kromem @ kromem @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

The 'religion' I think most accurate is all in on a deity of light.

Given light can be more than one color at once when not measured and different separated eventual observers can each measure different results then as long as a deity of light was fundamentally unobservable during this life and only observed on a relative basis after departing it - such a deity's qualities and characteristics are entirely up for grabs.

Believe what you want. If I'm right, all options are on the table - relative to you. So your beliefs don't constrain anyone else's or vice versa.

Even though I do think there's a rational underlying mechanical objective truth to how that setup may have been achieved, my guess is most people wouldn't like that version nearly as much as their own dearly held beliefs, spirituality, or superstitions, so my genuine hope is that after death what they most hoped to be the case for themselves is what they'll find irregardless of how it works behind the scenes or what it might be for others.

When they don't straight up lie, they don't know stuff. It's quite simple, really, I usually deal with very complex problems that few people dealt with, the AI has (close to) no data on that, so it runs in circles and is not able to help.

You need to provide it the data. The fact they know things at all pretrained was kind of a surprise to everyone in the industry. Their current usecase as a Google replacement is really not ideally aligned with the capabilities. But the models have turned out to be surprisingly good at in context learning and are having increased context windows, so depending on the model you can absolutely provide it relevant reference material to ground the responses with a factual reference point before asking for deeper analysis. It's hard to give specific recommendations without knowing more about what you are trying to accomplish, but "they're very stupid" runs extremely counter to most of what I've seen at this point, and the rare cases where that seems to be the case there's usually something more nuanced getting in the way and a slight modification to what or how I'm asking gets past it.

Knowing GPT, it didn't ask that question.

Really? I find that the chat models are almost overturned to asking for more details as part of their reengagement strategy. In fact, a number of the employment related usage examples I've seen were things like users having the model ask a series of questions about work history and responsibilities in order to summarize resume fodder. So again, maybe a bit of a difference between users of the tools.

Just learn which use-cases it excels at and don't ask it for complex advice.

My use of the models is almost entirely related to complex scenarios and while I'd agree that something like GPT-3 is dumb as shit, GPT-4 is probably among the smarter interactions I've had in my life and I used to consult for C-suite execs of Fortune 500s. One of my favorite results was explaining the factors I suspected were influencing it getting a question wrong and it generating a correct workaround that was quite brilliant (the issue was token similarity to a standard form of a question and the proposed solution was replacing the nouns with emojis, which did bypass the similarity bias and allowed it to answer correctly when it was failing before). In spite of there being no self-introspection capabilities, giving it background details resulted in novel and ultimately correct out-of-the-box solutions.

From the sound of it, you are trying to use it for coding. I recommend switching to one of the models that specializes in that rather than using a generalist model.

And on the off chance you are using the free 3.5 version - well stop that. That one sucks and is like using an Atari when there's a PS3 available instead. Don't make the mistake of extrapolating where the tech is at based on outdated tech being provided for free as a foot on the door.

On the other hand, one of mine thinks she deserves a promotion because her electricity bill was so much higher in winter than she was expecting.

Maybe what she needs help with from ChatGPT is translating her actual request to language you'd better understand.

"Hi person who has undue influence over my well-being, it turns out that the increased amount of work I've been doing at home has led to an unexpected increase in incurred personal costs. Ideally, these should be offset by work. Given I am skeptical you'd authorize any kind of reimbursement or a relative pay raise to cover these costs for their own sake, I'm instead coming to you to suggest a promotion prompted by my sudden increased incurred costs which are in part on your behalf. This is also justified based on my work history and the ways in which my pay hasn't kept track with market rates for comparable labor. I would encourage you to consider the transactional costs of finding a replacement at current market rates and factor those into the value you put on my retention as you consider this request, as without being able to pay my bills I may be forced to seek other employment which you will only know about if I succeed at max two weeks out from my disappearance."

There's something to be said for the abilities of a tool reflecting its wielder.

In research circles, the most advanced pipelines in terms of prompting have a 90% success rate at things the same model only gets right around 30% of the time with naive zero shot prompting.

At a minimum, people should be familiar with chain of thought prompting if using the models. That one is very easy to incorporate and makes a huge difference on complex problems.

