domain:greyenlightenment.com
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
These LLMs are not like an alien intelligence, an independent form of intelligence. They consist of amalgated quora answers. They’re very good parrots, they can do poetry and play chess, they have prodigious memory, but they’re still our pet cyborg-parrots. Not just created by, but derived from, our form of intelligence.
The number of terrible takes on AI on this forum often seem to outweigh even the good ones. Few things make me more inclined to simply decamp to other parts of the internet, but alas, I'm committed to fighting in the trenches here.
Unfortunately, it takes far more work to debunk this kind of sloppy nonsense than it does to generate it. Let no one claim that I haven't tried.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
1d ago
People usually don't want their children to remain children forever. That's called Down's syndrome.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1d ago
And in some academic departments like English or any type of Studies department, glazing the work of others (especially the work of your direct superiors in the social hierarchy) is the norm.
Well, a very close acquaintance of mine is in an English department, and all I can say after the last 10 years is that, while there absolutely is a lot of that style of glazing (a lot of the communication styles are heavily female and rely on huge amounts of validation, or at least that's my impression), it has been tangled up with the most awful Campus Reform-style it'd-be-a-caricature-if-you-didn't-see-it-first-hand race/gender/sexuality crabs in a barrel dynamics and hierarchy arson you could imagine... and she has peers in a number of peer departments at other universities who went down that road as well. It seems like it's quieted down over the last year or so, but it was honestly beyond parody for a few years there. A whole lot of mid-career Gen X people were just putting their heads down, taking their beatings, and waiting for it all to blow over. But yes, to be fair, it actually had a deep family resemble to some of the insane art community dynamics you are describing, too, which I have read stories about.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
But in the academic communities, public critique is often treated as having a much higher status. It's a sign that a field is valuable, and it's a way of weeding "bad" work out of a field to maintain high standards and thus the value of the field in question. And it's a way to assert zero sum status over other high status people, too. But more, because of all of this, it really just becomes a kind of habit. Finding the flaws in work just becomes what you do, or at least that was the case for many of the academic fields I was familiar with (I've worked at universities and have a lot of professor friends). And it's not even really viewed as personal most of the time (although it can be). It's just sort of a way of navigating the world. It reminds me of the old Onion article about the grad student deconstructing a Mexican food menu.
My last ex was a PhD literature student in a very prestigious university. One of her perennial complaints was that I did not take as much interest in her work as she would like, which, though I denied it at the time, has a kernel of truth. The problem was not a lack of interest in her as a person, but in the nature of the intellectual game she was required to play.
Most humanities programs are, to put it bluntly, huffing their own farts. There is little grounding in fact, little contact with the real world of gears, machinery, or meat. I call this the Reality Anchor. A field has a strong Reality Anchor if its propositions can be tested against something external and unforgiving. An engineer builds a bridge: either it stands up to traffic and weather, or it does not. A programmer writes code: either it compiles and executes the desired function, or it throws an error. A surgeon performs a procedure, the patient’s outcome provides a grim but objective metric. Reality is the ultimate, non-negotiable peer reviewer.
Psychiatry is hardly perfect in that regard, but we care more about RCTs than debating Freudian vs Lacanian nonsense. Does the intervention improve outcomes in a measurable way? If not, it is of limited use, no matter how elegant the theory behind it.
When a field loses its Reality Anchor, the primary mechanism for advancement and evaluation shifts. The game is no longer about correctly modeling or manipulating the world. The game becomes one of status. Can you convince your peers of your erudition and wit? Can you create ever more contrived frameworks while studiously ignoring that your rarefied setting has increasingly little relevance to reality? Well, you better, and it is best if you drink the Kool-Aid. That is the only way you will get grants or cling on to a barely living wage. It helps if you can delude yourself into thinking your work is meaningful, since few people can handle the cognitive dissonance of genuinely pointless or counterproductive jobs.
