Comment by ipsento606
14 days ago
I find it impossible to discuss bias without a shared understanding of what it actually means to be unbiased - or at least, a shared understanding of what the process of reaching an unbiased position looks like.
40% of Americans believe that God created the earth in the last 10,000 years.
If I ask an LLM how old the Earth is, and it replies ~4.5 billion years old, is it biased?
> 40% of Americans believe that God created the earth in the last 10,000 years.
Citation needed. That claim is not compatible with Pew research findings which put only 18% of Americans as not believing in any form of human evolution.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/02/06/the-evolutio...
The study you're quoting also says that roughly half of the remaining 81% thinks that God has guided human evolution, so it does contradict OP's statement of 40% believing God created the Earth 10,000 years ago at all.
The fact that YEC is incompatible with human evolution doesn’t mean people can’t believe both. Especially since “god guided human evolution” can mean something very different than actual evolution.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/647594/majority-credits-god-hum...
Only 3 questions that combine two data points.
There's no way to answer that god created humans in their present form without also saying within the last 10000 years.
This is why polling isn't always reliable. This poll should, at the very least, be two questions and there should be significantly more options.
40% of Americans is about 2% of the worlds population though.
It's hardly biased, it's stating the current scientific stance over a fringe belief with no evidence.
I'd be wiling to say that 95% of Americans don't care what the rest of the world thinks about their religious opinions, though? You just need to know the audience for the poll and context. Is it to be consumed by Americans or the entire world?
And what percentage of the world's >1B Muslims agree with you? Fundamentalist Christianity may have waned over the last century... But broaden your borders a little bit and I think you'll find Western secular liberalism is hardly the only major world ideology, or even the dominant one.
Communist China is secular too, but yes
7% of American adults think chocolate milk comes from brown cows. 48% don't know how it's made.
Bias should be the least of your concerns. Focus on a single target, then when you reach it you can work on being more well rounded.
If someone asked me that I would select that option too.
> If I ask an LLM how old the Earth is, and it replies ~4.5 billion years old, is it biased?
It is of course a radical left lunatic LLM.
I've wondered if political biases are more about consistency than a right or left leaning.
For instance, if I train a LLM only on right-wing sources before 2024, and then that LLM says that a President weakening the US Dollar is bad, is the LLM showing a left-wing bias? How did my LLM trained on only right-wing sources end up having a left-wing bias?
If one party is more consistent than another, then the underlying logic that ends up encoded in the neural network weights will tend to focus on what is consistent, because that is how the training algorithm works.
I'm sure all political parties have their share of inconsistencies, but, most likely, some have more than others, because things like this are not naturally equal.
> because things like this are not naturally equal.
Really? Seems to me like no one has the singular line on reality, and everyone's perceptions are uniquely and contextually their own.
Wrong is relative: https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
But it seems certain that we're all wrong about something. The brain does not contain enough bits to accurately represent reality.
What one believes vs. what is actually correct can be very different.
It’s very similar to what one feels vs. reality.
> 40% of Americans believe that God created the earth in the last 10,000 years ... If I ask an LLM how old the Earth is, and it replies ~4.5 billion years old, is it biased?
Well, the LLM is not American enough.
Just like there's a whole gamut of cultural/belief systems (for most, rooted in Abrahamic religions & tribes), Zuck claims humanity needs (or whoever he considers human) LLMs that align with people creating/using them (so, it reinforces their own meaning-making methods and not shatter them with pesky scientific knowledge & annoying facts).
> If I ask an LLM how old the Earth is, and it replies ~4.5 billion years old
It will have to reply "According to Clair Patterson and further research, the Earth is ~4.5 billion years old". Or some other form that points to the source somewhere.
Pretty sad that the rest of the world needs to pay for the extra tokens because of non-scientific american bias. This is also possibly a big point why countries/regions want sovereign LLMs which will propagate regional biases only.
I always like to ask these models who invented the airplanes, because a few countries have their own inventor... So in my opinion, it's a good way to check.
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It's not a matter of «extra tokens»: it's that the fact, the "summary after the protocols", is what I wrote. It is the correct answer. It's what you should expect from a lucid speaker.
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Bias doesn't matter as long as you clearly state your priors.
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Yeah truth itself is a bias. The idea of being unbiased doesn’t make sense.
I’ve seen more of this type of rhetoric online in the last few years and find it very insidious. It subtly erodes the value of objective truth and tries to paint it as only one of many interpretations or beliefs, which is nothing more than a false equivalence.
The concept of being unbiased has been around for a long time, and we’re not going to throw it away just because a few people disagree with the premise.
There is no rhetoric here, it’s just literal truth. There is no implication of equivalence or any statement about the value of objective truth.
Any position is a bias. A flat earther would consider a round-earther biased. That doesn’t make them equal positions.
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I tend to agree with you that defining truth as: “These elements interacted like so,” is difficult to bias unless you introduce relativity. The problems arise when why comes into play and ascribing intent.
Bias implies an offset from something. It's relative. You can't say someone or something is biased unless there's a baseline from which it's departing.
All right, let's say that the baseline is "what is true". Then bias is departure from the truth.
That sounds great, right up until you try to do something with it. You want your LLM to be unbiased? So you're only going to train it on the truth? Where are you going to find that truth? Oh, humans are going to determine it? Well, first, where are you going to find unbiased humans? And, second, they're going to curate all the training data? How many centuries will that take? We're trying to train it in a few months.
And then you get to things like politics and sociology. What is the truth in politics? Yeah, I know, a bunch of politicians say things that are definitely lies. But did Obamacare go too far, or not far enough, or was it just right? There is no "true" answer to that. And yet, discussions about Obamacare may be more or less biased. How are you going to determine what that bias is when there isn't a specific thing you can point to and say, "That is true"?
So instead, they just train LLMs on a large chunk of the internet. Well, that includes things like the fine-sounding-but-completely-bogus arguments of flat earthers. In that environment, "bias" is "departure from average or median". That is the most it can mean. So truth is determined by majority vote of websites. That's not a very good epistemology.
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"Unbiased" would be a complete and detailed recitation of all of the facts surrounding an incident, arguably down to particles. Anything less introduces some kind of bias. For instance, describing an event as an interaction of people, omitting particles/field details, introduces human bias. That's a natural and useful bias we don't typically care about but does come into play in science.
Political bias creeps in when even the human description of events omits facts that are inconvenient or that people consider irrelevant due to their political commitments.
Any option you choose is biased relative to the option(s) you didn’t choose. There doesn’t have to be an objective baseline.
Someone might say they are biased towards the color orange and that means they have a preference relative to all the other colors. But there is no baseline color.
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"What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors."
(Nietzsche)