domain:greyenlightenment.com
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6m ago
I think honestly we need to renormalize tge idea that not every thing and every place is for everybody. It’s not really workable. If you’re constantly offended, maybe a debate isn’t where you want to be. On the other hand if you chafe at the thought of living in a hugbox where everyone is super nice and gets along, then you want the debate forum.
The internet of 2025 feels much much smaller and less diverse in a lot of ways than the early internet where you might go to a forum for gaming discussion and it might be the kind of place where you need to cite in game books to talk about Elder Scrolls lore. Or you don’t like that you go somewhere else and trash talk about Fortnite and drop lots of Fbombs.
I don’t mind having rules and standards for a forum. You need to keep the discussion under some control just to keep everyone mostly on topic and avoid excessive vitriol. Just make the rules simple and post them so people can read them, and be viewpoint neutral.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7m ago
I've got an idea swirling around in my head about how the draft is necessary(not sufficient) for a free, western society, in a way that goes back to the beginning of time. I think mass culture is just one expression thereof.
The period where the Anglosphere countries had a peacetime draft was very short (20-30 years after WW2) and coincided with a low point for freedom. The model of democracy that emerges from the French Revolution was based on the idea that democracy (which is related to, but not the same as, freedom) requires a draft, although empirically that has turned out to be false in a number of Continental European countries including France. But I don't think France is noted for having more freedom than the Anglosphere.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
15m ago
· Edited 4m ago
I didn’t care for Luca much. In general, I think Pixar does best at movies that show “the world within the world”, where there are non-human characters who are related in some way to humans and we see what the “human world” is like from their perspective. Once you notice that pattern, you realize all of Pixar’s best movies fit that pattern.
Toy Story is about toys who have to navigate the world of children playing with them. Monsters inc is about monsters who scare humans, but are deathly afraid of them. Finding Nemo is about fish having to navigate the world of commercial fishing and aquariums. Wall-E is about robots who have to clean up after lazy humans. Inside Out is about internal emotions who have to try and regulate themselves to deal with the problems of their host person. (Not actually the first time Disney developed that concept.)
Luca, Brave, Elio, and Coco are the opposite: about humans exploring the inner world. I find that inherently less interesting. Coco is by far the best out of the bunch I really like; day of the dead has such color as a cultural festival, and the idea of an elderly grandmother with memory issues remembering her father is such a raw and poignant human experience that I’m not sure anyone left the theater with dry eyes. But I liked Elio more than most people seemed to have; I’m considering an effortpost review since it came up.
Soul and Turning Red (never saw that one) I guess are like that, but less about a world and more about a transformation? Not considered Pixar’s best.
There are also the “non-humans as a human allegory,” like Cars, A Bug’s Life, Onward, Elemental. These are, at best, controversial. I think humans need to be in a Pixar movie, but not as the main characters.
I never saw Lightyear, and I think that was their worst ever concept for a film. I hated that they made a 3d Pixar movie as the in-universe buzz lightyear movie; I prefer the original 2d galactic command TV show. Toy advertisement media is far more silly and zany than a Pixar film.
Pixar is at their best when we get to imagine non-humans “inside” our world and what they might think of us. If I were an exec, I would be demanding that creatives pitch more of those ideas.
07mk
21m ago
Also, given the falls he survives in 3 and 4, it seems that the bulletproof-ness applies to all impact. I was actually reminded somewhat of the Die Hard franchise, where John McClane went from a competent off-duty cop barely making it out of his depth in 1 to a Marvel superhero taking down a fighter jet with a Mack truck followed by surviving sliding down a crumbling bridge in 4. Hollywood might have somewhat of an issue with making everything bigger and more over-the-top with sequels.
philosoraptor
22m ago
I quite vividly remember someone posting a comment about there being a siren and someone else saying "can't find any news confirming it" and not piping in with "it's me, I'm the news, posting from the spotty internet in the bomb shelter". And then it became just increasingly not the right moment for it (also I was quite sleep deprived and dealing with lots of other more immediate concerns).
Those posts from the shelter would probably have been awesome, actually, though I completely understand you having other concerns that were far higher priorities at a moment like that.
07mk
27m ago
Now if you feel that I've been unfairly dismissive, antagonistic, or uncharitable in my response towards you then perhapse then you might begin to grasp why i hate the whole "bUt HuMaNs ArE FaLaBlE ToO UwU" argument with such a passion. Im not claiming that LLMs are unreliable because they are "less than perfect" i am claiming that they are unreliable because they are not only unreliable, but unreliable by design.
I don't understand why anyone would hate that argument. Humans are also unreliable... not by design, perhaps, but intrinsically due to the realities of biology. The point of the argument is that, even though humans are intrinsically and inescapably unreliable, we still manage to make reliable systems based around relying on them, and as such, the intrinsic, inescapable unreliability of LLMs doesn't make them incapable of being used as the basis of unreliable systems.
There are good arguments to be made against this. It's possible that we can't get LLMs' unreliability to be lower than humans at the same cost. It's possible that even if that were possible, the nature of the unreliability of LLMs will always remain less predictable than that of humans, in such a way as to make making reliable systems based on them impossible. The fact that LLMs can't be shamed or punished based on failing in their reliability could be a fatal flaw for creating reliable systems based on them. And there are probably a myriad of other better reasons I haven't even thought of.
But I'd like to actually see those arguments actually being made. Maybe that video you say you linked makes them, but I'm one of the users of a text-based forum like this who don't have either interest or ability to view long-form videos during normal usage of this forum.
ulyssessword
38m ago
Let's try a concrete example. Excerpted from here:
The o1 model identified the exact or very close diagnosis (Bond scores of 4-5) in 65.8% of cases during the initial ER Triage, 69.6% during the ER physician encounter, and 79.7% at the ICU
65.8% accuracy isn't that great, but buddy, have you seen humans?