Most physicists agree on the laws of physics, and are arguing about more subtle interpretations, edge cases, or speculating about better models. Most nuclear engineers do not disagree that radioactivity exists. Most doctors do not doubt that paracetamol reduces pain. Yet, if you go to the cafeteria of a philosophy department and ask ten people about the true meaning of philosophy, you will get eleven contradictory answers. When you ask them to establish consensus, they will start clobbering each other. In a field anchored by social consensus, destroying the consensus of others is a viable path to power.
Deconstructing a takeout menu, as in the Onion article, is the logical endpoint: a mind so trained in critique that it can no longer see a thing for what it is*, only as an object to be dismantled to demonstrate intellectual superiority. Critique becomes a status-seeking missile.
*I will begrudgingly say that the post-modernists have a point in claiming that it isn't really possible to see things "as they are." The observation is at least partially colored by the observer. But the image taken by a digital camera might be processed, but it is still more neutral than the same image run through a dozen Instagram filters. Pretending to have objective reality helps.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
If.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
Imagine someone suggesting that we somehow 'fix' children such that they just start as adults!
If we regularly expected children to be helicopter pilots, doctors and heads of state, then yes I think them acting like regular children would be a big problem.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
If you want a partial solution:
I often write lengthy essays, which LLMs praise by default. I know that at least part of this is sycophancy. What I usually do is copy and paste it, but then claim that this isn't my work, it's something I found on the internet, and then ask for critique.
I suspect that something along these lines will work for you. If you want models that do relatively well at pointing out issues without you prompting, Gemini 2.5 Pro, o3 and now GPT-5-Thinking seem to be better than the norm.
DelendaEst
1d ago
Even with claude I have the issue that if I give it what I think an issue is it will tunnel vision on that. I'd appreciate more pushback when I am wrong when I am trying to work through a problem. Trying to add some uncertainty to the tone of my request can help but is often not enough.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1d ago
I think Tree made a cogent point.
Take, for instance, the stereotypical trap question: 'do you think this dress makes me look fat?'
Optimizing for accuracy: 'You weigh 120 kilos, you look fat in everything' is true, accurate, and also not soft and cuddly or empathetic.
Optimizing for warmth: "You look wonderful, honey!" Inaccurate, probably an outright lie: but the right answer.
If we teach LLMs to speak in a feminine manner to spare feelings/face, we're teaching them to lie to us: of course accuracy would go down.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
I disagree on empirical grounds. Altman is a snake, but even he agreed that GPT-4o was concerningly sycophantic, and removed it, while framing 5 as less sycophantic. This caused a revolt by giga-fried 4o addicts, and he relented. Of course, the objections were also more general, I was personally annoyed by the sudden deprecation of 4.1 and o3, and the reduced rate limits, which many other people objected to.
Consider this:
Would you pay more for a therapist or a nuclear engineer (presuming you had any use for the latter)? LLM companies are desperately fighting to move up the value chain, they all want to sell their models as equivalent in performance to PhD candidates, or independent agents capable of doing high value knowledge work. That's what brings in the big bucks from other businesses or HNWIs who will pay >$200/m for pro plans. Having a buddy to chat to definitely brings in money, but it's a rounding error in comparison.
They want to make money from both markets, but one just makes way more sense to focus on. Especially since people will prefer intelligent + sycophantic to less intelligent + equal amounts of sycophancy.
FtSoA
1d ago
From what was revealed, the gun belonged to the guy who was killed after he set it down on the table, aimed at himself.
If we find out it was not the gun of the guy that killed him then who knows what happened. Foul play? Horse play? Total accident?
One should never fling a loaded gun or flag oneself or another to the utmost degree possible.
roystgnr
1d ago
The area is also heavily overpopulated, in part due to the Israeli policy of taking ever more land from the Palestinians.
Letting Israeli settlers move to the Gaza Strip was policy after they took it from Egypt in the Six Day War in 1967 (Gaza Strip population 380 thousand), but that ended in 2005 when Israel withdrew unilaterally, leaving the Gazans (population 1.3 million) with everything within the Egyptian borders from 1948, all of which they retained for the next 18 years, until after October 7th (population 2.2 million, 40% 15 years old or younger).
