Comment by jychang
3 days ago
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.
That's fake epistemic humility, akin to a religious nutcase proclaiming "evolution is just a theory". In fact, he's using the exact same arguments.
I'm not impressed. I've seen this before, from "biology is actually fake" or "the covid vaccine is fake, the FDA is using an 'emergency authorization' which means it's made up", or plenty of other examples. That's not a substantive objection, that's a thought-terminating cliche which is designed to dismiss any merits in the moment.
Imagine if someone in 1945 said "nuclear bombs cannot be real, even if the USA just dropped a nuke on Hiroshima, because it's just theory and it hasn't been peer reviewed yet. The Manhattan project is burning a lot of money". That would be hilarious. And yet if someone identifies an actual neuron or feature in a ML model that activates upon recognition of a software bug- WHICH IS LITERALLY WHAT YOU WOULD EXPECT IF A MODEL HAS AN INTERNAL REPRESENTATION OF SUCH A THING- it gets dismissed. If such an obvious signal is dismissed, what is even the end goal?