—surpassing the two physicians (54.4%, 60.8%, 75.9% for Physician 1; 48.1%, 50.6%, 68.4% for Physician 2) at each stage.
The state of the art for generating accurate medical diagnoses doesn't involve gathering the brightest highschoolers, giving them another decade(-ish) of formal education, then more clinical experience before asking for their opinions. It involves training an LLM.
You did not say "no", as such i find it disingenuous of you to suddenly back-pedal and claim to care about reliability after the the fact.
Buddy, have you seen humans?
Humans are unreliable. You are a human are you not? You have not given any indication that you care about accuracy or reliability and instead (by chosing to use the trick calculator over doing the math yourself) have strongly implied that you do not care about such things.
Now if you feel that I've been unfairly dismissive, antagonistic, or uncharitable in my response towards you then perhapse then you might begin to grasp why i hate the whole "bUt HuMaNs ArE FaLaBlE ToO UwU" argument with such a passion. Im not claiming that LLMs are unreliable because they are "less than perfect" i am claiming that they are unreliable because they are not only unreliable, but unreliable by design. I know its long but seriously watch the video essay on Badness = 0 I posted up thread. It is highly relevant to this conversation.
Lorian_Aristedes
42m ago
I would be very interested to read that if you ever do a write up.
Fixed the link.
It's this one.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NDWKRFSZlCM&t=64
This scene in the Mario Movie has NO REASON TO EXIST, they don't resolve anything, it lasts less than 2 minutes, there's no real danger, and they just solve the problem without even thinking about it, and get back to the storyline. Literally the next scene leads into the final showdown.
The whole movie feels like this.
You're putting far too much into your interpretation of what I initially said.
In the context of:
My point is clearly that humans, even the "best" humans, aren't immune to the same accusation.
What are you on about? If my only option was that faulty calculator, then I would use it, after making every attempt to mitigate its shortcomings. That is the same approach I use with LLMs, to excellent effect. Verify everything that is worth the effort of verifying.
Why would you assume that I don't care about reliability? A perfect calculator beats a faulty calculator. Multiple faulty calculators beat a single faulty calculator. A faulty calculator beats no calculator at all.
Once again, your insistence on dividing the world into "reliable" vs "unreliable" is a choice you're making, and not one of mine. If you, instead, assume that I'm the one making such a claim, you're off by light-years.
Humans are not perfectly reliable, and we have entire systems meant to address that. That's a significant purpose behind the whole civilization thing.
Are human pilots perfectly reliable? No, hence we have copilots, flight computers, and check-lists.
Are human mathematicians perfectly reliable, even working within the rigorous confines of mathematics? Nope. That's why we invented calculators, theorem provers like Coq, and so on.
Am I perfectly reliable? I wish. That's why I make sure to fact-check my own claims and use Google, and yes, LLMs, because I expect the combination to be more robust as well as faster than figuring out everything from first principles myself.
Our entire civilization is a human-fallibility-management-system. So when I say "Buddy, have you seen humans?", I'm not making a "fully generalized argument against 'true' and 'false'". I'm making the opposite point: The pursuit of truth and accuracy is so important that we've spent millennia developing robust, multi-agent, error-correcting systems to compensate for the fact that our base hardware (a single human brain) is unreliable.
Cost and speed are factors too, and one that can be meaningfully traded off with reliability if you can't have it all.
Hardly. If, for some reason, normal calculators weren't an option, then I offered ways to mitigate the failures of even the faulty ones you conjecture. That steps adds extra time and headache, but if you really cared to, you could get indistinguishable results.
Even if were to grant your framing of LLMs as less than perfectly reliable oracles, then I obviously endorse working around those failures. I also point to the fact that humans are less than perfectly reliable.
Besides, you're the one who made the entirely unfounded claim that:
What does you being a math nerd have to do with anything? Without further justification, it's an argument from authority, and authority you then didn't demonstrate. You have yet to remotely demonstrate that I am making a "fully generalized argument" against those concepts. Everything you said afterwards is, at bare minimum, tangential to that point.
Without quantifying "reliability", or even quantifying one's willingness to tradeoff reliability for other things, such an argument is pointless.
Modern electronics are some of the most robust and error-resistant physical devices to ever exist, with more sigmas of accuracy than I care to count. Yet, they're still at risk of failure or inaccuracy, if some random cosmic ray were to hit them during an operation. In situations where you absolutely need to reduce this to the bare minimum, you can pay for ECC memory or run computations in parallel. This still doesn't entirely mitigate the risk, but it reduces it to levels that aren't a concern except over periods of billions of years.
Does this mean that modern computers are "unreliable by design"? Absolutely not. It means that some unreliability is, unfortunately, unavoidable, but can be reduced to tolerable levels. They were designed, in the human-intent sense, for reliability.
You claim LLMs are "unreliable by design". This is a misunderstanding of what they are. LLMs are stochastic by design. This is a feature, not a bug. It allows them to produce a diverse range of outputs from the same prompt, which is essential for creative and exploratory tasks. This stochasticity is controllable via sampling parameters like temperature. If one requires deterministic output for a given state, one can simply set temperature=0. The resulting output will be the single most probable completion. It may still be factually incorrect, but it will not be randomly incorrect in the way your trick abacus analogy suggests. The unreliability is an emergent property of imperfect modeling of the data distribution, not a deliberate design choice in the sense you imply.
The argument "humans are fallible too" is not a "fully generalized argument against 'true' and 'false'". It is the establishment of the relevant baseline for performance. To hold a new technology to a standard of flawless perfection that no existing system (especially its human predecessors) can meet is not a rigorous critique; it is simply moving the goalposts.
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