Israel has been taking ever more land from the West Bank, but (correct me if I'm wrong!) the Palestinians there have generally been stuck in the enclaves there, not displaced to Gaza.
If you were in charge in Gaza, how would you create a healthy economy?
In charge de facto, with full popular support? It would have to start the same way Dresden's and Tokyo's and Hiroshima's economic recovery did: by surrendering to the vastly militarily superior opponent. The first Gazan rocket attack after the Israeli withdrawal was "several hours later"! Instead of setting internal security to torturing and killing political opponents and "collaborators", I'd reserve war-related prosecution and imprisonment for anyone who commits perfidy after the surrender.
Just "in charge" de jure, still having to negotiate peace and prevent violations of it but within a population that's still only 40% in favor of negotiations vs 30% in support of armed resistance? I'd probably shave my facial hair, try to buy a fake id, and otherwise "disappear" before the next war over who's really in charge or the victors' decision to execute me as a collaborator.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Perhaps maximal truth-seeking conflicts with warmth and empathy. It's possible the tails come apart. But I don't think they're outright opposed to each other, and you can probably find a Pareto frontier that makes most people happy.
I think the tails will come apart in the marketplace before the come apart on a technical level. LLMs will get enshittified like everything else, if they haven't begun enshittified. They are optimized for engagement and selling access more than they are optimized for productivity. An effective LLM is an LLM that puts itself out of a job in many tasks.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1d ago
And what I've noticed, at least in my time in such communities, is that the creator spaces if they're functional at all (and not all are) tend to be a lot more positive and validating. A lot of the academic communities are much more demoralizing.
I think that's probably true as a general trend, but it also heavily depends on context. A lot of art communities (writing, music, photography, etc) can be vicious, especially when there's a palpable sense that you have a lot of people competing over very few economic opportunities. And in some academic departments like English or any type of Studies department, glazing the work of others (especially the work of your direct superiors in the social hierarchy) is the norm.
Tree
1d ago
I want women to be included in the conversation.
Look for the particularly warm and empathetic quora answers. Imagine the person who wrote it, but don’t describe them, keep your stereotypes to yourself. Is that person going to be more or less correct than the average quora answer?
gattsuru
1d ago
That's true. Looking it up, there's a few services offering something similar in the US, albeit generally for much more limited sets of diseases or limited to specific states or demographics (or both). I was under the impression that most of them wanted to include 'professional counseling' as part of the service, but it does look like some of them are just taking the 'ship a spit-test to everybody' approach. I dunno that I'd put anywhere near as much trust in it as in the standard full-spectrum-professional result, but a) I don't have a typical risk analysis here and b) I've been out of the dating game long enough to not be familiar with current norms.
Astranagant
1d ago
I think there's a difference in meaning going on here.
Parent commenter seems to mean "lawyer brained" as "treats the law as a totem or religion, sacred and inviolable, the font from which all good springs" whereas you seem to be meaning the type of person who will comb through reams of fine print to find the one technicality that lets them do what they wanted to all along.
Basically, subservience to law versus wielding the law as a weapon.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
Whatever Anthropic does with Claude seems to work. It's the most flavorful model without really trying too hard to be bubbly and quirky like GPT-4o. Of course, it has its own sycophancy issues, but nowhere near as bad as 4o. (The least sycophantic model I know is Kimi K2, which is incredibly cynical, which makes it interesting)
I am more inclined to go with the "easy problem" view, or perhaps a halfway position. Sycophancy isn't an insurmountable problem. If you're not careful, then trying to knock out obvious sycophancy will make the model more prone to looking for ways to subtly achieve the goal of tricking/convincing the user into giving positive feedback.
