☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ @ yogthos @lemmy.ml

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You continue to ignore my point that human representation are themselves not arbitrary. Our brains have emerged naturally, and that's what makes the representations humans make natural. You could evolve a representation of the model from scratch by hooking up a neural network to raw sensory inputs, and its topology will eventually become tuned to model those inputs. I don't see what would be fundamentally more natural about that though.

The perception of democracy by a country's own people is likely the strongest indicator of its health. After all, what could be more relevant than the lived experience of the populace? If people don't feel that their government serves them, then external ratings showing otherwise, however meticulously compiled, miss the core reality of the situation.

Furthermore, coming up with a truly comprehensive and universally agreed-upon rating system for democracy is itself a non-trivial challenge. Would such a rating heavily weigh material conditions, levels of inequality, access to public services, or more abstract freedoms like speech and assembly? And crucially, who decides which of these aspects are the most important or hold the greatest weight in determining a nation's democratic standing?

welcome to the world that capitalism built

A more accurate conclusion would be: human-like object concept representations emerge when fed data collected by humans, curated by humans, annotated by humans, and then tested by representation learning methods designed for humans.

Again, I'm not disputing this point, but I don't see why it's significant to be honest. As I've noted, human representation of the world is not arbitrary. We evolved to create efficient models that allow us to interact with the world in an effective way. We're now seeing that artificial neural networks are able to create similar types of internal representations that allow them to meaningfully interact with the data organized in a way that's natural for humans.

I'm not suggesting that human style representation of the world is the one true way to build a world model, or that other efficient representations aren't possible. However, that in no way detracts from the fact that LLMs can create a useful representation of the world, that's similar to our own.

Ultimately, the end goal of this technology is to be able to interact with humans, to navigate human environments, and to accomplish tasks that humans want to accomplish.

It's a good thing in a sense that it means the models are creating stable representations of objects across modalities. It means that there is potential for extending LLM approach to building actual world models in the future.

this is a very good take on why Germany does this https://spore.social/@ayoub/114653676641160705

since it was part of the survey

It’s not merely natural. It’s human.

I'm not disputing this, but I also don't see why that's important. It's a representation of the world encoded in a human format. We're basically skipping a step of evolving a way to encode this data.

We know that LLMs, when fed human-like inputs, produce human-like outputs. That’s it. That tells us more about LLMs and humans than it tells us about nature itself.

Did you actually read through the paper?

accurate description of how surveys are conducted in fascist states like the US, UK, and France

I didn't say they're encoding raw data from nature. I said they're learning to interpret multimodal representations of the encodings of nature that we feed them in human compatible formats. What these networks are learning is to make associations between visual, auditory, tactile, and text representations of objects. When a model recognizes a particular modality such as a sound, it can then infer that it may be associated with a particular visual object, and so on.

Meanwhile, the human perspective itself isn't arbitrary either. It's a result of evolutionary selection process that shaped the way our brains are structured. This is similar to how brains of other animals encode reality as well. If you evolved a neural network on raw data from the environment, it would eventually start creating similar types of representations as well because it's an efficient way to model the world.

Ultimately the data both human brains and artificial neural networks are trained on comes from the material reality we inhabit. That's the underlying context. We're feeding LLMs data about our reality encoded in a way that's compatible with how our brains interpret it. I'd argue that models being based on data encoding that we ourselves use is a feature, because ultimately we want to be able to interact with them in a meaningful way.

The object concept representation is an emergent property within these networks. Basically, the network learns to create stable associations between different modalities and associate an abstract concept of an object that unites them together.

You measure perception by doing surveys and asking questions. That's how social scientific studies are conducted. Thanks for further confirming you don't understand how scientific method works though.

What's funny to me is that people genuinely thought this time would be different.

Exactly, moving away from fossil fuel usage is key to having energy sovereignty. Incidentally, this won't only be true for China because as Chinese alternative energy industries mature, this tech will be exported globally. We're already seeing this with cheap solar panels becoming prevalent, and western media crying that they're destroying fossil fuel profits. Soon, we'll see China start exporting things like thorium reactors as well. The choke hold the US had on global energy is being broken.

I do, and I can guarantee you that it has fuck all to do with a single thing you've said in this thread.

The best outcome here would be the west imploding economically and turning on itself while the global south moves on.

In all the numerous studies have been done over many decades that you could've easily googled. In fact, I even linked many of them here because unlike some people I actually source my claims.

• https://lemmy.ml/post/31985765/19378486
• https://lemmy.ml/post/31985765/19374523

Democracy means a government that serves the majority, and answers to them. Its most important measure lies the steady rise in people’s living standards. But perception matters too, do citizens believe their government works for them?

In the West, most don’t. And why would they? They watch their livelihoods shrink while oligarchs, the real rulers of capitalist regimes, gorge themselves on the exploitation of the working class. In China, people call their system democratic, because it is. They’ve witnessed the fastest improvement in living standards in human history. That’s not just democracy in theory. It’s democracy in practice.

in fact there are studies showing this empirically

What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.