Comment by roywiggins
1 day ago
One thing I noticed from chat #1 is that you've got a sort of "God of the gaps" ("woo of the gaps"?) thing going on- you've bundled together a bunch of stuff that is currently beyond understanding and decided that they must all be related and explainable by the same thing.
Needless to say this is super common when people go down quasi-scientific/spiritual/woo rabbit holes- all this stuff that scientists don't understand must be related! It must all have some underlying logic! But there's not much reason to actually think that, a priori.
One thing that the news stories about people going off the deep end with LLMs is that that basically never share the full transcripts, which is of course their right, but I wonder if it would nevertheless be a useful thing for people to be able to study. On the other hand, they're kind of a roadmap to turning certain people insane, so maybe it's best that they're not widely distributed.
I don't usually believe in "cognitohazards" but if they exist, it seems like we have maybe invented them with these chatbots...
I don't think it's bad or a big deal for people to look for wide connections in things, or at least to explore different ideas in life and trying to understand them deeper - Can it lead to problematic behaviour, sure, and I think for me at least that was introduced when the LLM started to try to convince ME my ideas were good, even though I was effectively just day dreaming with it. For me personally, I don't feel I need to look any more foolish than I feel, even now knowing how openai had the LLM temperature set, I'm surprised I didn't force myself to be more skeptical, I'm educated I have critical thinking skills (ish)- I should have turned it off sooner rather than driving deeper with it and I guess honestly, I just have too much ego or pride or whatever to show the foolishness: not a great answer.
One reason I don't engage with LLMs that much is the thought that some engineer at OpenAI might read some of my dumbest thoughts!
Hah. If those transcripts become public then future LLM’s get trained on them! Who knows what influence that will have.