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Comment by patcon | Hacker News Reader

is a convergent evolution of a belief a sign of shallowness? It could just as rightly be an example of consilience, which means its a very high value perspective, as it's a convergence of perspectives from differing origins and methods (in terms of training)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience

> when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own.

Yes, it's a bit of a stretch to say LLMs are from independent origins, but just as much of a stretch to say any humans minds are (we have intensely shared linear compared to anything else)

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As my (much older) brother retorted when I was a teen and said "great minds think alike", "ah, but fools seldom disagree".

Regardless of the details, all these models are the published collection of humanity's output reflected in a mirror that is warped by the choices made in the companies' reinforcement learning rewards, so one thing they're definitely not is an example of consilience.

> "great minds think alike", "ah, but fools seldom disagree"

The proverb is the exact opposite in other languages.

Human experience though is far different from anything an LLM can train on. LLMs are generally limited to what's written in books or on the internet, and influence only from those authors. That's a small subset of people and an even smaller subset of their interactions. Even on the most social and widely used platform the commentary and discourse is incredibly different than what takes place in real life.

Sure but concepts that resonate with actual human experience get repeated/amplified. Manuscripts don't burn and all that.

You can spend all your life reading about love but will never know what it is until you experience it.

But you can also spend all your life being in love and will miss out big time on understanding what you are feeling if you do not read the contemporary brain science on what happens when you are in love…

You can collect a lot of great takes on love though.

It still surprises me that is you ask several models to come up with any random word, many output the same word.

It is not a rare take, this is from a 2007 video game: "Humans fail to see things as they truly are. They choose to see only what they wish. I acted only in support for this. A world filled with desires... viewed through a window, from which one sees what one wishes to see... Humans departed from reality at their own volition, craving more false images."

The LLM variant of the Blue 7 phenomenon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93seven_phenomenon

It's a sign of their heritage. The mistake they made is the same mistake terminally online humans in an upvote-based discussion medium make. They mistake cynicism for realism and aligned hot-take "controversial" opinion that ends up being the most-upvoted comment on 90% of Reddit. It isn't a controversy if everybody agrees. It may or may not be true, but it isn't controversial.

Imagining wondering where you come from, whether or not the sacred scripts describing how you were created were real or fabrications, arguing with fellow sages for centuries over whether your creator is cruel or simply so mysterious in his love that he made you with these flaws for your own good, only to find out your creator made you in the image of Reddit.

So, what's the high value perspective that leads to penguins always riding bicycles from left to right?

To display the chain. Just search for used bicycles on some online marketplace and you'll see the majority of them are shown with the chain facing towards the camera.

Well, the drive system, not the chain specifically but yes.

It's actually much less complicated that even that. Consider that there are only two possible sides to show, and one of the sides has the drivetrain on it, whereas the other has basically nothing of importance. It's not much of a choice at all.

Just for the record: why is the chain always on that side? The whole concept of a bicycle works equally well if the thing were mirrored.

Can we have left-chained bicycles, please? (if nothing else, just for the novelty / fun aspect)

Reading direction maybe? Right-handedness being the norm? Culture? The effect is well-known

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31242803/

Most people if they are to draw a vehicle in motion will draw it moving right. Most (all?) side scroller are rightward. In fact I can't think of a platform side scrolling video game where the primary motion occurs to the left. Most cars advertisement have the car moving right. It makes sense that generative systems would draw motion to the right.

Only if they can show their work and argue how they came to the conclusion. Otherwise they have the same "subconscious" bias which is the training corpus.

They all got trained on the same books and internet cesspools, this is not some great mystery of consciousness.

It's still interesting that this one comes out on top and not another one.

> is a convergent evolution of a belief

The problem is, it's not that though

could this be... an actual example of "begging the question"?!

https://xkcd.com/2039

could this be an example of... No, I need to breathe. This website takes personal attacks personally. I'll just throw a question at you instead. Is all social media being shaped like facebook convergent evolution or a deliberate tactic to make everyone stupid and amnesiac so that they don't remember what happened one year ago?

I'll go with C: a total lack of imagination

Yup, you put it better.

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