Comment by dns_snek
1 day ago
> do you know what "Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher" means? Because that would be a fairly bold statement if you were aware of that.
The mere existence of a research field is not proof of anything except "some people are interested in this". Its certainly doesn't imply that anyone truly understands how LLMs process information, "think", or "reason".
As with all research, people have questions, ideas, theories and some of them will be right but most of them are bound to be wrong.
That's a lame typical anti-intellectual argument. You might as well as say all of physics is worthless because nobody truly understands gravity.
Notice I didn't use vague terms like "think" or "reason" and instead used specific terms like "feature/circuit internal representation". You're trying to make a false equivalence of "the hard problem of gravity/reasoning/etc is not solved ... so therefore nobody understands anything" and that's obviously a false leap of logic if you've talked to any physicist or ML researcher or whatever.
That type of response is more typical GED holder who wants to feel intellectually superior so they pull out a "well you don't know anything either" to a scientist.
Dude, seriously, the parent is typical of a mature phd student and up. It's spot on. Enthusiasm is great, but not without humility.