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[–] 95 points 2 months ago (18 children)

Intuition or just highly tuned pattern recognition?

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  • [–] 22 points 2 months ago (14 children)
  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    Intuition is subconscious, pattern recognition is conscious.

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  • [+] -7 points 2 months ago* (9 children)

    Intuition is a word for thoughts that we don't experience consciously until they're fully formed. Large language models only have access to intuition, which is why they're so racist. They always say the first thing that pops into their head, and they can't explain why they thought of it except by guessing.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    Incorrect.

    LLMs do not have "thoughts" or "intuition" by any definition.

    They organise tokens into groups based on statistical probability, and convert those tokens into words and sentences.

    They can explain why they resolved a given answer, but he answer is always unsatisfying: this accumulation of tokens seemed to be the most likely response based on my probability matrix.

    The problem you're trying to convey is that humans can not summarise or read or understand a probability matrix with many billions of parameters.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    They organise tokens into groups based on statistical probability, and convert those tokens into words and sentences.

    Yeah, that's the way your brain works when you're not paying attention. That's why your dreams are like that. It's just a bunch of vaguely probable stuff based on your daily experiences.

    humans can not summarise or read or understand a probability matrix with many billions of parameters.

    Uhhhhh, yeah they can. The human brain has 86 billion neurons. If you put all 86 billion of those neurons and their connections into a matrix, you get a mathematical representation of the human brain's information processing. You're running the calculations on all 86 billion neuron matrix every second, manually, one neuron at a time.

    Like, I'm guessing you're not really a math person, so let Me explain in simple terms: multiplication is just a shorter way to do addition, right? 6 * 5 is just 6+6+6+6+6, collapsed down. So if you have a 10 year old kid who can count out all the numbers one by one, and a computer that knows some computational tricks to figure out 6 * 5, that's the same, right?

    So your neurons in your brain are biological computers, and that makes them really energy efficient. Electronic computers kinda suck at that efficient stuff. So where your neurons can manually calculate 86 billion parameters many times a second, a computer has to use shortcuts. And vector cross-multiplication is just a more efficient way for a computer to calculate neuron firings. The abstract mathematical operations are the same in principle.

    Now there are a lot of differences between your brain and an LLM, and I'll be happy to explain them. But matrix multiplication is not one of them. That's stinky nonsense.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    Humans can not read or understand the probability matrix in which an LLM stores its parameters.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    Neither can an LLM. Try asking ChatGPT to run a matrix cross-multiplication, it sucks as badly as if you tried to do it without any paper.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    An LLM can't read the matrix in which it stores its own parameters?

    That's like saying a human can't read the neurons in their own brain. Sure, looking at them through a microscope, we can not.

    You don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    That’s like saying a human can’t read the neurons in their own brain

    Yeah, that's what you just said. Matrix multiplication is an abstract representation of neuron weights, remember? And then you said a human can't read the matrix. Like it was at all relevant. Obviously neither humans nor LLMs can understand the individual neurons that make up their thoughts, nor the matrices that describe those neurons. Obviously.

    Are you ready to stop regurgitating canned arguments yet?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    LOL.

    We're discussing whether LLMs can think and have intuition.

    My point is, just because we can't read the probability matrix with which they formulate their answers, does not mean they have intuition.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    There is no "probability matrix". There's an input matrix (which you provide it), various neuron weight matrices, and an output matrix (which contains the thing it says in response to your input).

    It doesn't look up a table of things to say like a d100 table in an RPG. You've fundamentally misunderstood the technology.

    It's not a magic 8 ball.

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  • [–] 51 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    I am cursed with people asking my advice, my advice being correct, them failing to heed my advice to their detriment. Time after time. People value my judgment, because it is pretty good, then proceed to do the opposite of it.

    That probably sounds self absorbed, but it's not like I'm an oracle or anything. It's just usually fairly obvious stuff, but people are often irrational and do wacky things.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago

    I feel your frustration. I felt the same way about parenting. The number of "you'll understand when you're a parent" responses I got was depressing. Guess what, now I have a child to apply it on, my advice works awesomely 90% of the time.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    Oh boy, are you me? I've spent most of my life feeling like Cassandra. I'm not even particularly smart, but it's like a lot of people just can't see the incredibly obvious and inevitable outcomes of their actions?

