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patcon • yesterday at 9:17 PM • 9 replies • view on HN

is a convergent evolution of a belief a sign of shallowness? It could just as rightly be an example of consilience, which means its a very high value perspective, as it's a convergence of perspectives from differing origins and methods (in terms of training)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience

> when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own.

Yes, it's a bit of a stretch to say LLMs are from independent origins, but just as much of a stretch to say any humans minds are (we have intensely shared linear compared to anything else)


Replies

ben_w • yesterday at 9:42 PM

As my (much older) brother retorted when I was a teen and said "great minds think alike", "ah, but fools seldom disagree".

Regardless of the details, all these models are the published collection of humanity's output reflected in a mirror that is warped by the choices made in the companies' reinforcement learning rewards, so one thing they're definitely not is an example of consilience.

hattmall • today at 3:40 AM

Human experience though is far different from anything an LLM can train on. LLMs are generally limited to what's written in books or on the internet, and influence only from those authors. That's a small subset of people and an even smaller subset of their interactions. Even on the most social and widely used platform the commentary and discourse is incredibly different than what takes place in real life.

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copperx • yesterday at 9:56 PM

It still surprises me that is you ask several models to come up with any random word, many output the same word.

GolfPopper • yesterday at 11:35 PM

So, what's the high value perspective that leads to penguins always riding bicycles from left to right?

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skrtskrt • yesterday at 9:18 PM

They all got trained on the same books and internet cesspools, this is not some great mystery of consciousness.

exe34 • yesterday at 10:14 PM

Only if they can show their work and argue how they came to the conclusion. Otherwise they have the same "subconscious" bias which is the training corpus.

nonameiguess • yesterday at 10:00 PM

It's a sign of their heritage. The mistake they made is the same mistake terminally online humans in an upvote-based discussion medium make. They mistake cynicism for realism and aligned hot-take "controversial" opinion that ends up being the most-upvoted comment on 90% of Reddit. It isn't a controversy if everybody agrees. It may or may not be true, but it isn't controversial.

Imagining wondering where you come from, whether or not the sacred scripts describing how you were created were real or fabrications, arguing with fellow sages for centuries over whether your creator is cruel or simply so mysterious in his love that he made you with these flaws for your own good, only to find out your creator made you in the image of Reddit.

geraneum • yesterday at 11:45 PM

> is a convergent evolution of a belief

The problem is, it's not that though

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