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I have pretty much had it with people who ranted about "trump disrespecting the troops!" now waving the flag of Hezbollah who actually killed a lot of those troops.
The next time a Democrat starts regurgitating NPR at me I'm going to end up saying something friendship-ruiningly impolite because I just can't hold in the anger at this stupidity any more. It's almost worse than 2020 because the deranged hysteria isn't happening in unique circumstances.
How do you all deal with this every day?
It is profoundly heart breaking watching people you otherwise respect and have affection for repeat nonsensical NPC talking points, as though they were their own original thoughts. It just completely breaks your perception of them. It reminds me when I was reading the Prince of Nothing series, and the main character is some genius hypnotist manipulator, and every other character he encounters goes from being an interesting individual contending for power in a Game of Thrones-esque power struggle to merely his puppet. By the end of the trilogy there are like, 3 actual characters left, and everyone else has become an NPC in thrall to him. I kind of hated it.
It's frightening above all else. It lowers my estimation of humanity on an absolute basis, versus merely impacting how I view that person. It changes how I view myself. It's like if your best friend tumbled over one day, cracked his skull wide open, and instead of flesh and blood and brains, there was just a hamsters on a wheel that quickly ran off, leaving your friend inert. And while your first thought might be "Was he always just a hamster on a wheel?" your next thought might be "Is there a hamster on a wheel in my head too?!"
It's the sort of thing that makes me wonder if LLMs aren't actually that smart, but that people are dumber than we thought. I can't think of a better analog to "Pattern matches language tokens based on a data set without any comprehension of their actual meaning" in people than just uncritically repeating NPC talking points, angrily, without considering for even a millisecond any of their broader implications. I've called it unidirectional knowledge before. You are spoon fed a list of data points, along with the only permissible conclusions you are allowed to draw from them. Do not draw outside the lines! Most people are happy not to.
Frankly I can't understand how we, as a species, made it through anything anymore. I don't understand how we progressed past city states. Maybe an elite, which really is better than us, and which really is necessary to keep us from all choking on our food because we forgot to chew (metaphorically) is real and required.
More importantly, if such an elite class of human is real, it's probably safe to assume you aren't among them. You have to face the very real possibility that you, like everyone else, just has a hamster on a wheel in their head.
Hampster wheels are fine. Or rather. As an LLM dev, I don't think there's a hard line between regurgitation and intelligence in the first place. The line comes from what you choose to regurgitate. How you choose to regurgitate. What you choose to absorb- in order to later regurgitate.
Choosing what to believe is ultimately a process. A complex process, but a process, that any sufficiently general intelligence can learn. Discernment is a process. A complex process that requires interacting with the real world, but a process, that any sufficiently general intelligence placed in the right environment can learn.
And once it's learned and cached, you can regurgitate. Iterate. Fill in your template with your context. Throw your new, more advanced tools at the wall and see what sticks. That's creativity. Then you proceduralize the things that stuck. Analyze the things that didn't using your various regurgitated analysis processes. Regurgitate those insights in your "previous work" section as you proceed to rinse and repeat.
I think most 'NPC's have brains that can support far more intelligence than their environment has made learnable. People got by in antiquity because midwits and geniuses alike scale- with limits of course, to the problems their environment requires them to solve and the tools (mental or otherwise) their environment gives them. Elites only need to tell people what to do insofar as people are incapable of testing what they're told.
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