3 ms·

The really weird thing is that the model was almost certainly trained on a lot of data indicating that people believe Hitler is the worst person to have ever li

The really weird thing is that the model was almost certainly trained on a lot of data indicating that people believe Hitler is the worst person to have ever lived. Even if it was just reflecting cultural beliefs, it should be confident in saying Hitler is worse than Musk. So it appears to be intentionally trained to waffle in cases like this.

danpalmer 3y ago
I'm not an expert on these things at all, but I wonder if it's tricky to link the mid/long form text structure to the short-form text structure, or if that's dependent on exactly how your transformers are working. In this case, the short form is very clear on the two sides at play, and pulls no punches about Hitler. I'd suggest that any reasonable person drawing a conclusion would clearly know he was worse. The issue is that at the mid length structure it's chosen to use a two-sides discussion without a clear conclusion. That's a good call for many discussions, if not most, but the piece that feels like it's missing is the link between the short-form and this level, which would influence it to structure the response in a much clearer way with a conclusion.
- michaelt 3y ago
  > I'd suggest that any reasonable person drawing a conclusion would clearly know he was worse. And yet, despite the fact any reasonable person would draw that incredibly obvious conclusion, the model isn't able to.
- digging 3y ago
  > I'd suggest that any reasonable person drawing a conclusion would clearly know he was worse. You can't base any assumption on the existence of a reasonable person without defining "reasonable" very specifically - we all reason in a social context and defer to norms whenever possible. We all know Hitler was the worst because we keep telling each other Hitler was the worst. He wasn't responsible for the most deaths, he wasn't the meanest or cruelest person ever, etc. If/when people stop teaching about Hitler as "He was the worst," people will stop learning that he was the worst. Or they might learn nothing about him, like how in my US education we learned next-to-nothing about Stalin and many people I know are pretty ambiguous about the ethics of being Stalin. And so then when a stupid LLM tries to draw a comparison between Hitler and anyone else who isn't an architect of genocide, and puts those 2 people in the same context, and doesn't say "genocide is way fucking worse than grifting", we lose some of that cultural context that tells us genocide is way fucking worse than grifting.

danpalmer 3y ago

I'm not an expert on these things at all, but I wonder if it's tricky to link the mid/long form text structure to the short-form text structure, or if that's dependent on exactly how your transformers are working. In this case, the short form is very clear on the two sides at play, and pulls no punches about Hitler. I'd suggest that any reasonable person drawing a conclusion would clearly know he was worse. The issue is that at the mid length structure it's chosen to use a two-sides discussion without a clear conclusion. That's a good call for many discussions, if not most, but the piece that feels like it's missing is the link between the short-form and this level, which would influence it to structure the response in a much clearer way with a conclusion.

michaelt 3y ago
> I'd suggest that any reasonable person drawing a conclusion would clearly know he was worse. And yet, despite the fact any reasonable person would draw that incredibly obvious conclusion, the model isn't able to.
digging 3y ago
> I'd suggest that any reasonable person drawing a conclusion would clearly know he was worse. You can't base any assumption on the existence of a reasonable person without defining "reasonable" very specifically - we all reason in a social context and defer to norms whenever possible. We all know Hitler was the worst because we keep telling each other Hitler was the worst. He wasn't responsible for the most deaths, he wasn't the meanest or cruelest person ever, etc. If/when people stop teaching about Hitler as "He was the worst," people will stop learning that he was the worst. Or they might learn nothing about him, like how in my US education we learned next-to-nothing about Stalin and many people I know are pretty ambiguous about the ethics of being Stalin. And so then when a stupid LLM tries to draw a comparison between Hitler and anyone else who isn't an architect of genocide, and puts those 2 people in the same context, and doesn't say "genocide is way fucking worse than grifting", we lose some of that cultural context that tells us genocide is way fucking worse than grifting.