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    I had a coworker like this. Always asking me for advice, then going out and doing the opposite. At every turn, she asked me what she should do, and at every turn, she did something else.

    She ended up cheating on her husband by going after an ex who had just got out of prison. It was at that point where I (metaphorically) threw my hands in the air and was done. I'm not going to keep wasting my energy trying to help someone who insists on ignoring me and making stupid decisions all the time. She clearly had her mind already made up, there's no need to drag me into it.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    People like that aren't asking for advice, they have already decided and want validation/permission for the choice they already made.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago

    A life time of obsessive pattern recognition done to try to fit in will do that.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Does this count for adhd as well? I feel like I've definitely felt like this before. Predict what's going to happen, tell them not to do it. They do it anyway, shit falls apart. Rinse and repeat.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago*

    Mine's great, but it takes so long that by the time it proves correct, everyone has the AHA face and says "boy i wish someone had told me this 15 yrs ago before it was too late". 310

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  • [–] 22 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    Fled America when Biden was still president. Urged all my friends to do the same. If told-ya-so's were money I'd have fixed income in perpetuity.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Unfortunately, moving is expensive and citizenship elsewhere is expensive and complicated.

    I'll get the fuck out eventually. Hopefully.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago

    A lot of people don't have good options, I hate how much governments treat people like property and immigrants like invaders. I'm a dual citizen but getting family visas for everyone else has been financially ruinous. Hope they can get citizenship soon.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    When trump won in 2016 I told all my trans friends to buy guns and bought them books about starting mutual aid/defense networks, explaining to them the democratic party soon would abandon them.

    They were all still pretty liberal and were still very antigun. A lot of them thought I was losing it at the time. Since then I've taken most of them to the gun range to teach them how to shoot.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    You're a good friend. Hope the mutual aid is going well, it's a less exciting day than the gun range maybe - but that's going to be a big deal sooner or later.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (3 children)

    Yeah, unfortunately we live in one of the most conservative states in the US, so if something were to happen to them calling the police wouldn't exactly be a great option. If all the bigots are strapped up there really isn't any other option than to arm yourself to protect your community.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    You don't have to defend it to me. Back in the states I practiced with my own piece and even did my own handloads sometimes.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 months ago

    Go to a rural town in Utah. Listen to a medium/long conversation between two local people at a gas station or diner etc. Drive to another rural town. Start a conversation the exact same way you just saw and play the role of whoever started the conversation.

    There is a non-zero chance the entire new conversation will replicate the original one verbatim even down to the pauses, cadence, and inflections of the original conversation, despite it occurring with an entirely different person several dozen miles away.

    Intuition is easy when people around you think exactly the same way about everything

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    Validation biais?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    Listening to your intuition works in certain situations.

    Always listen to your intuition when it comes to the behavior of others (and animals). Ie: If you think they’re lying or trying to pull something over you - for are. If something doesn’t seem right with someone, there is something wrong. Make an excuse and leave.

    Intuition also works if you’re an expert at something (like an actual expert, not something you learned from TikTok.)

    Intuition doesn’t work on logic and if you’re not an expert. Dunning kruger effect is real.

    Intuition also doesn’t work on your emotions. Just because you feel something (or think something), doesn’t mean that it’s true.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    I pay attention to a lot of off the wall information sources but unfortunately people tend to ignore me. (For example I heard about this mystery illness in China in December 2019 - but you know I was just being an alarmist.) I regularly mention topics and will be blown off by my friends but frustratingly a year or two later Jon Oliver will do a special on that very subject and the same people will suddenly care about it and excitedly explain it to me. Because now they know all about it and are interested. And don't mistake me. I'm glad Jon Oliver is making some of these topics mainstream but it's endlessly infuriating that it takes an HBO funded comedian to allow the people around me to open their minds enough to talk about the topics I care about. Even if they never acknowledge these things have been my special interests for-fucking-ever.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    Pretty good. I always expect it to be wrong, but still allow myself to be a bit cautious. But pretty much always in the right, sometimes might take longer to see the results.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    My selection bias is unparalleled

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    My intuition is fantastic, I trust my gut on everything because it's never let me down. I think it's amazing how countless generations before me were able to hone this instinct to become what it is today. Those that ignored these feelings ended up paying for it with their lives, while those who listened managed to pass on their genes, eventually passing the trait to those of us here today.

