This remains the clearest criticism of GPT type things so far. It’s casual-glance impressive, double-take gibberish.https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general-intelligences/ …
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The lack of a reality reference loop remain crippling for such things, trained entirely on verbal maps and no connection to the territories the maps are about. Even the most bullshitty human has at least a minimal loop based on sensory-actuatory connection to the world.
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On the plus side, I think GPT demonstrates just how load-bearing our system 1 associative cognition is, and how far it can get on its own without either explicit reasoning (system 2) or sense-data (we should call that system 0).
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Older thread with same point. I’ll probably keep circling this take.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1284684717359419394 …
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What we have with GPT is basically a stock market for words. You can invest effectively in green lumber and make money without knowing whether it is lumber painted green or fresh, not-dry wood.https://fs.blog/2016/11/green-lumber-fallacy/ …
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Taleb is wrong in his reading of the green lumber anecdote. His “doers” are actually “money-map talkers” who operate in a partially closed symbolic universe of prices. Roughly similar to the world of driving, where 90% of the time reading the maps and traffic signs is enough.
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But 10% of the time, not appreciating that real cars follow more basic laws of physics and crushable bones gets you killed. It’s not a video game. Similarly in the broader world, you do in fact need to know what green lumber is to work with it in broader ways than trading it.
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In the talebverse reading of anecdote, the strawman opposite of Joe Siegel, the successful green lumber trader is some sort of notional intellectual-yet-idiot who talks a lot and knows “useless” facts like what green lumber actually is and feels superior while being ineffectual.
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This is common in talebverse (more common with his fans than himself). a) define “real” as “financial success” b) define “actually important” as “leads to financial success” c) label everything else as intellectual affectation
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A more accurate view is that money and words are both varieties of speech. One just deals in a more valuable currency. In the open real world beyond words, trades, and green lumber, the value of knowing what green lumber is, and what you can do with it depends on context.
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The works is bigger than words and trades, and it’s a kind of acting dead to limit your life to restricting epistemology to a semi-closed symbolic domain and further to notions of winning within them.
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End of conversation
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