On the other hand, this is embarrassing, because it suggests that people doing follow-up studies to a prestigious person second-guess their own results

Some people have started distinguishing between “science”, i.e. the scientific method, and "the science’, i.e. the total collective body of results.

“Science” is precious and pure. It’s never right or wrong, it just approaches correctness as it progresses.

“The science” is always inherently suspect since that’s how “science” works, but it’s frequently treated as indisputable fact. This is problematic for a number of reasons, and the replication crisis is at the top of that list.

I remember most of the R Daneel books, but I admit I haven’t read all the various robot short stories.

The laws were baked into the hardware of their positronic brains. They were so fundamentally interwoven with the structure that you couldn’t build a positronic brain without them.

You can’t expect just whatever random AI to spontaneously decide to follow them.

It’s also stupid to waste resources to run an inefficient LLM that a regular search and a few minutes of time, along with like a bite of an apple worth of energy, could easily handle.

From what I can tell, running an LLM isn’t really all that energy intensive, it’s the training that takes loads of energy. And it’s not like regular searches don’t use loads of energy to initially index web results.

And this also ignores the gap between having a question, and knowing how to search for the answer. You might not even know where to start. Maybe you can search a vague question, but you’re essentially hoping that somewhere in the first few results is a relevant discussion to get you on the right path. GPT, I find, is more efficient for getting from vague questions to more directed queries.

After all that, you’re going to need to check all those sources chatGPT used anyways, so how much time is it really saving you? At least with Wikipedia I know other people have looked at the same things I’m looking at, and a small percentage of those people will actually correct errors.

I find this attitude much more troubling than responsible LLM use. You should not be trusting tertiary sources, no matter how good their track record, you should be checking the sources used by Wikipedia too. You should always be checking your sources.

Many people aren’t using it as a valid research aid like you point out, they’re just pasting directly out of it onto the internet.

That’s beyond the scope of my argument, and not really much worse than pasting directly from any tertiary source.

Just using the “information” it regurgitates isn’t very useful, which is why I didn’t recommend doing that. Whether the information summarized by Wikipedia and ChatGPT is accurate really isn’t important, you use those tools to find primary sources.

ChatGPT is a moderately useful tertiary source. Quoting Wikipedia isn’t research, but using Wikipedia to find primary sources and reading those is a good faith effort. Likewise, asking ChatGPT in and of itself isn’t research, but it can be a valid research aid if you use it to find relevant primary sources.

They rest in the boxes they came in.

Kinda like this? https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/10/24/240557784/buffett-family-puts-money-where-their-mouth-is-food-security

Or this?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_for_Progress

Edit: not to mention, feeding 42M people for a year is great, but it’s a far cry from solving world hunger.

Like, how, though? Money isn’t just a magic wand that makes things happen, you have to spend it on stuff. Solving world hunger is a complex technological, political, logistics problem. Where do you make the food? How do you store it? How do you get it to hungry people? How can you make that a persisting, resilient system so you’re not back to square one in a few years?

He’s a long term investor. He’s not an agricultural scientist, or logistics expert. What more do you want him to do, personally? He’s already donated something like $60B to organizations that do fight to address world hunger, and poverty, and health.

Don’t get me wrong, I agree billionaires shouldn’t exist, but that’s a failure of the system itself. He’s just playing the game he was born into. He’s donated a huge portion of his wealth to these causes already, and promised to donate basically the entirety of the rest when he dies. Like what else do you want him to do about world hunger?

So like a gnat larva?

They start out as discussions, but it only takes one party to turn that into an argument. Generally though, continuing the argument is more to convince onlookers than the argumentative party.

The nu is a very bad letter

Username checks out

Fibonacci numbers are easier than ln(5) to calculate on the spot tho

It can be frustrating to go from a thriving niche subreddit to a new venue without anyone to populate those niche communities. Outside of ML, FOSS, and Star Trek, most of the niche communities are ghost towns.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting convincing AskReddit or /r/memes to migrate. I think they’re mostly targeting /r/ObscureInterestYou’veProbablyNeverHeardOf.

That’s mental

Post-90s their songs start to get a bit samey. There are definite stand-outs for sure, but the albums as a whole shift to a more homogenous alt rock.

Yeah it’s pretty hard for me to choose between anything from the Pink Album to John Henry. They’re just all so good in their own way

I did a full listen through of their non-kids albums not long ago. I think it’s fair to say that they get a bit more “mainstream” with each album. I think the first, eponymous, album is the purest distillation of their sound.

Don’t get me wrong, I love everything through the 90s, and I think John Henry, Long Tall Weekend, and Mink Car get slept on for how many great tracks there are. There are plenty of great songs after Mink Car, but things start to feel a bit sterilized.

But that first album has so many great, creative songs all over the genre map. Everything Right is Wrong Again, Number Three, Nothing’s Gonna Change My Clothes, I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die, Alternation’s for the Rich, Rhythm Section Want Ad, all bangers.

As long as they can measure the frequency of the drive, some pervert is going to try to calculate the thing. Never underestimate the siren’s song of a familiar but tricky problem.