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Yes it is a very serious problem because it confuses a lot of folks with a great deal of power like judges and policymakers. The first book I ever read on ML (
by pera 1mo ago
Yes it is a very serious problem because it confuses a lot of folks with a great deal of power like judges and policymakers.
The first book I ever read on ML (late 90s) dedicated the entire first or second chapter exploring the distinctions between artificial and biological neurons, and even talked a bit about the philosophy of modelling. I still remember thinking back then why would the authors spend so many pages on this but now I believe it was because they understood that a metaphor can be a double-edged sword.
- ux266478 1mo agoTo be fair, the ANN architecture underneath is a misleading thing to be looking at, it's not where the comparison comes from. Though I can't tell if you meant it to be relevant in that way, or just as a general example for the dangerous nature of metaphor. LLMs are expressly designed to approximate human behavior within the bounds of the written word. The anthropomorphization is no more philosophically problematic than saying differential calculus measures curves.
- pera 1mo agoI meant it in the latter way: a metaphor can be useful as a pedagogical tool to introduce new ideas, and using the source of inspiration for this idea as the metaphor itself makes perfect sense, but unfortunately our brains seem to be prone to assign other properties of the metaphor that don't actually belong to the object of study. I imagine this happens because we tend to conflate things that are similar, or maybe because it's not entirely clear which characteristics are being mapped in the metaphor?
- lern_too_spel 1mo agoThey spent so many pages discussing it only to show that the mechanism for how ANNs work is different from the mechanism for how biological brains work. It says nothing about whether they can compute the same things.