5 ms·

Humanity has been using steel for over a millenia, however it's only in the past 100 years or so we have a good understanding of how carbon interacts with iron

Humanity has been using steel for over a millenia, however it's only in the past 100 years or so we have a good understanding of how carbon interacts with iron at an atomic level to create the strength characteristics that makes it useful. Based on this argument, we should not have used steel, until we had a complete first principles understanding.

dakolli 5mo ago
pro LLM people are the kings of ad hoc fallacy. Why did you type this? You can consistently test steel and get a good idea of when and where it will break in a system without knowing its molecular structure. LLMs are literally stochastic by nature and can't be relied on for anything critical as its impossible to determine why they fail, regardless of the deterministic tooling you build around them.
- keybored 5mo ago
  What is the ad hoc fallacy? From googling I didn’t find any convincing definitions (definitions that demonstrate that it is a logical fallacy).
  - jibal 5mo ago
    https://finmasters.com/ad-hoc-fallacy/ https://finmasters.com/ad-hoc-fallacy/ > Ad hoc fallacy is a fallacious rhetorical strategy in which a person presents a new explanation – that is unjustified or simply unreasonable – of why their original belief or hypothesis is correct after evidence that contradicts the previous explanation has emerged. https://cerebralfaith.net/logical-fallacy-series-part-13-ad-hoc/ https://cerebralfaith.net/logical-fallacy-series-part-13-ad-... > An argument is ad hoc if its only given in an attempt to avoid the proponent’s belief from being falsified. A person who is caught in a lie and then has to make up new lies in order to preserve the original lie is acting in an ad hoc manner. It should be clear why the ad hoc fallacy is a fallacy.
    - keybored 5mo ago
      Thanks. I’m by default disposition suspicious of fallacies that are not logical fallacies. And I’m not convinced that this is a solid fallacy. > > Ad hoc fallacy is a fallacious rhetorical strategy in which a person presents a new explanation – that is unjustified or simply unreasonable – of why their original belief or hypothesis is correct after evidence that contradicts the previous explanation has emerged. That someone jumps to a new thing once something is refuted just looks like rhetoric to me. Not fallacious rhetoric. > > that is unjustified or simply unreasonable So it needs to be these things as well. But why are not these points the problematic part? It seems impractical to usefully label an argument in this way since you either call any new argument (that is also unjustified or unreasonable) a fallacy, or divine that the argumenter is intending to be dishonest. > > https://cerebralfaith.net/logical-fallacy-series-part-13-ad- https://cerebralfaith.net/logical-fallacy-series-part-13-ad-... This was one of the results of my googling. > > One example of this logical fallacy that immediately comes to mind is the multiverse hypothesis. When Atheists are presented with The Fine Tuning Argument For God’s Existence, many of them will respond to it by giving the multiverse hypothesis. [...] Given an infinite number of universes, there were an infinite number of chances, and therefore any improbable event is guaranteed to actualize somewhere at some point. So why is this a problem? > > There are many problems with this theory, not the least of which is that there’s no evidence that a multiverse even exists! There’s no evidence that an infinite number of universes exist! No one knows if there’s even one other universe, much less an infinite number of them! You can’t detect these other universes in any way! You can’t see them, you can’t hear them, you can’t smell them, you can’t touch them, you can’t taste them, you can’t detect them with sonar or any other way. They are completely and utterly unknowable to us. I find it ironic that atheists, who are infamous for mocking religious people for their “blind faith”, themselves are guilty of having blind faith! Namely, blind faith in an infinite number of universes! > > This explanation is one example of the ad hoc fallacy. The multiverse hypothesis is propagated for no other reason than to keep atheism from being falsified. The theory is ad hoc because the only reason to embrace it is to keep atheism from being falsified! For if this universe is the only one there is, then there’s no other rational explanation for why the laws of physics fell into the life permitting range other than that they were designed by an intelligent Creator! Allow me to restate. It is a fallacy because there is no evidence of the theory. And further that (perhaps following from the no-evidence part in their mind) there is no reason to hold this theory other than from arguing against theists. Yeah there is no reason to hold a theory from physics other than wanting to prove theists wrong. Why? Because my argument for theism is so water-proof that this would be the only hope that they would have of refuting it. I find that very unconvincing. (The argument for this fallacy. I can take or leave the God/unGod part.)
