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> "Everything is variable reward. Is everything gambling?" well, no. If you work overtime and get paid overtime, you are not gambling and that is not a variabl
by jodrellblank 25d ago
> "Everything is variable reward. Is everything gambling?"
well, no. If you work overtime and get paid overtime, you are not gambling and that is not a variable reward.
Humans engage more with rewards that are intermittent and variable. Like Futurama's scene from 'The Scary Door' where the character says "A casino where I'm winning, I must be in heaven! A casino where I always win, that's boring, I must really be IN HELL!". A constant predictable reward is boring, less engaging. So if you know you get no overtime, but sometimes your boss rewards you with $5 coffee voucher, sometimes a free pizza dinner, sometimes double-time pay for the time worked or a half-day off, now you might be gambling 1hr overtime for an intermittent variable reward.
> "Drive to work, traffic might be good or might be bad."
Good traffic is not a "reward" for driving to work(!) and you have to drive to work regardless so you are not risking anything [you might be risking your life, but you are not making a choice which can reward you with good traffic]. You might say that going a different route is a choice and a gamble which could reward you with good traffic, but traffic engineering does not work that way because if there was a consistently low-traffic route, everyone else would take that route until it was no faster than any other route. Traffic will generally be the predictable and similar every day, plus 'arriving at work early' is not much of a reward.
- dpark 25d ago> A constant predictable reward is boring, less engaging. Perhaps but predictable outcome is a very desirable quality. No one wants a hammer that sometimes drives nails and sometimes doesn’t. All of the current harness engineering work is about squeezing predictability out of the LLM. > Good traffic is not a "reward" for driving to work(!) Like hell it’s not. I drove into work last Friday and there was no traffic because of the holiday weekend. It was amazing. Had me considering whether Friday should be one of my standard RTO days.
- jodrellblank 24d agoI think you're missing the point. Predictable outcomes are desirable, but they aren't addictive or gambling. People quickly get used to opening the faucet and seeing water come out and stop doing it, whereas people scroll TikTok or channel surf for hours at a time. In what way was amazing no-traffic "a reward"? What system was rewarding you for what change in behaviour?
- dpark 24d agoYou went off on a tangent and I responded. None of this is actually relevant to the topic of whether LLMs are “basically gambling”. > In what way was amazing no-traffic "a reward"? What system was rewarding you for what change in behaviour? What does this mean? Are you asking me to describe the dopamine system or are you implying that rewards have to be driven by some external system’s goal?