Though for anyone actually building serious pipelines for these products, the best technique I've seen to date was this one from DeepMind:

We introduce SELF-DISCOVER, a general framework for LLMs to self-discover the task-intrinsic reasoning structures to tackle complex reasoning problems that are challenging for typical prompting methods. Core to the framework is a self-discovery process where LLMs select multiple atomic reasoning modules such as critical thinking and step-by-step thinking, and compose them into an explicit reasoning structure for LLMs to follow during decoding. SELF-DISCOVER substantially improves GPT-4 and PaLM 2's performance on challenging reasoning benchmarks such as BigBench-Hard, grounded agent reasoning, and MATH, by as much as 32% compared to Chain of Thought (CoT). Furthermore, SELF-DISCOVER outperforms inference-intensive methods such as CoT-Self-Consistency by more than 20%, while requiring 10-40x fewer inference compute. Finally, we show that the self-discovered reasoning structures are universally applicable across model families: from PaLM 2-L to GPT-4, and from GPT-4 to Llama2, and share commonalities with human reasoning patterns.

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03620

So yes, maybe you aren't getting a lot out of the models. But a lot of people are, and the difference between your experiences and theirs may just boil down to experience in using the tool. If I just started using Photoshop for an hour or two I might complain about how the software sucks at making good looking images. But we both know it wouldn't be the software's fault.

Furthermore, simple probability calculations indicate that GPT-4's reasonable performance on k=5 is suggestive of going beyond "stochastic parrot" behavior (Bender et al., 2021), i.e., it combines skills in ways that it had not seen during training.

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17567

Do these networks just memorize a collection of surface statistics, or do they rely on internal representations of the process that generates the sequences they see? We investigate this question by applying a variant of the GPT model to the task of predicting legal moves in a simple board game, Othello. Although the network has no a priori knowledge of the game or its rules, we uncover evidence of an emergent nonlinear internal representation of the board state.

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382 (replicated here and here (with chess))

So you already have research showing that GPT LLMs are capable of modeling aspects of training data at much deeper levels of abstraction than simply surface statistics of words and research showing that the most advanced models are already generating novel and new outputs distinct from anything that would be in the training data by virtue of the complexity of the number of different abstract concepts it combines from what was learned in the training data.

Like - have you actually read any of the ongoing actual research on the field at all? Or just articles written by embittered people who are generally misunderstanding the technology (for example, if you ever see someone refer to them as Markov chains, that person has no idea what they are talking about given the key factor of the transformer model is the self-attention mechanism which negates the Markov property characterizing Markov chains in the first place).

Mhmm. Here's the uncensored anti-woke AI Elon tried to create answering Twitter blue subscribers questions:

Or

Or

Yeah, so horribly biased and terrible...

Well that will fix their failing economy.

Just think of all the wasted ink and paper costs for gender inclusivity.

Brilliant.

How do you think Song of Songs or Ezekiel 29 relate to the divorce prohibition?

It's a bit annoying that they wrote it up so literally decades after he was dead.

Dude was also allegedly regularly referring to death and the afterlife using marriage metaphors of bridegrooms and bridal suites.

But yeah, the idea divorce is impossible had to do with actual marriage and not the whole 'dying' part.

(Though I suppose the sect that believed a dead body came back as opposed to the sects that denied physical resurrection would have preferred interpreting it as referring to actual marriage and not death...)

'Pro' just means you can charge more.

It stands for 'Profits'

But I'm not sure we can verify, even, it was led by an apocalyptic prophet.

I completely agree - Paul is certainly apocalyptic, but something like the Gospel of Thomas has very different ideas, such as:

The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us, how will our end come?"

Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.

Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."

Jesus said, "Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being.

• Gospel of Thomas saying 18-19a

You see a similar notion opposed in the Epistles:

As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you, brothers and sisters, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as though from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here.

• 2 Thessalonians 2:1-2

Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying resurrection has already occurred. They are upsetting the faith of some.

• 2 Timothy 2:17-18

(It's worth noting that while 2 Timothy is classically considered to be forged, it is the only disputed letter to have the same relative amount of personal reference as Paul's undisputed letters - he happened to talk about himself a lot like a covert narcissist is prone to, and that may offer another perspective on authenticity that's been missed by scholarship to date.)

There were no texts before Mark, as the movement was entirely word of mouth, and as per all games of telephone, evolved with each retelling.

That's a spurious claim based on an argument from silence and at odds with Papias's description of a sayings work we don't have, as well as a number of scholars estimating the date of a early core for the Gospel of Thomas, which Paul even seems to quote from as among the collection of resources in Corinth, potentially even as a written document.

