> Alzheimer’s isn’t my field, but I got very interested in it, spent six months studying the literature, and came away believing the amyloid hypothesis was basically completely solid.
If the accusation is "the field has been captured by a group with a vested interest in a model based on fraudulent research, strongly biasing what gets funded and what gets published" I wouldn't expect "studying the literature" to be particularly helpful in assessing the claim. It's sort of like saying "I read all of Enron's press releases and SEC filings, and they sound legit."
The defense reads more like a special pleading or sunk cost fallacy. There has been a lot of research done on one hypothesis, actively excluding alternatives,
so that hypothesis deserves to be considered until disproven (he does, iirc, allow for a test that would de-privilege the amaloyd hypothesis).
Thank you for writing out this reply, so I didn't have to. I think that somebody who is not working in medicine or pharma at all would not be able to understand how views have shifted concerning the amyloid-plaque theory. It is largely discussed as a theory that has been tested extensively and has only highlighted our lack of understanding of Alzheimer pathophysiology.
That last part isn't a sidenote, it's the entire reason for discussing the theory.
This isn't quite what's going on. A better reading might be "which is a";
"Ǝx s.t. x∈ℕ" (there exists an x such that x is in the naturals) is just being shortened to "Ǝx∋ℕ" (there exists an x in the naturals), or there exists an x which is in the naturals.
It's not really that different from the normal usage.
It either means man must adjust (themselves), or must adjust (the machine).
So it's a somewhat arch joke than may not be apparent due to shifts in language usage. (Also, "man" in this context was short for "human" without regard to sex (which we now call gender)).
Yeah. A survey of other people who like Cory (I haven't checked this, but it's almost certainly true) are _also_getting_older_.
If the pollsters somehow stumbled on a pocket of people who don't age, this would be the most stupendous example of burring the lede I've ever encountered.
The National Customer Rage Study is a cross-sectional study. The organization (Customer Measurement & Consulting) picks a new sample each time. Has the proportion of older people in the US population grown so much as to explain the increase in customer complaints?
A lot of what we're seeing is yet again due to the largest generation in US history (the "boomers", so called because they were a population boom) progressing through their lives. Everything from the summer of love (when they discovered hormones) to the OMG we're old! vibecession.
About half the people I discuss this with seem to think LLMs are great and don't see any problems with their output. The other half seem to get nothing but an endless stream of plausibly shaped rubbish.
It doesn't seem to depend on what model they use or how they prompt it. In code, there seems to be a loose correlation with testing styles; I've previously noticed that some people write tests to show that the code works as intended, and others try to write tests to show that it can't fail in ways that were unintended. But that correlation is weak.
It's also not whether the code passes tests or not. Sometimes AI does the thing I ask for, and it works, but it's so different from the way I would do it or it's too verbose so I just scrap it and code it by hand.
I mostly use it for boilerplate code nowadays. Anything more complicated and it takes me more effort to review the output than to just code it slowly
Does it seem like it bifurcates based on the person? I've had both experiences myself, sometimes with the same model and within ~days of each other on seemingly similar tasks. It's almost impossible to deny sometimes that actual intelligence is being expressed (and could not be regurgitated intelligence from some random internet page), but then I see firsthand the eye-rolling "intelligence-shaped" output from something else and wonder where I went wrong.
> It's almost impossible to deny sometimes that actual intelligence is being expressed (and could not be regurgitated intelligence from some random internet page)
But how is it impossible? Or rather, how is it possible to distinguish actual intelligence from some internet page--not "some random internet page", but some very well selected, timely and topical internet page?
Carly Simon's "Killing Me Softly" describes a similar experience, decades before LLMs. It's amazingly easy to feel like someone is understanding you when they are just pattern matching on a common shared experience.
This seems so likely that I have a hard time understanding why some people think it's impossible.
I know; if I hadn't experienced it myself, I would have a hard time believing it. Even if we grant that it's "merely" as you say, that it can interpret my loose and often false or misleading rhetoric to identify my question, trawl through thousands of lines of code to determine the core problem, select some very specific and relevant internet page, and then translate its solution fresh into my own problem domain; that in my mind at least "an expression of intelligence", even if it is not truly intelligent or understanding.
