If a generic human glances at an unfamiliar screen/wall/room, can they accurately, pixel-perfectly reconstruct every single element of it? Can they do it for every single screen they have seen in their entire lives?
I never said pixel perfect, but I would be surprised if whole objects , like flaming lanterns suddenly appeared.
What this demo demonstrates to me is how incredible willing we are to accept what seems familiar to us as accurate.
I bet if you look closely and objectively you will see even more anomalies. But at first watch, I didn’t see most errors because I think accepting something is more efficient for the brain.
You'd likely be surprised by a flaming lantern unless you were in Flaming Lanterns 'R Us, but if you were watching a video of a card trick and the two participants changed clothes while the camera wasn't focused on them, you may well miss that and the other five changes that came with that.
That ("_every_ money-making industry...") seems like a too strong statement and can be proven false by finding even a single counter-example.
gwd's claim (AFAICT) is that _specifically_ OpenAI, _for this specific decision_ is not driven by profit, which is a much weaker claim. One evidence against it would be sama coming out and saying "we are disabling codex due to profit concerns". Another one would be credible inside information from a top-level exec/researcher responsible for this subproduct to come out and say that as well.
> Except atoms aren't atomic: they can be further subdivided
Those are two different facts:
1. Atoms exist
2. Atoms can be divided
GP was attesting to #1 being a scientific fact for which "no matter your threshold for evidence needed, it can be met". If you object to the word "atoms" on the grounds of it having a specific meaning from 2K years ago, replace that with "the modern standard model of particle physics".
>> > It means we have a statement for which we can generate additional evidence at will.
> Reading the same book over and over again only gives you evidence about what the book says
"Generate additional evidence at will" is packing a lot of stuff, but in my read it means "Generate a hypothesis", "Model a new experiment that can disprove it to the desired or available precision", "Review the experimental setup for any defects", etc etc.
"Generate additional evidence at will" when applied to the "scientific fact that atoms exist" means that any new experiment that you design and perform will be compatible to that fact. There is no evidence whatsoever that atoms (at their "level of abstraction") do not exist.
The only way I see out of that is if you're _so_ reductionist to the point where you accept that the _only_ thing that exists is whatever is at the lowest level of reality (quantum fields, quantum foam, whatever), but then I guess neither you nor I exist to be discussing this.
> "Generate additional evidence at will" when applied to the "scientific fact that atoms exist" means that any new experiment that you design and perform will be compatible to that fact. There is no evidence whatsoever that atoms (at their "level of abstraction") do not exist.
You're describing certainty. This is a prediction, not reality. A new experiment you design and perform might not be compatible with the existence of atoms; that's the whole point of running experiments! (Of course, I have the same prediction; the proton-neutron-electron theory of atoms seems like a pretty solid one, at this point.)
Certainty does have interesting properties, from a Bayesian perspective: if you are certain of something, there is no finite amount of evidence that'll convince you otherwise. (Of course, humans aren't ideal Bayesian reasoners; you can usually provide enough evidence to convince a certain person otherwise, if they are actually wrong.)
> You're describing certainty. This is a prediction, not reality.
I was being concrete about atoms, in particular, not about what gets named as a "scientific fact" in general.
Yes, in general you don't reach that threshold of being able to produce a stream of evidence that is always compatible to a theory, and you should not call that theory a fact (I also pointed that out on a different message). However for the existence of atoms, specifically, I do believe we have reached this level.
> Certainty does have interesting properties, from a Bayesian perspective: if you are certain of something
I don't literally believe with 100% certainty that atoms exist (because I may as well be a Boltzmann Brain hallucinating my entire universe). I say there will never come a time when we'll disprove the existence of atoms (at their level of abstraction).
>GP was attesting to #1 being a scientific fact for which "no matter your threshold for evidence needed, it can be met". If you object to the word "atoms" on the grounds of it having a specific meaning from 2K years ago, replace that with "the modern standard model of particle physics".
Replacing the meaning of words isn't a minor point, it's the whole thing, and scientific definitions aim to be as strict as possible. If we decided to retire the word "atom" after the discovery of subatomic particles, nothing in reality would be stop existing, except this argument.
If we decided to call the electromagnetic field "the luminiferous ether" - defensible imo - we would be in a similar position. The concepts are incommensurate in similar ways, the word choice is to a degree a historical accident.
> Generate additional evidence at will" when applied to the "scientific fact that atoms exist" means that any new experiment that you design and perform will be compatible to that fact.
There's a word for this, as I think it's fair to say any evidence of atoms still takes some inference and isn't a direct observation. The word is theory [1]. That is why we refer to the idea that matter is made of atoms as 'atomic theory',
Gould: "facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts."
This is an excellent comment! And this is a *very* strong threshold to reach:
> No matter what your threshold for evidence needed is, it can be met.
I'm fearful of mentioning any specific current scientific controversy, but it seems to me that many of the current politically charged topics fail to meet this very strong threshold.
I guess I'm thanking you because while I had an intuitive sense for this, I didn't know this specific wording of "you can meet any threshold for evidence".
I think the relevant wording here is "problem of induction". You can generate evidence at will and meetn any threshold of evidence for the statement "all swans are white". Anyone can perform the experiment by traveling around the northern hemisphere and find millions of white swans.
It would still be silly to call that statement a fact, because it only requires a single swan sighting in Australia to falsify it.
You cannot "generate evidence at will to meet any threshold of evidence" for this specific example ("all swans are white") because, unless you posit that there are swans in Kepler-422B, I can set my threshold of evidence to "we have turned the earth into computronium and have not found any non-white swans", which is a finite (albeit large) threshold.
Once we agree on whatever definition of "swan" we care about (an animal belonging to a specific phylogenetic branch, with such and such qualities) we can agree on a more reasonable threshold, one that should include a visit to Australia to be crossed.
