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I might have a very different reading of the parable of the cave to you? Can you elaborate? (At the risk of spoiling the joke)

by andybak 11mo ago

tormeh 11mo ago
"It's all fake?" "Always has been"
ninkendo 11mo ago
I’ll take a stab: because twitter isn’t reality, it’s a microcosm. A tempest in a teapot. It’s something that if you step outside of, you realize it’s not the real world. Leaving social media can be thought of as emerging from the cave: you interact with people near you who actually have a shared experience to yours (if only geographically) and you get a feel for what real world conversation is like: full of nuance and tailored to the individual you’re talking to. Not blasted out to everyone to pick apart simultaneously. You start to realize it was just a website and the people on it are just like the shadows on the wall: they certainly look real and can be mesmerizing, but they have no effect on anything outside of the cave.
- mlrtime 11mo ago
  Reddit even more so, thats why you see these 'touch grass' comments littered around.
FloorEgg 11mo ago
I'm not author of parent. My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth. If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they have seen first hand someone who is educated, knowledgeable and reasonable become deceived by social media, casting away their own values and knowledge for misconceptions incepted into them by persistent deception. I'm not saying I agree entirely with the point the joke is making but it does sort of make sense to me (assuming I even understand it correctly).
- CalChris 11mo ago
  > intelligent and knowledgeable. people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth. I also see this with AI answers relying on crap internet content.
  - FloorEgg 11mo ago
    Most content on the internet has been optimized to get attention, not to represent truth. AI trained on most content will be filled with misconceptions and contradictions. Recent research has been showing that culling bad training data has a huge positive impact on model outputs. Something like 90% of desirable outputs comes from 10% of the training data (forget the specifics and don't have time to track down the paper right now) I really hope that AI business models don't fall into relying on getting and keeping attention. I also hope the creators of them exist in a win-win relationship with society as a whole. If AIs compete with each other based on which best represent truth, then overall things could get a lot better. The alternative seems dreadful. Edit: I am curious why this is getting downvoted.
    - CalChris 11mo ago
      A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison It was discussed a month or so back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587
      - FloorEgg 11mo ago
        Yeah I saw that one too, which I would think supports my point that distilling down training data would lead to more truth aligned AI. I mean it's also just the classic garbage in garbage out heuristic, right? The more training data is filtered and refined, the closer the model will get to approximating truth (at least functional truths) It seems we are agreeing and adding to each other's points... Were you one of the people who downvoted my comment? I'm just curious what I'm missing.
TJSomething 11mo ago
It matches my usual reading pretty closely. Society gives names to things that aren't real and then argues about them. Twitter is a microcosm of this with their own categories and assemblages of ideas that are even less real than those present in broader society.
- pixl97 11mo ago
  Really Twitter may be one of the worse ones, but the internet really has become CGP Grey's this video will make you angry.
- thrance 11mo ago
  OP's twist on the cave allegory is funny and makes sense if you take the usual modern reading, but that is very much not what Plato meant by it. It was just a way for him to convey his "theory of forms" in which perfect versions of all things exist somewhere, and everything we see are mere shadows of these true forms. The men in the cave are his fellow Athenians who refuse his "obvious" truth, he who has peeked out of the cave and seen the true forms. All in all, it's very literal.
BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
I'll try with a Simpsons analogy: > Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall. Homer pays to get the crayon put back up his nose > Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake. Homer gets annoyed/surprised if someone calls him stupid.

I might have a very different reading of the parable of the cave to you? Can you elaborate? (At the risk of spoiling the joke)

by andybak 11mo ago

I might have a very different reading of the parable of the cave to you? Can you elaborate? (At the risk of spoiling the joke)

tormeh 11mo ago

"It's all fake?" "Always has been"

ninkendo 11mo ago

I’ll take a stab: because twitter isn’t reality, it’s a microcosm. A tempest in a teapot. It’s something that if you step outside of, you realize it’s not the real world. Leaving social media can be thought of as emerging from the cave: you interact with people near you who actually have a shared experience to yours (if only geographically) and you get a feel for what real world conversation is like: full of nuance and tailored to the individual you’re talking to. Not blasted out to everyone to pick apart simultaneously. You start to realize it was just a website and the people on it are just like the shadows on the wall: they certainly look real and can be mesmerizing, but they have no effect on anything outside of the cave.

mlrtime 11mo ago
Reddit even more so, thats why you see these 'touch grass' comments littered around.

FloorEgg 11mo ago

I'm not author of parent. My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth. If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they have seen first hand someone who is educated, knowledgeable and reasonable become deceived by social media, casting away their own values and knowledge for misconceptions incepted into them by persistent deception. I'm not saying I agree entirely with the point the joke is making but it does sort of make sense to me (assuming I even understand it correctly).

CalChris 11mo ago
> intelligent and knowledgeable. people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth. I also see this with AI answers relying on crap internet content.
- FloorEgg 11mo ago
  Most content on the internet has been optimized to get attention, not to represent truth. AI trained on most content will be filled with misconceptions and contradictions. Recent research has been showing that culling bad training data has a huge positive impact on model outputs. Something like 90% of desirable outputs comes from 10% of the training data (forget the specifics and don't have time to track down the paper right now) I really hope that AI business models don't fall into relying on getting and keeping attention. I also hope the creators of them exist in a win-win relationship with society as a whole. If AIs compete with each other based on which best represent truth, then overall things could get a lot better. The alternative seems dreadful. Edit: I am curious why this is getting downvoted.
  - CalChris 11mo ago
    A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison It was discussed a month or so back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587
    - FloorEgg 11mo ago
      Yeah I saw that one too, which I would think supports my point that distilling down training data would lead to more truth aligned AI. I mean it's also just the classic garbage in garbage out heuristic, right? The more training data is filtered and refined, the closer the model will get to approximating truth (at least functional truths) It seems we are agreeing and adding to each other's points... Were you one of the people who downvoted my comment? I'm just curious what I'm missing.

TJSomething 11mo ago

It matches my usual reading pretty closely. Society gives names to things that aren't real and then argues about them. Twitter is a microcosm of this with their own categories and assemblages of ideas that are even less real than those present in broader society.

pixl97 11mo ago
Really Twitter may be one of the worse ones, but the internet really has become CGP Grey's this video will make you angry.
thrance 11mo ago
OP's twist on the cave allegory is funny and makes sense if you take the usual modern reading, but that is very much not what Plato meant by it. It was just a way for him to convey his "theory of forms" in which perfect versions of all things exist somewhere, and everything we see are mere shadows of these true forms. The men in the cave are his fellow Athenians who refuse his "obvious" truth, he who has peeked out of the cave and seen the true forms. All in all, it's very literal.

BLKNSLVR 11mo ago

I'll try with a Simpsons analogy: > Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall. Homer pays to get the crayon put back up his nose > Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake. Homer gets annoyed/surprised if someone calls him stupid.