FWIW this is my own mental gymnastics around the Chinese Room; at some point the question "where is the understanding?" is moot, because if the Chinese Room reliably delivers context-specific correct results in unique contexts, then what more do we require of intelligence? I have to admit that sometimes it does better than I can do, and I've been called intelligent by intelligent people my whole life.
(BTW Killing Me Softly wasn't written/sung/anything by Carly Simon, but composed by Charles Fox with lyrics by Norman Gimbel, in collaboration with Lori Lieberman [after she was inspired by a Don McLean performance in late 1971].)
Thanks for that final BTW which sent me on a side quest to listen to a half dozen different versions and gave me a completely different outlook on what that song was about and what it was saying. Made it even more poignant.
> if the Chinese Room reliably delivers context-specific correct results in unique contexts, then what more do we require of intelligence?
First, I'm not sure I grant the premise (esp. "reliably"), but even so the answer seems glaringly obvious: we require intelligence to extend the range of what is known so that it can be looked up / delivered by systems like libraries, search engines, and LLMs. The conflation of knowledge indexing and knowledge creation (and, more specifically, that some people don't seem to be able to distinguish them) may be the core of the issue.
> BTW Killing Me Softly wasn't written/sung/anything by Carly Simon
I agree that there is some 'higher' intelligence that is about knowledge creation; say, mathematical inventions like RSA, or new philosophy, or coming up with interesting mathematical problems. But I only asked what is 'required' of intelligence, and we should admit that the vast majority of people, even among those who have above-average intelligence, do not create new knowledge of the grand sort. Most people acquire knowledge in education and then apply that knowledge in their vocation, and their improvements are optimizations or remixings that we already see AI capable of making.
Most people don't create knowledge "of the grand sort" but that's moving the goal posts; they do create knowledge "of the mundane sort" constantly. LLMs with a suitable harness can simulate this (poorly) by parroting what humans do when they are flustered (mumbling to themselves things like "What was I going to the store for? I made a list. Where did I put the list? Ah, here it is. Now where did I leave my keys?") and it even sort of appears to work, at least in highly structured environments.
But it only appears to work as long as things stay within the expected statistical distribution. If I'm driving my usual route to work, waiting to turn left, and the three cars in front of me each start their turn, glow pink, and turn into circus animals with their occupants perched precariously on top I'm going to have a very different reaction than any self driving car or LLM.
So a Palestinian influence network (Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between People, that owns imemc.org) is claiming to have exposed Israel's influence network? I wonder if they cleared it with China's influence network and Russia's influence network before announcing it?
For all I know, Luxembourg and Fiji have influence networks.
Yeah, that seems like an odd factor to include. The whole message of fines is supposed to be "don't do these specific anti-social things" not "be sure to factor in the arbitrary charges you'll be hit with".
You'd be surprised at how many people will only see the latter. When they introduced congestion pricing in NYC, there were actually people who were commenting, completely unironically, along the lines of "There's no way I'm going to pay that, I'll just take the train. That'll show em!"
They 100% saw the fee as solely a means to tax residents, and didn't even consider that the primary purpose could be to change behavior.
I saw some wildly ignorant videos on YouTube of objectively wealthy people complaining about needing to driving (a few blocks!) to 59th Street to visit a relative, but needing to pay the congestion fee. I think these people have no idea how insulated there are from the Real World.
"[...] plastics had significantly accelerated due to the military’s need during WWII for lighter, more durable materials to create 3D topographical maps"
What?! Citation needed. Lots of topomaps were printed on paper, but I've never heard of the military using 3d plastic maps. Certainly not enough to accelerate the development of plastics. Nor can I find any credible source for the claim.
If the accusation is "the field has been captured by a group with a vested interest in a model based on fraudulent research, strongly biasing what gets funded and what gets published" I wouldn't expect "studying the literature" to be particularly helpful in assessing the claim. It's sort of like saying "I read all of Enron's press releases and SEC filings, and they sound legit."
The defense reads more like a special pleading or sunk cost fallacy. There has been a lot of research done on one hypothesis, actively excluding alternatives, so that hypothesis deserves to be considered until disproven (he does, iirc, allow for a test that would de-privilege the amaloyd hypothesis).
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