Comment by mjburgess

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Comment by mjburgess

A NN is just a fancy search engine: the weights are a compression of its training data; it's prediction algorithm is a decompression+search. These "large models" are effective because the weights run to 100s GBs, so compressing TBs of data for searching.

In any case, my question here is: how do you not go mad in this techno-religious environment where people (seemingly desperately and earnestly) equivocate correlations in written text with thinking?

I feel at once overwhelmed, despairing, and a sense of need to point out that it isn't true. It's the most obscene form of wishful thinking and superstition.

HNers seem capable of identifying pseudoscience when its an article in nutrition (namely, eg., that correlations in the effects of human behaviour are not explanations of it)... but loose all sense when "AI" becomes the buzzword.

Correlations in *TEXT* are not models of language, intelligence, thinking. This is pseudoscience. And the most extreme and superstitious form: thinking that correlations are meaningful because we find them meaningful.

A person using language uses it in response to an environment, so "Pass me the salt" is said on the occasion that one needs salt. The "language model", `language = person(...)` includes the environment as input (and many other things).

Correlations in pixel patterns of the night sky are not a model of gravity. Correlations in text are not a model of language. Correlations in the detritus of human behaviour are not models of intelligence.

But to my question: how does one cope in an environment of this kind of wishful thinking?

Replies mjburgess · 2022-07-10
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