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As someone who has done “self-directed” learning, for my entire life (high school dropout, with a GED), I can certainly relate. I like to learn new stuff, ever
by ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
As someone who has done “self-directed” learning, for my entire life (high school dropout, with a GED), I can certainly relate.
I like to learn new stuff, every day. I have found LLMs to be a godsend, here. Makes it much easier to just barge into unfamiliar territory.
Whenever I come across essays like this, I like to post The Gap, by Ira Glass[0]; one of the more encouraging short essays out there.
[0] https://vimeo.com/85040589 https://vimeo.com/85040589
- andrew_lettuce 4mo agoLLMs can definitely be helpful, but you need your radar set to 11 because they will convincingly feed you smart sounding nonsense when you are most at risk.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo agoOh yeah, but the same goes for almost any information source (especially these days).
- abalashov 4mo agoYeah, but this is like saying that one needn't focus so much on LLMs making mistakes because humans also mistakes. They do, but the shape of the way LLMs will confidently mislead you is quite different to the way misinformed humans, or even the malevolent and mendacious humans, will mislead you.
- brookst 4mo agoThere are plenty of authoritative reference books full of errors. Teachers in every subject can be wrong, convincingly.
- abalashov 4mo agoYes, but human errors are based on genuine and elaborate misconceptions (or propagandistic intent), not squishy, facile "you're right to push back on that, I straight up made that up" type stuff.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo agoI just apply the "Wikipedia model" to things like LLMs (and StackOverflow, which can be just as bad -but without the admitting error part). I look for citations and footnotes. In many cases, accuracy isn't something that I worry about, as bad info becomes apparent, almost immediately. In cases where it matters, though, I may try a couple of verifications. One problem with humans, is that we can be quite insecure, and will fight to the death to defend a provably wrong position, because we can't bear to be seen as in error.
- jcgl 4mo ago> bad info becomes apparent, almost immediately Can you elaborate on this? I suspect that you’re thinking mostly of cases in which you already have a fair bit of domain expertise. But in the general case, this seems to be very untrue. Which is why it’s so pernicious that LLMs can generate such quantities of syntactically-plausible-but-factually-untrue text.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo agoValid point, but I don’t really just start learning whole new vocations, cold. I’m an engineer/software developer, with over 40 years’ experience, and my learning is generally some branch off that (like learning asynchronous programming, or a new UI framework). Can’t really put it into precise terminology, but I get a “gut feeling,” that something is/is not plausible, and it happens pretty quickly; usually when I start some implementation. I tend to learn by do[0] (note the “sample playground,” in each essay), so the “reality filter” gets applied fairly rapidly. In any case, I have been dealing with misinformation (sometimes, deliberate), for a long time, and I’m still working fairly effectively, so I guess it works. Can’t argue with results. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/swiftwater/ https://littlegreenviper.com/series/swiftwater/
- varjag 4mo agoIt's not anywhere close. Like, by four orders of magnitude.