- handoflixue 5mo ago
  > LLMs are literally stochastic by nature and can't be relied on for anything critical Ahh, yes, unlike humans, who are completely deterministic, and thus can be trusted.
  - steveBK123 5mo ago
    Humans can be governed by rules with consequences and replaced with individuals with a appropriate level of risk taking / rule following for the role.
    - GigaDingus 5mo ago
      Which has, famously, been a great consolation for people who suffered the consequences of human failure in the past
    - somewhatgoated 5mo ago
      Rules and consequences seem to apply to humans in a similar way as prompts and harnesses govern LLMs. The greater the level of power a human possesses the less they are governed by these restraints, this doesnt apply to LLMs so at least in that aspect they are an improvement. But yea we can’t really punish or inflict pain on them - this seems like a problem
      - handoflixue 5mo ago
        Why does it matter if you can inflict pain on them? Is that normal and acceptable in your line of work?
        wild_egg 5mo ago
        Being able to fire someone, thus causing potentially significant hardship, is considered quite normal and acceptable in most lines of work.
        somewhatgoated 5mo ago
abcde666777 5mo ago
Where did he say not to use LLMs? Oh that's right: he didn't.
nutjob2 5mo ago
That's not his point at all. He advocates using LLMs. The correct analogy is: if we just scale and improve steel enough, we'll get a flying car.
- lukan 5mo ago
  Well, we did build airplanes out of steel, but there are better (lighter) materials avaiable. But the developement of car engines did directly enabled airplane engines. Not sure if this is the right analogy path, but I kind of suspect similar with LLM's/transformers. They will be a important part.
  - jagged-chisel 5mo ago
    An important stepping stone, perhaps. But I don’t think the final AGI thing will necessarily contain LLMs.
    - lukan 5mo ago
      I don't know. I know I used to be pretty AI sceptic, until they became good enough to help with non trivial code problems on their own. I strongly suspect, that we will come to a point, where it gets impossible to tell if something is AGI and consciouss or not.
    - dreis_sw 5mo ago
      History shows continuous evolution, there won't be a "final AGI thing". The definition of AGI is so vague anyways that any conversation around it is hardly useful. 5 years ago, what we have today would have been considered AGI.
      - jagged-chisel 5mo ago
        > 5 years ago, what we have today would have been considered AGI. Were it you could pipe today’s LLM to an interface usable by someone 5 years ago, they might be impressed by the incremental improvement, but it would be obvious soon enough that it’s still not AGI.
JoshGG 5mo ago
Which year did we use steel to replace human workers and automate decision-making?
- carlosjobim 5mo ago
  The entire industrial revolution was steel replacing human workers. And that is still the backbone of the world today. We are still living the industrial revolution. Just like the invention of fire happened ages ago, but is still a crucial part of life today.
  - almostdeadguy 5mo ago
    Famously Andrew Carnegie spent years trying to get the steel to stop talking about goblins.
    - someguyiguess 5mo ago
      Famously Andrew Carnegie dodged the point
      - almostdeadguy 5mo ago
        That the industrial revolutions use of steel to augment or replace labor was similar in every way to using LLMs to do the same? Seems on point to me.
      - pixl97 5mo ago
        It was Frick who did not dodge so well.
    - gus_massa 5mo ago
      Steel is almost magic. Stainless steel is beyond magic. I had a specialization in Chemistry in High School. For some analysis, the fist step is to dissolve everything in boiling Nitric Acid. But stainless steel has Chrome is like a spell of protection, so you must use boiling Hydrochloric Acid instead. I have no idea why. It's just like magic. It may have Nickel, Molybdenum, and other metals, that give it more magical properties. A few years ago there was a nice post about copying a normal steel alloy for knives to get an equivalent made of stainless steel. You need to reduce the the Carbon content to make it less brittle. And they had to add Vanadium so it keeps the sharpness of the knives. I have no idea why. It's just like magic. If you have half an hour, it's worth reading, but beware that it has too many technical details that are close to magical https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/03/25/cpm-magnacut/ https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/03/25/cpm-magnacut/ (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29696120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29696120 | 375 points | Dec 2021 | 108 comments)