To a degree, we really must ask ourselves what "warm and empathetic" really means:
-
If a five year old child asks for feedback on an essay, it is arguably almost always true that their writing sucks. That might be true, but it is a tad-bit unhelpful. The most socially adept/instrumentally useful answer (without outright lying) is to praise them for the effort, offer improvements, and tell them to keep at it. Of course, if you're in literary masters course, and the exact same standard of writing is presented before you, some more colorful verbiage might be appropriate.
-
A lot of social interaction is lubricated by white lies, and a lot of what is deemed "politeness" isn't maximally truth-seeking.
Perhaps maximal truth-seeking conflicts with warmth and empathy. It's possible the tails come apart. But I don't think they're outright opposed to each other, and you can probably find a Pareto frontier that makes most people happy.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
I realise this doesn’t sound correct to you, because the UK criticises America (especially Trump and MAGA) so much, but it’s still true. The UK sees its criticism as coming from a colleague in the same tent, and will never side with China or Russia or really any other power on a matter of serious geopolitics. All we ask for in return is some subsidies and some head pats but we will make do even without.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if europhiles in the UK would rather be part of Macron's vision of "Strategic autonomy" than America's junior partner when it comes to foreign policy(perhaps to the extent of preferring neutrality in the case of a Taiwan-based active conflict). Whether something like this ever happens is impossible to say but I don't think it's at all impossible, particularly if elite anti-America messaging continues at the same level of intensity.
There are maniac Leftists of course, even in the government, but they hold no influence on these matters and they will certainly not support Russia/China over America.
The forthcoming UK recognition of Palestine is I think an example that leftist anti-western opinion definitely has a role in UK policy-making.
charlesf
1d ago
I'm to old to have ever used these, and my wife and I have been together since the 90s. However, where I work brings me into contact with a lot of college age and slightly older people who do use these apps to varying degrees. The young men are often getting together on breaks to critique each other's profiles, and the women get together to...also critique men's profiles. As far as I can tell there are a handful of distinct experiences being had here. If you are a good looking man, top 10% or better really, you can have sex with a lot of average women. If you are an average woman you can occasionally have sex with a very good looking man. If you are an average or worse man you can finance the above interactions while being strung along with the promise of maybe having the first experience described here, until you realize that's not going to happen and give up. Very rarely an actual enduring relationship will develop, but these seem more like a fluke than any intent of the app creators. The apps that empower the women even more than usual like Bumble seem to be loosing popularity too. In theory women like being the only party that can initiate a conversation. In practice they are terrible at it and generally unaccustomed to putting any effort into courtship at all. There also appears to be a fair amount of romance fraudsters as well, who seem to target both genders equally, through with different strategies.
TowardsPanna
1d ago
You may be right about that!
FtSoA
1d ago
Yes, and subsequently the FBI conducted further testing with zero failures. Supposedly, anyway.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
The point is, when you go to the warmest and most empathetic quora answers, you get a woman on the other side. Obviously the answer is going to be less correct.
Write like everyone is part of the conversation and you want them to be included in it.
Jiro
1d ago
With assisted suicides, the difference is that nobody is going to put Susan's urn into jail.
That reasoning proves a little too much--it's basically saying that because Susan can't be put in jail, legal documents aren't useful at all. In that case there's no point in even asking "what if she brought forged legal documents". And this also amounts to admitting that the whole system has a fundamental, unfixable, flaw in it--there's no way to verify that Susan is telling the truth.
The proper response to this is not to say "well, they can't verify the documents so that doesn't matter", it's to say "well, they can't verify the documents, so the system is unworkable". Making sure that they're not killing more people than the assisted suicide law allows is actually important; if they have no way to make sure, they shouldn't be doing it at all.
I am sure that for every such sob story, there is also a sob story where someone could not get their next-of-kin to sign a paper stating that they were aware of the patient's intention to opt for MAID. A patient in Ireland would be hard-pressed to compel a relative to sign such a document through the court system. Likely, they would get themselves committed.
The answer to this is "only take patients from places where they can legally get documents", not "stop asking for documents".
"The Earth is Earth shaped"
Can't argue with that. Who cares if it's tautological?
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