2 ms·
Let's do a mental experiment: Put 2 year old Einstein on a remote island, all alone, and come back 30 years later. Assume he survives. Will he impress you with
by visarga 2y ago
Let's do a mental experiment: Put 2 year old Einstein on a remote island, all alone, and come back 30 years later. Assume he survives. Will he impress you with his insights?
They say we don't use language for thought, but language informs our strategies and choices, and collective experience is essential for progress. We only add small increments of insight from our own experiences to the pool, but the experience captured in language is greater than any one of us.
And more interestingly, LLMs trained on this data show amazing capabilities that go beyond mere reproduction. LLMs gain everything Einstein lost in this experiment, what is the language part and what is the pure insight part? Looks to me humans are like LLMs on feet, and with a full social complement surrounding them.
- somenameforme 2y agoI know your answer is supposed to be no, but I think there's a good chance the answer would be yes. There's a seemingly endless amount that can be learned about basically anything. And surviving for 30 years on an isolated island is going to involve developing a wide range of skills and masteries ranging from healthcare, seasonal prediction, animal habits, hunting, medicine, shelter construction, and much more. It'd be akin to chatting with an isolated tribesman - that alone would already be fascinating and endlessly informative. These are people who can walk into the woods naked, and walk out weeks later fed, clothed, and sheltered. And now also add in this individual happening to be a several sigma outlier in learning capacity, creativity, and so on. It'd be an absolutely fascinating discussion!
- mewpmewp2 2y agoPretty sure he would die, to be honest.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mleroy 2y agoFor reference, language deprivation experiments have a long tradition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experiments https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experim...