qwery 5mo ago
Assuming your timeline and metallurgical claims to be true, you're conflating engineering and (materials) science. Humans have been using steel for however long, when and where it was understood to be an appropriate solution to a problem. In some sense, engineering is the development and application of that understanding. You do not need to have a molecular explanation of the interaction between carbon and iron to do effective engineering[-1] with steel.[0] Science seeks to explain how and why things are the way they are, and this can inform engineering, but it is not prerequisite. I think that machine learning as a field has more of an understanding of how LLMs work than your parent post makes out. But I agree with the thrust of that comment because it's obvious that the reckless startups that are pushing LLMs as a solution to everything are not doing effective engineering. [-1] "effective engineering" -- that's getting results, yes, but only with reasonable efficiency and always with safety being a fundamental consideration throughout [0] No, I'm not saying that every instance of the use of steel has been effective/efficient/safe.
- pixl97 5mo ago
  >do not need to have a molecular explanation of the interaction between carbon and iron to do effective engineering It was more like 'we take iron from place X and it works, but iron from place Y doesn't" This is why the invention of steel isnt really recognized before 1740. We were blind to molecular impurities
i_have_an_idea 5mo ago
What if you substituted "steel" with "asbestos" in your argument.
- irishcoffee 5mo ago
  Asbestos, lead paint, cigarettes, heroin(perscribed generously for basically whatever the doc felt like), "Radithor" (patent medicine containing radium-226 and 228, marketed as a "perpetual sunshine" energy tonic and cure for over 150 diseases), bloodletting, mercury treatments for syphilis, tobacco smoke enemas (yep that was a real thing), milk-based blood transfusions. Didn't understand those either and used the fuck out of them because "the experts" said we should.
  - yesco 5mo ago
    This is why I believe we should only listen to amateur opinions on everything, experts simply lack historical credibility. For example I've recently purchased a healing crystal (half off) for only $5000 dollars! It cleared up the imbalanced energies my street guru told me about right away. I would never have been made aware about the consequences of imbalanced energies in the first place if I had asked an expert instead. They probably wouldn't even suggest an immediate solution to the problem like my reliable street guru always does! Something to consider.
    - collingreen 5mo ago
      Ironically the street guru hucksters might have a better track record than the dangerous products mentioned above. Less charitably, it's a mistake to imply that simply being a bigger corporation makes you go from street guru to "expert". Bigger company trying to make money off of you at any risk to you is just the same bucket at a different scale. In this context the other side is probably "expert consumer advocate" since that fits the idea above of these dangerous products advertised as cure alls.
      - yesco 5mo ago
        I honestly agree with you in many respects, I'm simply spinning in some nuance to a topic I keep seeing. The snake oil salesmen is productive precisely because the actual effects of the snake oil they are selling is unknown to the consumer they are introducing it to. There isn't easy answers to this, it's just a fact of life that we can try our best mitigate. And apparently fish oil actually does help your brain. Weird world we live in. So I think the focus on "experts" is actually a consequence of declining institutional credentialism. You didn't trust them for claiming to be experts, you trusted the institutions who called them experts and said you should trust them for that reason. But expertise implies competence not trust. Not everyone operates with good intentions even with the right credentials, including many institutions themselves.
hansmayer 5mo ago
