Re:Every model learned by gradient descent is approximately ...
by dartos on Sunday February 25, 2024 @09:43AM
(#39501172)
You can imagine human behavior is like a stochastic parrot (the name of your argument,) but that’s, again, a gross oversimplification of the human experience.
I don’t really feel like having the stochastic parrot debate again, but look it up.
We’re more than parrots.
Re:Every model learned by gradient descent is approximately ...
by vidarh on Sunday February 25, 2024 @11:09AM
(#39501920)
The notion of a stochastic parrot is just a subset of this. It is what I'm arguing against, not for, on the basis that talking about "just" a statistical model is meaningless exactly because something being a statistical model does not imply it is just a stochastical parrot. As such it's a wildly misleading claim to make.
Yes, we're more than parrots, but that does not mean we can be described equally validly as "statistical models". Suggesting something is "just" a statistical model is a statement that is close to semantically void. It tells us near nothing about the computational limits - up or down - of something. Even a very simple system for running a statistical model with a loop around it providing IO can be made Turing complete.
> nothing about statistical models are like people.
As if we're not behaving like statistical models. Our decision-making is so fuzzy and probabilistic that trying to get us to stick to fixed sets of rules consistently is one of the things humanity spends the most time inventing systems to try to handle, and keep failing at. We don't even know a consistent way of achieving it for extremely basic things. We can't keep ourselves to rules we set ourselves with any consistency.