Today it's Boeing, tomorrow it could be your local firefighters, grocery store employees, baristas, or even the technicians for the company you work for either locked out or striking, so I think it's important for all working professionals to understand the lengths that corporations go to break the back of unions and to blame all of their problems on them.
> LLMs aren't racist: sometimes they might emit predictive text, which can be interpreted as racist.
I think this take is overly simplistic. LLMs can only learn from the data that we give them - if we feed in Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion then its output is going to be racist and anti-semetic. This is to say that the biases of the data we feed in to the system have some effect - large or small - on the output. LLMs only show us a reflection of ourselves, and if we're not careful with the training data we are more likely to propagate racist output as a result of what biases affect the input.
Whether or not the LLM went through what we consider the human process of thinking to generate racist outputs or if it's only predictive as a result of the input is sort of moot when the reader doesn't know if a person or LLM produced the output, and the impact on marginalized communities of propagating racist attitudes of stereotypes will be the same regardless of what the LLM "intended" or was designed to do.
> LLMs can only learn from the data that we give them - if we feed in Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion then its output is going to be racist and anti-semetic.
> > LLMs can only learn from the data that we give them - if we feed in Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion then its output is going to be racist and anti-semetic.
> The exact same thing is true of humans as well.
Humans are continuously learning from things not intentionally provided to them by other humans; that's pretty much an inevitable consequence of the manner in which human minds are embodied.
When I said "the same thing is true of humans", I was referring specifically to "if we feed in Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion then its output is going to be racist and anti-semetic." If you take a human and indoctrinate them on MK and PEZ to the exclusion of all else, their I/O behavior will almost certainly end up presenting as racist and anti-semetic.
That's just absolutely untrue, humans are entirely capable of reading critically without internalizing. There are tons of liberal-minded Lovecraft fans, even though nearly all of his work is grounded in varying degrees of xenophobia.
Only because they have also been exposed to contrary points of view. If you actively indoctrinate a human into a point of view, they are very likely to maintain that point of view no matter how odious it is. If you train an LLM on odious input it will produce odious output, just like humans. I really see no substantive difference.
I can see that - replication being the backbone of science.
However, there are areas of inquiry that most would consider science that also suffer from similar failure rates of replication - for example, biomedical research[1]. Would you consider the people working in, say, oncology research[2], not doing science because there are issues replicating their work?
(This is not a gotcha - just trying to understand your thought process and boundaries because perhaps you've seen things I haven't or understand things that I don't)
(I'm not the person you're responding to, just an internet butthead)
Agreed that there is a broader replication crisis across many fields, so using replication as a necessary condition for being scientific has troubling existential ramifications even for disciplines most people would consider hard science.
There's the hard definition of science as being anything that rigorously applies the scientific method, and the one that includes the scientific method plus other behaviors, like professional standards and ethics. But even that is problematic in a lot of fields these days.
Generally, I don't think of social science as being science in the same way as, for example, physics, because it's often trying to answer questions that I don't believe can be reduced to a predictive theory. Anything involving declarations about how people behave—especially individuals, but even in aggregate—doesn't feel like a productive use of science.
That's one thing, and not by itself a problem, because hey, you never know, maybe someday they'll crack the problem. But the fact that social science often dresses itself in the costume of science in order to project authority is the real reason that I, personally, tend rush to point out that it's not 'real' science.
Having said that, would you believe I have a postgraduate degree in a social science discipline? It's true! Maybe that's why I can't stand it putting on airs.
> smart devs who like to iterate fast and build awesome software will leave rapidly when bogged down with paperwork and compulsory training courses
Sure, when the market was hot this was most likely the case, but not everyone lives in the Bay Area and the choice of jobs that _aren't_ like this is much more slim.
One of the things that helped me was to have an actual dialog with the book.
For non-fiction books, this means pushing back against claims that appear to be unsupported. When I read in a paper book I do so with a pen to make notes in it (I don't sell my books, and I obviously don't do this with library books), but ebooks just get marked up in my ebook reader and it's very nice. It's also good when reviewing a book because I can see all of my thoughts and questions and often can answer them by the end of the chapter/section/unit.
For fiction books, this ends up being a "what would I do there/what would an ordinary person do?" It's very helpful to try and place yourself in the character's shoes and see how you may have reacted differently or if you agree with the character understanding _why_ you agree with them.
I had AP classes in high school and a 20 hour a week part time job - easily 10 hours a day on the week days including homework and ongoing projects. So at 17 I was working 70 hours a week. College was more of the same - honors classes and projects.
I graduated college and was like "I only have to work 40 hours a week? What's the catch?"
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