I agree with the point that self-reference comes "for free" due to computationalist reasons, namely Quining and Godel and liar's paradox all show that. But then self-computations should be more prevalent relative to phenomena like consciousness. Example could be the human immune system functioning, in that on the level of DNA there is some encoding of identifying what is "self", etc.

Also if self reference is easy for the reasons he mentions then should we see non-LLM systems, say AlphaGo or image generators, learning a sense of self vs other? E.g. inside AlphaGo's black box it could utilize a concept of "my strategy".

    b
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Do not presume to understand other people's concerns based on one or two sentences. I don't know how to explain that in an online conversation, this is more a learn to interact with real life people kind of thing. I would assume older generations still behave that way, because they are more authoritarian.

I could talk about why the 'implication' is not necessarily problem and about why what is 'obvious' to yourself should not be taken for granted when talking through disagreements with other people. But that would take more time and I think a well-rounded college education is supposed teach people these basic humanities skills, not something that can be sorted out online especially these days.

Today I entered this new M4 mini's serial as a trade in for the M6 base mini, and the retail price went from $1249 CAD to $824 "once trade-in received". That's the automatic estimate, so basically I'd be paying twice for an upgrade...

Computer science is about what LLMs fundamentally are. If you implicitly focus on "actually existing LLMs", and require others do this, then that is not computer science. That is politics.

N.b. if you look up 'populism' on Wikipedia a huge portion of the page explains the contested term is sociologically vague and did not have the negative connotation it does in mainstream discourse. Most people are not aware of this.

(I picked the news piece for its easy to read summary of the main idea)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338500

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

That's more because a PhD (especially in this socioeconomic era where academia is also a microcosm of capitalism) does not automatically teach or focus on deep inquiry, rather narrow research programmes. Case in point, fallaciously reducing it all to a superficial theory of tricks means that by the same light, general relativity or any other major scientific result is merely just a trick. That framing ought to be absurd on the face of it but the fact is many PhD students do still graduate with very unexamined understanding of science, cognition, philosophy, etc. (Another way to see this is to note how such an argument is letting the notion of "trick"/"heuristic" do all the heavy lifting--something an advanced education should have nurtured the critical thinking skills to avoid that very metacognitive pitfall in the first place, which is ironic.) (Yet another way is to see how increasingly experts of one field or another insist that one must stay on their lane when speaking about a complex topic.) There are professors and thinkers who have written/spoken about this but they are a minority. Even Einstein himself when he complained that more and more scientists were trained/structured to miss the forest for the trees, and that was almost 100 years ago.