    Which is why when I get a bad feeling about something, I sometimes imagine a crowd of my foremothers/forefathers standing there going, "GO! GET OUT! NOW!" as if they can see the danger that I can't.

    As to neurodivergence, I've spent a lot of time learning to know myself. I wouldn't be surprised if being different from most folks causes a lot of us to self-reflect. For me, that self-reflection includes evaluating what I feel and why I might be feeling it. Having different mental filters for stimuli, I know for a fact that I consciously recognize things that most people don't - usually little visual details, or background sounds. Surely, there's far more that my subconscious brain is picking up on that I am not consciously aware of. So when I overwhelmingly get the sensation that something is wrong, I react - usually either by investigating what is causing it (if I'm stuck somewhere, like at work), or by leaving the situation (if I'm in a public place that I can freely leave.)

    (Slight tangent) Sometimes I think of us as "the canaries in the coalmine" so to speak. With our different sensory experiences, we might be the first people to notice distressing stimuli, but that doesn't mean we're the only ones affected. For example, how background traffic noise increases stress levels - everyone can feel the effect, sometimes without knowing why. But usually it's us neurodivergent folk that are the first to say, "My god, it's way too loud here!" And we're right. If it's too loud for us, it's probably too loud for others too - they just don't consciously realize it yet.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago*

    For the naysayers, intuition has actually been proven to exist, the more scientific term is implicit learning and tacit knowledge. In summary we actually are much more aware of our environment and lived experience when we realize. Through this unconscious awareness we can actually pick up on patterns and use this passive knowledge in our lives as intuition.

    Sources:

    https://cognitivepsychology.com/Implicit_Learning

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

    Learning about the staring experiment is rather interesting too!

    As a caveat, you need to allow good information in, get offline, talk to people in real life, move your body. If you're implicitly learning garbage, your intuition will be garbage.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Can best be described as cassandraic

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    Self fulfilling prophecy doesn’t count

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Really hoping I’m wrong about Gen X retirement en masse single handily collapsing the stock exchange causing the worst financial crisis to date.

    I haven’t peeped any numbers lately but the aging work force and passive investments into etf portfolios with nowhere near the cash reserves to cover the draw down once the generation of 6-10 children become dependent on the 1-3 children generation lol

    Basically a race between the ai bubble and the silver tsunami at this point pain all around

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Pretty sure if it's true that the 1% own 80% of the stock market, that's a far bigger problem. Gen X is just a drop in the bucket by comparison.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    More like the publicly traded mega corps depend on people / the market wanting to buy their stock to inflate the value of their shares with speculative claims about their products cough artificial intelligence so they can leverage their ownership of that asset.

    Yeah the means of production being owned by the billionaires is a problem but it isn’t what’s going to gut people’s retirement funds lol

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (1 child)

    I've had similar suspicions. The golden rule that once something becomes popular, it turns to shit. For the prior generations it was exhausting social systems. For the current generations it's stock market based funds.

    I'm thinking probably if you weren't heavily invested into this before about 2015-2020 era, then you're probably going to be late to benefit from it before whatever disasters await. More definitely the whole memestock era was a high water mark.

    Also as the first reply said, it's not rigidly defined generations. Gen-X is a relatively small generation. The first half of millennials are probably just as big if not more invested into stocks. Public discourse has pinned millennials as close to gen-z and memory holed that the bulk of millennials are 40 give or take a few years. The difference between the two halves is by a wide margin.

    Gen-X is only a few years away from drawing from their investments and becoming net spenders. Many of them would already be doing so. The ones who retired early.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Ha told you so. The lesson you should learn is everyone else is wrong and I'm right

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    It's pretty good, but I still only believe things with evidence because if you're wrong once, it will butterfly effect all over your life.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Mostly because the typicals in your life think you don't deserve any benefits from your mind, only downsides, and wait for the moment you stumble to dogpile you and discount anything you said before and ever say again.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Pretty damn good. Sometimes scary.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    My parents were pro-trump, and pro to other 2 Italian polticians, i always told them that their gover is goin to be shit...a few years later and I was right in all 3 cases

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