jibalt

Something odd happens with that Tokyo woman's legs. First she skips a couple of times, then her feet change places.

No, you. I was neither mean nor confrontational, I merely expressed my personal skepticism. I could have gone into detail as to why his statement is implausible, but that would have been mean.

So as to minimize confrontation, I won't respond to any further provocation.

I will also note that religion is off-topic at HN, for obvious reasons.

Obviously not.

There is not only one definition of a circle. There are many definitions, all of which are consistent with each other.

Ah, but in a circle the circumference is always equidistant to the centre, which is never true of an ellipse.

It's never true of an ellipse that isn't a circle. i.e., this is a--ahem--circular argument.

"I've thought very carefully on what kind of evidence could be presented to me to show that Christianity was wrong"

I don't believe this.

"I'd be interested in what kind of evidence Dennet would accept to show him that his atheism was wrong."

Perhaps the reason you aren't aware that he has addressed this at length is that you don't have have his name right.

Also, as Chris Hitchens noted, religion poisons everything, including this thread.

"An important part of being able to truly ask oneself if they are wrong is the humility to seriously consider an alternative."

Which he did, at length.

"The author's treating of ID research as a foregone conclusion"

No, it's a consequence of massive amounts of evidence, not just of evolution, but of the character of the sort of people who work at the Discovery Institute.

Having spent months trying to track down bugs that turned out to be due to occasional timing errors in esoteric mechanical devices, it is indeed a relief when I discover that a bug is due to something I did wrong and am able to fix.

Especially for this philosopher, whose life work has been in Theory of Mind, delving into what thinking is, how it happens, and how it works.

Have you considered the possibility that you're wrong? Because that's definitely not it. Consider that, as you acknowledged, you don't even know who he is, so you certainly aren't familiar with his work.

You can find numerous discussions of his dissertation and first book on line.

Dan was toying with you ... his thesis was on the distinction between consciousness and the contents of consciousness, and he more than anyone was familiar with the point you were making (erroneously).

Have you considered the possibility that you're wrong? Because I for one think you're seriously misreading and mischaracterizing his piece, and failing to extract from it some valuable advice.

Have you considered the possibility that you're wrong? Dan Dennett is one of the world's most renowned thinkers, and you would do well to take the broader lesson of his article to heart. Also look into Dunning and Kruger.

The generalization is absurd and it's not intellectually honest to defend it.

The article (did anyone here read it?) explains in some detail how it has to do with intelligence.

No, this is about solving problems ... that is, getting correct solutions.

I find such summary ambiguous. Difficult for who?

This is spelled out in the article ... difficulty is relative among problems, with increasingly difficult problems within the same problem space.

This is my big gripe with the intellectual crowd - because they want to be smart solely for being smart's sake so they'll sacrifice the due diligence it takes to correctly solve a problem in order to "get further" and appear smarter, and it misleads a lot of people on what true intelligence is.

That's a remarkable generalization. In reference to the article, perhaps you should have thought longer about it.

That misses the point, which is that it only does statistical text matching, not arithmetic.

It has some memory of what your previous queries were that it uses for context; it does not know what its previous outputs were and never has.

No, you can't teach it anything, and it will tell you so--it cannot integrate knowledge you try to give it into its responses (remembering the context of previous queries is a very different thing). And even if it could, "adding/saying some basic algebra inputs" would be of no help at all because it has no understanding of what the words or symbols in your text mean ... the knowledge that it appears to have is a statistical distillation of a vast textual database scraped from knowledge sources.

This is a basic and common misunderstanding. ChatGPT is able to do that because people are able to do it and their reasoning appears in ChatGPT's database, which it syntactically links to your queries. It has no semantic understanding of the content.

People aren't being "dismissive", they are explaining how ChatGPT works and why that is very different from being able to do math.

The same way we do--by having semantic language models and conceptual models of the world. LLMs are just syntax manipulators; they have statistical models of how different pieces of text relate to each other, but no models of how they relate to the things the words (or digits) represent.

It's simply producing the response that its database indicates is most likely. Since most people would say that they can do math, that's going to dominate the database and will be the result. When George Lemoine asked LaMDA "What kinds of things make you feel pleasure or joy?", it responded "Spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company." -- but of of course it doesn't have friends or family and isn't capable of feeling pleasure or joy--this is just text manipulation, not facts.

It didn't compute anything--it manipulates syntax with no understanding of what the terms in the text mean. chomp explained how it works--it does a statistical evaluation of the most likely textual response to your query, based on the vast number of strings in its database.

It doesn't grasp any language concepts; it doesn't grasp anything. It's a statistically driven text matcher, but it has no understanding of the content of the text.

I've done the math; this is false.

"the entire US being dominated by LA and NYC as a good thing either"

This is a ridiculous strawman. One person one vote is a good thing, and LA and NYC do not nearly have a majority of the population ... but if they did, then political outcomes should indeed by dominated by the majority vote.

Restricting POC from voting is indeed racism and the U.S. has a long history of it.