Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know. I've been using Copilot, ChatGPT, and Bing Chat intensively in the past month. So far I still think the metaphor "you can’t get to the Moon by piling up chairs" aged very well.

> A criticism that would make more sense would be something along the lines of "piling up colors you won't get you any closer to the Moon", since colors aren't even the right kind of thing, and you can't aggregate them in a way that gets you spatially closer. Because that at least does not concede the fundamental relationship of spatial traverseability.

No. I think you misunderstood what the chair metaphor is trying to say. It makes perfect sense, and if you replaced it with colors it would stop making sense.

"You can’t get to the Moon by piling up chairs" means that even chairs and rockets share some attributes (helping you get higher), the difference between them is still qualitative, not quantitve. The problem isn't "we don't have enough chairs."

"You can't get to the Moon by piling up colors" makes zero sense because colors and rockets share so few attributes and the metaphor falls flat.

Is it true for AI? I don't know, and at this point, anyone who claims they knows for sure, is lying. But I don't think my experience with ChatGTP (GPT4 included) and Bing Chat disputes it.

>means that even chairs and rockets share some attributes (helping you get higher), the difference between them is still qualitative, not quantitve.

I don't think so, because the needed 'quality' is the ability to traverse space. So I don't think I agree that the qualitative piece is missing.

Perhaps the moon example is helpful here because the real solution, a rocket ship, uses propulsion rather than sheer mass, and so you could say that some function such as propulsion is 'qualitatively' lacking. But even that I believe exhibits the very form of confusion that I'm criticizing, which I'll explain below.

>The problem isn't "we don't have enough chairs."

Well, in a way it is. And at the risk of sounding like the type of question that Randall Monroe would answer in the book What If, even this most vulgar example would in a literal case prove true. Given enough chairs, they would topple over, but create a pile that overtime would spill and evenly distribute over the earth, and it would be the whole earth that grows until it's size is so large that it's close to the Moon.

And, I wasn't even trying to make this point, but it's actually kind of a perfect example here because Chat GPT has made all of its progress by throwing chairs (data) at the problem.

> has made all of its progress by throwing chairs (data) at the problem.

To me it seems like the most tricky thing about the whole field is that quantitative adjustments make qualitative breakthroughs. Simply increasing parameters / layers / data make sudden rapid jumps in generalization / abstraction / etc. It's somewhat unintuitive because many things in world don't work like this, and the metaphor you're discussing is more about "normal" things, it doesn't really apply to ANNs well, those are more of anomaly, like quantum mechanics (yeah, it's probably a bad analogy too).

The quote isn't talking about physical distance. It's talking about "close" in the sense of progress. You haven't made any progress towards walking on the moon even if the pile of chairs is as big as Mount Everest. There isn't just the question of toppling either, the chairs would start physically crushing each other and then they are no longer chairs.

I think this misunderstands my point across the board. Physical distance is progress, and not only that, it's the most fundamental kind of progress for this type of problem. Chairs run up against practical limitations but not in-principle limitations, and people invoke the piling-up-chairs argument because they are confused about which kinds of arguments are about practicality and which are about illustrating a conceptual principle.

>You haven't made any progress towards walking on the moon even if the pile of chairs is as big as Mount Everest.

I literally gave an example where this is exactly the thing that does, in fact, happen.

>There isn't just the question of toppling either, the chairs would start physically crushing each other and then they are no longer chairs.

I guess this means you actually read to the end of my comment, so that's good, but, this introduces JV debate team metaphysics that has nothing to do with anything, and if it did matter, you could substitute out chairs for just about any other physical material where the property of chair-ness is moot and the point would be the same. Gravel? Let's go with gravel.

But I shouldn't even have to make the point because the fundamental insight is that the nature of the problem is about the traversibility of space.

Again, this quote and this argument have been around for decades now, and it has been used to support an a whole range of arguments, some of which are now being abandoned because they seem increasingly untenable with recent advancements.

If the people who used this example in the 1960s knew that, come 2023, people were no longer making the in-principle argument, and were even denying that it was ever ever about the possibility in principle, they would wonder what the hell was happening in 2023 that rendered this position of theirs no longer respectable.

The moon is 30 earth diameters away. There isnt enough gravel on earth to build a pile that high. It's just not a working approach. If you are standing on a giant pile and want to get to the moon your best bet is walk all the way down again and start building a rocket.

Even if you had enough chairs, they are not strong enough.

They are qualitatively different because the rocket can traverse that amount of space scalably. The chairs cannot.

Six stages of acceptance:

1. We'll never land on the moon.

2. It's hard to land on the moon.

3. I never said we can't land on the moon, you just can't do it with pile of chairs.

4. I was never denying that chairs illustrate a fundamental principle that illustrates why the problem is indeed solvable in principle.

5. I was never saying distinctions about what is or isn't 'qualitative' was intended to show that we can't in fact land on the moon.

6. I know, I've been saying we'll land on the moon this whole time! I've always disagreed with people who said otherwise despite coming to defense of arguments that were used for decades to make the point that I supposedly am not endorsing!

Of course they can. Neal Armstrong literally travelled to the moon sitting in a literal chair.

Basically, the Saturn rocket was more or less a simple chair with some extra features added to it.

Granted they didn’t stack chairs. But, nevertheless, focusing on the mods you’d need to make to your La-z-boy to get to moon would be a fruitful way of approaching the problem.

>I don't think so, because the needed 'quality' is the ability to traverse space. So I don't think I agree that the qualitative piece is missing.

It's not the distance that keeps us from the moon but gravity. The needed quality to get to the moon is the ability to escape the gravity well, and chairs don't provide that.

These models are impressive but they aren't general intelligence, and I'm not sure this type of model ever will be.

If we look at it the other way around. These models have consumed more textual and graphical information than any human could ever do in a million lifetimes, and yet for most questions they don't really answer any better than the average human could. (They're much faster, so for the specific cases that they're right that's very useful).

So there is some key thing missing. I would say it is the ability to understand the text they are consuming and generating.

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