Comment by Retric
7 days ago
The average person can’t play 99% of all musical instruments, speak 99% of all languages, do 99% of surgeries, recite 99% of all poems from memory etc.
We don’t ask the average person to do most things, either finding a specialist or providing training beforehand.
One cannot be bad at the things one doesn't even do. None of this demonstrates that humans are bad at "literally almost everything."
You and the parent poster seem to be conflating the ideas of:
- Does not have the requisite skills and experiences to do X successfully
- Inherently does not have the capacity to do X
I think the former is a reasonable standard to apply in this context. I'd definitely say I would be bad if I tried to play the guitar, but I'm not inherently incapable of doing it. It's just not very useful to say "I could be good at it if I put 1000 hours of practice in."
That's why there's the qualifier of "average person". If one learns to play the guitar well, they are no longer the average person in the context of guitar playing.
> One cannot be bad at the things one doesn't even do.
??? If you don’t know how to do something you’re really bad at it. I’m not sure what that sentence is even trying to convey.
> Obviously you could train someone to recite the The Raven from memory, but they can’t do it now.
That doesn't make them bad at reciting The Raven from memory. Being trained to recite The Raven from memory and still being unable to do so would be a proper application of the term. There is an obvious difference between the two states of being and conflating them is specious.
If you want to take seriously the premise that humans are bad at almost everything because most humans haven't been trained at doing almost everything humans can do, then you must apply the same rubric to LLMs, which are only capable of expressions within their specific dataset (and thus not the entire corpus of data on which they haven't been trained) and even then which tend to confabulate far more frequently than human beings at even simple tasks.
edit: never mind, I guess you aren't willing to take this conversation on good faith.
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It's obvious that 'bad at' in this context means 'incapable of doing well'.
Nitpicking language doesn't help to move the conversation. One thing most humans are good at is understanding meaning even when the speaker wasn't absolutely precise.