Even an earlier form of Mark probably predated the version of Mark we have today. And the Pauline Epistles are documentary evidence that predate Mark (and likely even informed it).

What scholarly consensus does assert is the scripture is not univocal, inspired or inerrant, and the narrative bends with every era to affirm the morality of the time.

While the first part is true, the second is a gross oversimplification. The morals of some people at the time. For example, there was a massive women's speech movement going on in the first century that the church was opposing, including regarding women's speech in early Christian circles. So the scriptures that are misogynistic in the NT don't necessarily reflect the broader morals of the time so much as the reactionary morals of a select few controlling that version of the narrative.

Same with how Jesus was suddenly talking about marriage being between a man and a woman in a gospel whose extant version is dated after 70 CE, relevant to gay marriage having become an institution in Rome after Nero married two men in the 60s CE, but much less relevant in the 30s CE when he was allegedly saying it.

So keep in mind scripture only reflects morals of a select few of the time (and at the time of various edits).

explained by Neil Stephenson in Snow Crash

Not the most accurate information in there. He messes up the Sumerian stuff a bit too. Better than the average person, but roughly what you'd expect being found in a fictional work.

The myth of the empty tomb was to show that it was the people's religion, independent of temples and priests.

The myth of the empty tomb likely had more to do with a divide over physical resurrection. You can see this in 1 Cor 15, a debate over whether physical resurrection was believed or not. The group denying it was associated with both female disciples and later Thomas, so you see in Mark the women "totally saw the empty tomb, they just didn't tell anyone." Just like Thomas in John "totally saw the physically resurrected Jesus and believed."

The other group was instead of having a Jesus where you needed to eat his flesh and drink his blood to embody him, portraying a Jesus saying "Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him." They were also talking about there being non-physical twins ('Thomas') for physical originals, such that resurrection was mechanically the recreation of the physical in non-physical form, with a first Adam that was physical but a second Adam that was spiritual (this idea appears as early as 1 Cor 15, only about two decades after Jesus was dead, in what Paul is arguing with to position a physical resurrection as plausible).

Zombie Jesus has way different opinions than living Jesus.

Yeah, what a coincidence that Jesus had to come back from the dead to appoint the people claiming to have seen him do so as the proper torch bearers to carry on his message. Not at all suspicious.

"Most credible scholars, including most secular scholars agree" is different from "most people agree."

You might want to actually look into why they agree before talking about understanding evidence.

They aren't much later on. A number of the texts are composed within decades of his death. It's much later in that we have copies, and they definitely had some edits along the way, but they are pretty early.

There's arguably much better evidence a historical Jesus existed than a historical Pythagoras, for example. Do you doubt Pythagoras existed?

Or even Socrates - we only have two authors claiming to have direct knowledge of events around what he said, and the earliest fragments of their writings comes from the same collections of texts as early Christian writings, and the only full copy of Plato is centuries older in production than the earliest full copies of both canonical and extra-canonical texts.

What evidence for Socrates or Pythagoras do we have beyond hearsay?

Not at all. There's a very good case that the historical Jesus was extremely outspoken about the grift of Temple Judaism.

Not only do you have tidbits like him prohibiting carrying anything (including sacrifices) through the temple after throwing out the merchants in Mark (theologically problematic given he isn't dead yet and supposedly that's what invalidated the need for animal sacrifices, so you see this line left out when Matthew copies from the passage).

But you have one of my favorite apocryphal lines:

Jesus said, "The messengers and the prophets will come to you and give you what belongs to you. You, in turn, give them what you have, and say to yourselves, 'When will they come and take what belongs to them?'"

• Gospel of Thomas saying 88

(The work also uniquely has a parable about a son inheriting a treasure in his parent's field, selling it not knowing a treasure was buried within, and then the person he sells it to finding the treasure and lending it out at interest - and I can't think of better description for the grift of selling salvation for tithes than "lending a buried treasure out at interest".)

Which is again in the vein of another part of Mark left out of the other Synoptics, when he responded to a complaint about eating from a crop on the Sabbath with "was the Sabbath made for man or man for the Sabbath?"

So out of the many things I'm not sure about a historical Jesus, at very least "dude wasn't a fan of the religious grift" was one I'm pretty sure of, particularly when both early canonical and heretical sources agree about the subversive position.

Almost no one respectable in the scholarship, including atheist scholars, thinks that's the case.

And it would be the only instance I'm aware of where someone at the nascent stages of a cult made up a leader and immediately had major schisms around what that made up leader was saying.

