8 ms·
I mean, humans do that. We are remarkably contradictory when expressing ourselves, generally speaking, often without realizing it because we'll change our think
by tinsmith 3y ago
I mean, humans do that. We are remarkably contradictory when expressing ourselves, generally speaking, often without realizing it because we'll change our thinking in the moment to fit the current narrative or circumstance. LLMs just put that on blast.
- smusamashah 3y agoHumans are not mere LLMs. But it's nice to think we are. May be we can program other humans with carefully constructed prompts alone. May be hypnosis is just a prompt injection attack.
- eurekin 3y ago... or a cable TV
- chongli 3y agoMay be we can program other humans with carefully constructed prompts alone Isn’t that what scammers, catfishers, con artists, and marketers do?
- bmelton 3y agoI mean, it's what parents TRY to do
- coldtea 3y agoIt's also what makes a human. Without what parents "try to do" (teach the kids to human), the little people would just be like ferral animals, without language, human context, sense of society, and so on.
- _heimdall 3y agoThat's raises the interesting question of whether everything that makes us human is learned behavior. If it all really is nurture rather than nature we're much more fragile than people may realize and only ever one generation away from going ferral
- seszett 3y ago> only ever one generation away from going ferral That doesn't seem right to me, as we cannot survive childhood without adults. Young humans are ready for life in society long before they are able to survive on their own without support from the society around them. We have been depending on the continuation of some form of society for likely hundreds of thousands of years, not just for staying civilised but simply for survival.
- Viliam1234 3y agoNurture vs nature is a wrong way to look at things. Without the human nature, the nurture would not work. Try to raise a member of a different species as a human...
- ChatGTP 3y agoNo
- doctor_eval 3y agoNot to mention cult leaders.
- beardedetim 3y agoThe pseudo-science of NLP (_neuro-lingustic programming_) or "conversational hypnosis" is based on the believe that you _can_ program people with carefully constructed prompts alone. Not saying I _believe_ NLP to be valid (_hence the pseudo-science callout_) but I did fall down the Milton H Erickson wormhole 10-20yrs ago so can't say I never fell for it myself.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThe real NLP is getting people to believe in NLP
- dsr_ 3y ago... and that you can do this over the course of a few minutes or hours, without the subject noticing or objecting.
- TuringTest 3y agoSo, what was previously called 'persuading'.
- quickthrower2 3y agoI do feel like a stage hypnotist when prompt engineering an LLM!
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago> May be we can program other humans with carefully constructed prompts alone. Is that not what reasoning is in a debate? > May be hypnosis is just a prompt injection attack. No need to go into hypnosis. Mere prompts can inject false memories. This has been proven multiple times [1]. [1] The Brain: The Story of You, David Eagleman.
- civilized 3y agoHumans can be consistent if we try. LLMs can't, even when prompted to be consistent, because they don't really understand what it means to be consistent.
- awestroke 3y ago> Humans can be consistent if we try. That's a bold statement. Do you have evidence for this?
- civilized 3y agoDon't large sectors of the economy rely on precisely consistent behavior to operate?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- whyenot 3y agoI don’t think another bold statement, phrased as a question, is what most people would consider “evidence.”
- civilized 3y agoI'm phrasing it as a question because I'm asking you to do a small amount of mental legwork to observe the society around you. How does the financial industry work? How are people comfortable executing transactions? Do you generally rely on your bank account to not randomly fluctuate in its balance without cause? Do you work in the tech industry? Do you rely on computers and algorithms and software to do things humans promised they would do? All of this requires a very high level of consistency either in humans or in tools they have created.
- vidarh 3y agoTo me, none of what you mention requires a whole lot of consistency other than in as much as we understand that we are horribly inconsistent we have a whole lot of ceremony and processes built up around what we do to mitigate the wild inconsistencies in the quality of work we do.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThe reason humans do this and LLMs is very different. Humans do it as a social skill / tribe fitting behaviour. Agreeableness. (watch out for that!)
- vidarh 3y agoIs it? To my knowledge we don't have reliable data on why humans do this. To me it appears as if we spend a significant amount of our time retroactively making up justifications for things even to ourselves for things there's little reason to think we've done based on a conscious decision making at all.
- naasking 3y ago> The reason humans do this and LLMs is very different. Humans do it as a social skill / tribe fitting behaviour. Tribe fitting doesn't sound as far off from minimizing loss functions as you imply.
- DonaldPShimoda 3y agoI want you to find me a human who (a) has defined a loss function for social interaction and (b) consciously performs the statistical analysis involved in fitting that loss function in social settings. LLMs do not have cognitive processes. They do not think. They do not choose to obey the requirements of a loss function; it is simply how they work, like any machine. Humans do not work this way, and the difference is fundamental.
- naasking 3y ago> I want you to find me a human who (a) has defined a loss function for social interaction and (b) consciously performs the statistical analysis involved in fitting that loss function in social settings. Why would they have to do that consciously? Do you think LLMs do this "consciously", if that term even applies? I wouldn't think so. The loss function applies during training, that ultimately defines the weights which guide their "thinking process". Analogously, human experiences in childhood shape our ultimate neural weights which guide our thinking processes in social situations in adulthood. > LLMs do not have cognitive processes. They do not think. You don't know what thinking is mechanistically, so you can't make this claim. I don't know why people keep pretending we have knowledge that we do not in fact have.
- pydry 3y agoThere's a retrospective mechanism working within human intelligence that is very evidently not in play with LLMs. Humans are capable of creating cargo cults but it seems LLMs are destined for it.
- bheadmaster 3y ago> We are remarkably contradictory when expressing ourselves, generally speaking, often without realizing it because we'll change our thinking in the moment to fit the current narrative or circumstance. LLMs just put that on blast. Exactly. It seems to me that today's LLMs are on the level of human children. Children often say random bullshit. They try to figure out things, and succeed to some level, but fail spectacularly above that, regressing to whatever connection they can sense. It's only that human children most often learn to fear mistakes, so they stop expressing themselves so freely. LLMs seem like human children, but without the fearing mistakes part - they just spew whatever comes to their mind, without filter (except those """ethical""" filters built in by OpenAI).