Oh for crying out loud! Let's stop inventing fake analogies to justify the inherent LLM shortcomings! Those of us who are critical - are only using the standards that the LLM companies set themselves ("superintelligence", "pocket phds" bla blabla), to hold them accountable. When does the grift stop?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
ashtonshears 5mo ago
Poor correlation comparing physical material to computer technology
- idiotsecant 5mo ago
  Why
  - datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
    Let me just quickly use absurdism to illustrate why argument by analogy is weak (and unfortunately overused on HN): “”” Humanity has been using celibacy for over a millenia, however it's only in the past 100 years or so we have a good understanding of not having sex affects the psychology of a person, turning them into an ubermensch. Based on this argument, we should have never stopped having sex, until we had a complete first principles understanding. “”” Analogies can produce a lot of words, making it appear to be a high effort comment, but it also shifts the argument to why or why not an analogy is good or not, and away from the points the original poster was trying to make. And, by Sturgeon’s Law, most analogies are utter crap on top of being an already weak way to form an argument.
    - salad-tycoon 5mo ago
      In my life I’ve come across a few people who are really good at making analogies and it’s wonderful and makes mine look like a child’s scribble next to a Monet. In fact, I think analogies are some of the most powerful rhetorical devices and, unsurprisingly, one of the most difficult to master. Look at some of the all time, almost supernaturally skilled, analogists: Jesus, Plato, Buddha, Aesop, Socrates. Their analogies will be eternal. Now that said, we aren’t always seeing quite that level of skill often here on HN (or anywhere) but when you see a great analogy, it’s like…[scratch that, I’m resisting the urge to force an analogy here].
      - datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
        I would tend to agree that the list of effective analogies is so small that the orators who muttered them are celebrated for millennia.
surgical_fire 5mo ago
This is a very low-effort argument. Humans could understand properties of steel long before they knew how Carbon interacted with Iron. Steel always behaved in a predictable, reproducible way. Empirical experiments with steel usage yielded outputs that could be documented and passed along. You could measure steel for its quality, etc. The same cannot be said of LLMs. This is not to say they are not useful, this was never the claim of people that point at it's nondeterministic behavior and our lack of understanding of their workings to incorporate them into established processes. Of course the hype merchants don't really care about any of this. They want to make destructive amounts of money out of it, consequences be damned.
- aldebaran1 5mo ago
  [dead]
  - surgical_fire 5mo ago
    No. > When some normally ductile metal alloys are cooled to relatively low temperatures, they become susceptible to brittle fracture—that is, they experience a ductile-to-brittle transition upon cooling through a critical range of temperatures. That we did not know how steel behaved under low temperatures in building ship husks does not make it unpredictable. It was an engineering failure. Unpredictability would be if steel behaved fine in 2 ships, cracked in 3 ships under low temperature for becoming brittle, in another ship it turned into gelatine, and in another it behaved fine but gained a pink color.
    - aldebaran1 5mo ago
      >That we did not know how steel behaved under low temperatures in building ship husks does not make it unpredictable. Yes it does. Or rather, 'steel as used in shipbuilding' is unpredictable (a pedantic distinction). If the properties of steel were fully understood then someone would have identified the brittle fracture concern. They did not, hence the steel-ship system behavior was not predicted. Whether it was /predictable/ is a exercise in hindsight. >Unpredictability would be if steel behaved fine in 2 ships, cracked in 3 ships under low pressure for becoming brittle, in another ship it turned into gelatine, and in another it behaved fine but gained a pink color. That's not how LLMs work either. If you could control all the parameters that go into training and using an LLM, they would be predictable in the same sense (in theory, given enough time to analyze inputs/outputs given fixed process parameters). Also steel does in fact behave probabilistically, for example in the distribution of assumed pre-existing flaw sizes in castings which are very important for the structural performance. Not all liberty ships cracked.
burnte 5mo ago
Poor steel didn't quite have the same consequences, however.