Literally the earliest Christian documents we have are of a guy who was persecuting followers of Jesus suddenly going into areas where he had no authority to persecute, literally "if you can't beat them, join them," and then telling people not to pay attention to a different gospel "not that there is a different gospel" or to listen to him over alleged 'super-apostles.'

The next earliest document is a gospel that's constantly trying to spin statements allegedly said in public by Jesus with secret teachings that only a handful of their own leaders supposedly heard.

Not long after that is a letter from the bishop of Rome complaining his presbyters were deposed in the same place Paul was complaining about them receiving a different gospel, and how young people should defer to the old and women should be silent (so we know the schism was supported by the young and women, who just so happen to be at the center of a competing tradition which has extensive overlap with Paul's letters to Corinth).

For all of the above to have occurred within just a few decades of a made up person would be even less believable than that said person walked on water. Personally, I don't believe either of those scenarios.

P.S. Carrier is a history PhD, not a biblical studies PhD, and a bit of a pompous moron. For example, he managed to miss one of the most interesting elements of early Christianity regarding the Gnostic references to cosmic seeds because his head was so far up his own rear that he couldn't see past a (straight up bizarre) theory they were talking about a cosmic sperm bank. Nope - it has to do with Lucretius's "seeds of things" but that's a long discussion for another comment. Point is, I'd be wary of taking anything he says too seriously.

Christianity sounds to me a lot more like socialist utopia.

A lot of atheists end up with that impression, maybe from unfamiliarity. That Jesus was just a dope socialist who loved everyone.

But the religion has been absolutely shitty for pretty much as soon as he was dead (at least).

For example, the other day I saw someone cite Acts 4 as an example of how Christianity was a commune, where people pooled their assets.

It conveniently left out the part where Peter had an older couple who didn't pay him everything they owned who were both struck dead after meeting privately and being confronted (allegedly killed by God). Which was a reference back to the book of Joshua where a guy kept some loot for himself and was outed and killed.

Women were told to be silent and subservient (in spite of 'heretical' sects and texts of Christianity where Jesus was instructing female disciples and they were acting as teachers - ironically the only extant sect that claimed Jesus was talking about Greek atomism and naturalism was one of these).

The religion was canonized right after the emperor of Rome converted, so guess what was canonized? A bunch of shit about how patriarchal monarchy is the divine plan. The saying attributed to Jesus about how someone who succeeded in life should rule and should only hold power temporarily obviously gets excluded and eventually the collection of sayings is punishable by death for even possessing it.

Even a lot of that stuff about "blessed is the poor" was probably from Paul who was separating fools from their money. Originally there's sayings about how those ministering shouldn't collect money, but this gets straight up reversed in a later edition of Luke and you can see Paul in 1 Cor 9 arguing that he is entitled to make a living off ministering and encouraging donations "for the poor in Jerusalem." But then elsewhere we see Paul was accepting expensive fragrant offerings from people. But that's ok, as then in the gospels you see Jesus keeps an expensive fragrant offering and yells at the people who criticize him for not selling it and giving the proceeds to the poor.

It's a bunch of feel good BS to con people out of their money. I don't think it was always that from the very start, and probably even had some interesting things going on initially, but almost immediately after Jesus is out of the picture the errant early tradition gets morphed into a traditional cult where power and wealth consolidates at the top and it preaches subservience and obedience and self-hatred so you beg for the idea of salvation and trade all that you have for a promise the people you turn everything over to can't fulfill.

So why would a group that wants power and wealth concentrated and to destroy democracy in favor of patriarchal authoritarianism be attractive to Christians? Because they've been being fattened up for that slaughter going on near two thousand years at this point.

The scientists pointing out the impending collapse of ecological systems and the corporate regulators seeking revolving doors to lobbying gigs are very different people with very different aims.

The scientists at the oil companies wrote alarmist research at the same time the marketing people were downplaying environmental concerns. Different people in different roles have different motivations and objectives.

It strikes people that, if it really were such a massive and immediate threat, then it would be completely irrational to ignore the massive contributions those economies are making to the problem.

It's because "these economies" are everyone's economies.

The world outsourced its slave labor and environmental disregard for regulations to two places, and you think it's sus that the world is hush hush on criticizing themselves?

Anecdotally, women develop language earlier than men as children.

The MtF trans person I know most closely was in the 90th percentile for their birth sex in early language development.

I suspect it might well show trans brain differences.