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Comment by avaer | Hacker News Reader

Someone should tell the mathematicians if they use a calculator or a whiteboard or heavens forbid a computer they are "bad at math".

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1) That's not related to chain of thought I was replying to. Someone asked about the "bad at math" and pointed out "but it seems good to me" so I added the color of why that might be the case. Your retort seems to imply I'm making an argument that because something uses tools for a job it cannot be good at the thing it's using a tool for. Which is not the case.

2) If you have something to say, just say it. Don't put words in my mouth and then argue with a thing I didn't say.

Right, but your narrative was incorrect and based on faulty premises, which you haven't acknowledged. That's fine, except you're still pressing the argument.

Can you please present a reasonable maths problem that I can bounce off GPT so we can see it fail? I can give you many hundreds of relatively complex problems, none of which have appeared in a textbook, that GPT has not only solved, but critiqued my own crappy solutions for. I'm only asking you for one counterpoint.

> your narrative was incorrect and based on faulty premises

I am referring to specific, documented behavior of LLMs. Google it.

Google any plausibly reasonable math problem, and even the terrible LLM that powers the Google search page will almost certainly solve it correctly for you.

I don't need to reconstruct my argument axiomatically from folk beliefs.

You seem to have misunderstood my comment. I'm happy to accept the fault for poor communication. But you're making it hard. You're signaling that any clarifications on my behalf will be treated as further arguments instead of some sort of shared desire to hear one another. I don't care to continue.

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