dakolli 5mo ago

pro LLM people are the kings of ad hoc fallacy. Why did you type this? You can consistently test steel and get a good idea of when and where it will break in a system without knowing its molecular structure. LLMs are literally stochastic by nature and can't be relied on for anything critical as its impossible to determine why they fail, regardless of the deterministic tooling you build around them.

keybored 5mo ago
What is the ad hoc fallacy? From googling I didn’t find any convincing definitions (definitions that demonstrate that it is a logical fallacy).
- jibal 5mo ago
  https://finmasters.com/ad-hoc-fallacy/ https://finmasters.com/ad-hoc-fallacy/ > Ad hoc fallacy is a fallacious rhetorical strategy in which a person presents a new explanation – that is unjustified or simply unreasonable – of why their original belief or hypothesis is correct after evidence that contradicts the previous explanation has emerged. https://cerebralfaith.net/logical-fallacy-series-part-13-ad-hoc/ https://cerebralfaith.net/logical-fallacy-series-part-13-ad-... > An argument is ad hoc if its only given in an attempt to avoid the proponent’s belief from being falsified. A person who is caught in a lie and then has to make up new lies in order to preserve the original lie is acting in an ad hoc manner. It should be clear why the ad hoc fallacy is a fallacy.
  - keybored 5mo ago
    Thanks. I’m by default disposition suspicious of fallacies that are not logical fallacies. And I’m not convinced that this is a solid fallacy. > > Ad hoc fallacy is a fallacious rhetorical strategy in which a person presents a new explanation – that is unjustified or simply unreasonable – of why their original belief or hypothesis is correct after evidence that contradicts the previous explanation has emerged. That someone jumps to a new thing once something is refuted just looks like rhetoric to me. Not fallacious rhetoric. > > that is unjustified or simply unreasonable So it needs to be these things as well. But why are not these points the problematic part? It seems impractical to usefully label an argument in this way since you either call any new argument (that is also unjustified or unreasonable) a fallacy, or divine that the argumenter is intending to be dishonest. > > https://cerebralfaith.net/logical-fallacy-series-part-13-ad- https://cerebralfaith.net/logical-fallacy-series-part-13-ad-... This was one of the results of my googling. > > One example of this logical fallacy that immediately comes to mind is the multiverse hypothesis. When Atheists are presented with The Fine Tuning Argument For God’s Existence, many of them will respond to it by giving the multiverse hypothesis. [...] Given an infinite number of universes, there were an infinite number of chances, and therefore any improbable event is guaranteed to actualize somewhere at some point. So why is this a problem? > > There are many problems with this theory, not the least of which is that there’s no evidence that a multiverse even exists! There’s no evidence that an infinite number of universes exist! No one knows if there’s even one other universe, much less an infinite number of them! You can’t detect these other universes in any way! You can’t see them, you can’t hear them, you can’t smell them, you can’t touch them, you can’t taste them, you can’t detect them with sonar or any other way. They are completely and utterly unknowable to us. I find it ironic that atheists, who are infamous for mocking religious people for their “blind faith”, themselves are guilty of having blind faith! Namely, blind faith in an infinite number of universes! > > This explanation is one example of the ad hoc fallacy. The multiverse hypothesis is propagated for no other reason than to keep atheism from being falsified. The theory is ad hoc because the only reason to embrace it is to keep atheism from being falsified! For if this universe is the only one there is, then there’s no other rational explanation for why the laws of physics fell into the life permitting range other than that they were designed by an intelligent Creator! Allow me to restate. It is a fallacy because there is no evidence of the theory. And further that (perhaps following from the no-evidence part in their mind) there is no reason to hold this theory other than from arguing against theists. Yeah there is no reason to hold a theory from physics other than wanting to prove theists wrong. Why? Because my argument for theism is so water-proof that this would be the only hope that they would have of refuting it. I find that very unconvincing. (The argument for this fallacy. I can take or leave the God/unGod part.)
handoflixue 5mo ago
> LLMs are literally stochastic by nature and can't be relied on for anything critical Ahh, yes, unlike humans, who are completely deterministic, and thus can be trusted.
- steveBK123 5mo ago
  Humans can be governed by rules with consequences and replaced with individuals with a appropriate level of risk taking / rule following for the role.
  - GigaDingus 5mo ago
    Which has, famously, been a great consolation for people who suffered the consequences of human failure in the past
  - somewhatgoated 5mo ago
    Rules and consequences seem to apply to humans in a similar way as prompts and harnesses govern LLMs. The greater the level of power a human possesses the less they are governed by these restraints, this doesnt apply to LLMs so at least in that aspect they are an improvement. But yea we can’t really punish or inflict pain on them - this seems like a problem
    - handoflixue 5mo ago
      Why does it matter if you can inflict pain on them? Is that normal and acceptable in your line of work?
      - wild_egg 5mo ago
        Being able to fire someone, thus causing potentially significant hardship, is considered quite normal and acceptable in most lines of work.
        somewhatgoated 5mo ago

abcde666777 5mo ago

Where did he say not to use LLMs? Oh that's right: he didn't.

nutjob2 5mo ago

That's not his point at all. He advocates using LLMs. The correct analogy is: if we just scale and improve steel enough, we'll get a flying car.

lukan 5mo ago
Well, we did build airplanes out of steel, but there are better (lighter) materials avaiable. But the developement of car engines did directly enabled airplane engines. Not sure if this is the right analogy path, but I kind of suspect similar with LLM's/transformers. They will be a important part.
- jagged-chisel 5mo ago
  An important stepping stone, perhaps. But I don’t think the final AGI thing will necessarily contain LLMs.
  - lukan 5mo ago
    I don't know. I know I used to be pretty AI sceptic, until they became good enough to help with non trivial code problems on their own. I strongly suspect, that we will come to a point, where it gets impossible to tell if something is AGI and consciouss or not.
  - dreis_sw 5mo ago
    History shows continuous evolution, there won't be a "final AGI thing". The definition of AGI is so vague anyways that any conversation around it is hardly useful. 5 years ago, what we have today would have been considered AGI.
    - jagged-chisel 5mo ago
      > 5 years ago, what we have today would have been considered AGI. Were it you could pipe today’s LLM to an interface usable by someone 5 years ago, they might be impressed by the incremental improvement, but it would be obvious soon enough that it’s still not AGI.

