3 ms·
For those who don't know about Plato's Theory of Forms, the remarkable empirical fact is that all humans learn roughly the same concepts representing words like
by d_burfoot 1y ago
For those who don't know about Plato's Theory of Forms, the remarkable empirical fact is that all humans learn roughly the same concepts representing words like "dog", "house", "person", "boat", and so on, even if those people grew up in different places and never had any overlap between their observational experience. You and I may never have observed the same dog, but we still agree on what a "dog" is.
This phenomenon appears to occur for LLM learning as well, though it is less remarkable due to the fact that LLMs likely have significant overlap in their training data.
I believe this is good news for Alignment, because, as Plato pointed out, one of the most important forms is the Form of the Good - a (theoretical) universal human ideal containing notions of justice, virtue, compassion, excellence, etc. If this Form truly exists, and LLMs can learn it, it may be possible to train them to pursue it (or refuse requests that are opposed to it).
- wagwang 1y agoBasically... Jungian archetypes
- hobbyjogger 1y agoThis vastly oversimplifies the notion of what is "good" or "fair" in a given situation. Just because we can generally agree on classifying simple objects like a boat or a house doesn't entail that we share a universal notion about the virtuous thing to do in a given situation. Humans (even in the same society/environment) have wildly differing ideas about moral issues like abortion, assisted suicide, medical testing on animals/stem cells, etc. Consider this chart from a 2010 Gallup Poll: https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/ztybao6qoegc_-aam95srw.gif https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro...
- reactordev 1y agoAhh, semantic search problem rears its head once more. While we can agree on what a "dog" is. We disagree on it's value.
- pphysch 1y ago> all humans learn roughly the same concepts representing words like "dog", "house", "person", "boat", and so on, even if those people grew up in different places and never had any overlap between their observational experience. This "roughly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting to support the "Plato was right" thesis. The fact is we inhabit a shared reality with shared laws of physics and evolutionary pressures and so on; there are only so many ways to float a boat. That doesn't necessarily mean Platonic Forms exist and that everyone arrives independently at the same Form. Indeed you will find that people have fundamentally different ideas of what words like "freedom", "economy", "government" mean, despite using the same syntax.