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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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When I saw that, I took a closer look at how it performed in assorted test, and saw it comprehensively failed the AP English Language and Composition and AP English Language and Literature tests. Which makes sense to me, because a lot of those tests involve more generalized and flexible reasoning than the sorts of formalized mathematical logic examples it might plausibly be trained to imitate.

Come on, most of the UK parliament can't even give the probability of two coins both coming up heads: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-19801666

Most people can't even imitate intelligence, by your logic.

GPT-4 has vastly superhuman knowledge, superhuman language knowledge, superhuman speed. Its reasoning skills are well above most of humanity. Most people can't program at all, let alone in all the languages, know how to use so much software like it can. These niggling flaws in AP English and Composition probably have more to do with the arcane and arbitrary scoring mechanism in those tests. It can write just fine. Its prose is not amazing and tends to be rather cliche and predictable, yet that has a lot to do with the RLHF.

Come on, most of the UK parliament can't even give the probability of two coins both coming up heads: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-19801666

That is astonishing.

I wonder how well the average EU parliamentarian or US congressman etc. would do. I can’t imagine that the average Politburo member in China would be this bad.

Well, Britain has been in decline for the last century... I think we could learn a great deal by watching what they've done, what they do and committing to the opposite. They deliberately crushed Birmingham for instance - 'too much development in this rich industrial region, stop!' https://unherd.com/2020/09/the-plot-against-mercia/

And apparently NHS maternity incompetence costs twice as much as NHS maternities themselves: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maternity-payouts-twice-cost-of-care-times-health-commission-svdhsjhqk

The Chinese politburo has a fair few with a basis in science and engineering, I made a post about it a while ago which was contested. Xi at least has an engineering background, other Politburo members have tiny wikipedia pages. https://www.themotte.org/post/238/what-if-your-entire-worldview-was/44213?context=8#context

The Chinese politburo has a fair few with a basis in science and engineering, I made a post about it a while ago which was contested. Xi at least has an engineering background, other Politburo members have tiny wikipedia pages. https://www.themotte.org/post/238/what-if-your-entire-worldview-was/44213?context=8#context

My understanding was that politburo members were, at one point, mostly or completely of an engineering or science background, but this has relaxed recently. Regardless, the point stands.

I think this holds for the other East Asian countries though, even with a pretty low estimation of the Diet or the National Assembly of Korea.

Wonder what it’s like in other countries.

The only field where GPT-4 outright disappoints me is in writing fiction. Better than the average human maybe, because they're absolutely shit, just look at the majority of posts on /r/WritingPrompts, but still not good.

I've tried to lean on it in my own writing, because I'm lazy, but other than some help with brainstorming, this is not a strength.

It's good at sparking ideas, indeed.