JoshGG 5mo ago

Which year did we use steel to replace human workers and automate decision-making?

carlosjobim 5mo ago
The entire industrial revolution was steel replacing human workers. And that is still the backbone of the world today. We are still living the industrial revolution. Just like the invention of fire happened ages ago, but is still a crucial part of life today.
- almostdeadguy 5mo ago
  Famously Andrew Carnegie spent years trying to get the steel to stop talking about goblins.
  - someguyiguess 5mo ago
    Famously Andrew Carnegie dodged the point
    - almostdeadguy 5mo ago
      That the industrial revolutions use of steel to augment or replace labor was similar in every way to using LLMs to do the same? Seems on point to me.
    - pixl97 5mo ago
      It was Frick who did not dodge so well.
  - gus_massa 5mo ago
    Steel is almost magic. Stainless steel is beyond magic. I had a specialization in Chemistry in High School. For some analysis, the fist step is to dissolve everything in boiling Nitric Acid. But stainless steel has Chrome is like a spell of protection, so you must use boiling Hydrochloric Acid instead. I have no idea why. It's just like magic. It may have Nickel, Molybdenum, and other metals, that give it more magical properties. A few years ago there was a nice post about copying a normal steel alloy for knives to get an equivalent made of stainless steel. You need to reduce the the Carbon content to make it less brittle. And they had to add Vanadium so it keeps the sharpness of the knives. I have no idea why. It's just like magic. If you have half an hour, it's worth reading, but beware that it has too many technical details that are close to magical https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/03/25/cpm-magnacut/ https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/03/25/cpm-magnacut/ (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29696120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29696120 | 375 points | Dec 2021 | 108 comments)

qwery 5mo ago

Assuming your timeline and metallurgical claims to be true, you're conflating engineering and (materials) science. Humans have been using steel for however long, when and where it was understood to be an appropriate solution to a problem. In some sense, engineering is the development and application of that understanding. You do not need to have a molecular explanation of the interaction between carbon and iron to do effective engineering[-1] with steel.[0] Science seeks to explain how and why things are the way they are, and this can inform engineering, but it is not prerequisite. I think that machine learning as a field has more of an understanding of how LLMs work than your parent post makes out. But I agree with the thrust of that comment because it's obvious that the reckless startups that are pushing LLMs as a solution to everything are not doing effective engineering. [-1] "effective engineering" -- that's getting results, yes, but only with reasonable efficiency and always with safety being a fundamental consideration throughout [0] No, I'm not saying that every instance of the use of steel has been effective/efficient/safe.

pixl97 5mo ago
>do not need to have a molecular explanation of the interaction between carbon and iron to do effective engineering It was more like 'we take iron from place X and it works, but iron from place Y doesn't" This is why the invention of steel isnt really recognized before 1740. We were blind to molecular impurities

i_have_an_idea 5mo ago

What if you substituted "steel" with "asbestos" in your argument.

irishcoffee 5mo ago
Asbestos, lead paint, cigarettes, heroin(perscribed generously for basically whatever the doc felt like), "Radithor" (patent medicine containing radium-226 and 228, marketed as a "perpetual sunshine" energy tonic and cure for over 150 diseases), bloodletting, mercury treatments for syphilis, tobacco smoke enemas (yep that was a real thing), milk-based blood transfusions. Didn't understand those either and used the fuck out of them because "the experts" said we should.
- yesco 5mo ago
  This is why I believe we should only listen to amateur opinions on everything, experts simply lack historical credibility. For example I've recently purchased a healing crystal (half off) for only $5000 dollars! It cleared up the imbalanced energies my street guru told me about right away. I would never have been made aware about the consequences of imbalanced energies in the first place if I had asked an expert instead. They probably wouldn't even suggest an immediate solution to the problem like my reliable street guru always does! Something to consider.
  - collingreen 5mo ago
    Ironically the street guru hucksters might have a better track record than the dangerous products mentioned above. Less charitably, it's a mistake to imply that simply being a bigger corporation makes you go from street guru to "expert". Bigger company trying to make money off of you at any risk to you is just the same bucket at a different scale. In this context the other side is probably "expert consumer advocate" since that fits the idea above of these dangerous products advertised as cure alls.
    - yesco 5mo ago
      I honestly agree with you in many respects, I'm simply spinning in some nuance to a topic I keep seeing. The snake oil salesmen is productive precisely because the actual effects of the snake oil they are selling is unknown to the consumer they are introducing it to. There isn't easy answers to this, it's just a fact of life that we can try our best mitigate. And apparently fish oil actually does help your brain. Weird world we live in. So I think the focus on "experts" is actually a consequence of declining institutional credentialism. You didn't trust them for claiming to be experts, you trusted the institutions who called them experts and said you should trust them for that reason. But expertise implies competence not trust. Not everyone operates with good intentions even with the right credentials, including many institutions themselves.

hansmayer 5mo ago

Oh for crying out loud! Let's stop inventing fake analogies to justify the inherent LLM shortcomings! Those of us who are critical - are only using the standards that the LLM companies set themselves ("superintelligence", "pocket phds" bla blabla), to hold them accountable. When does the grift stop?

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

ashtonshears 5mo ago

Poor correlation comparing physical material to computer technology

idiotsecant 5mo ago
Why
- datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
  Let me just quickly use absurdism to illustrate why argument by analogy is weak (and unfortunately overused on HN): “”” Humanity has been using celibacy for over a millenia, however it's only in the past 100 years or so we have a good understanding of not having sex affects the psychology of a person, turning them into an ubermensch. Based on this argument, we should have never stopped having sex, until we had a complete first principles understanding. “”” Analogies can produce a lot of words, making it appear to be a high effort comment, but it also shifts the argument to why or why not an analogy is good or not, and away from the points the original poster was trying to make. And, by Sturgeon’s Law, most analogies are utter crap on top of being an already weak way to form an argument.
  - salad-tycoon 5mo ago
    In my life I’ve come across a few people who are really good at making analogies and it’s wonderful and makes mine look like a child’s scribble next to a Monet. In fact, I think analogies are some of the most powerful rhetorical devices and, unsurprisingly, one of the most difficult to master. Look at some of the all time, almost supernaturally skilled, analogists: Jesus, Plato, Buddha, Aesop, Socrates. Their analogies will be eternal. Now that said, we aren’t always seeing quite that level of skill often here on HN (or anywhere) but when you see a great analogy, it’s like…[scratch that, I’m resisting the urge to force an analogy here].
    - datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
      I would tend to agree that the list of effective analogies is so small that the orators who muttered them are celebrated for millennia.

surgical_fire 5mo ago

This is a very low-effort argument. Humans could understand properties of steel long before they knew how Carbon interacted with Iron. Steel always behaved in a predictable, reproducible way. Empirical experiments with steel usage yielded outputs that could be documented and passed along. You could measure steel for its quality, etc. The same cannot be said of LLMs. This is not to say they are not useful, this was never the claim of people that point at it's nondeterministic behavior and our lack of understanding of their workings to incorporate them into established processes. Of course the hype merchants don't really care about any of this. They want to make destructive amounts of money out of it, consequences be damned.

aldebaran1 5mo ago
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- surgical_fire 5mo ago
  No. > When some normally ductile metal alloys are cooled to relatively low temperatures, they become susceptible to brittle fracture—that is, they experience a ductile-to-brittle transition upon cooling through a critical range of temperatures. That we did not know how steel behaved under low temperatures in building ship husks does not make it unpredictable. It was an engineering failure. Unpredictability would be if steel behaved fine in 2 ships, cracked in 3 ships under low temperature for becoming brittle, in another ship it turned into gelatine, and in another it behaved fine but gained a pink color.
  - aldebaran1 5mo ago
    >That we did not know how steel behaved under low temperatures in building ship husks does not make it unpredictable. Yes it does. Or rather, 'steel as used in shipbuilding' is unpredictable (a pedantic distinction). If the properties of steel were fully understood then someone would have identified the brittle fracture concern. They did not, hence the steel-ship system behavior was not predicted. Whether it was /predictable/ is a exercise in hindsight. >Unpredictability would be if steel behaved fine in 2 ships, cracked in 3 ships under low pressure for becoming brittle, in another ship it turned into gelatine, and in another it behaved fine but gained a pink color. That's not how LLMs work either. If you could control all the parameters that go into training and using an LLM, they would be predictable in the same sense (in theory, given enough time to analyze inputs/outputs given fixed process parameters). Also steel does in fact behave probabilistically, for example in the distribution of assumed pre-existing flaw sizes in castings which are very important for the structural performance. Not all liberty ships cracked.

burnte 5mo ago

Poor steel didn't quite have the same consequences, however.