13:27
@ʁəfələmələ Maybe over Christmas break I'll finally write another article on AI, which overlaps with some of your thoughts here... After rereading Gorgias and remembering Socrates' distinction between "art/craft" (techne) and "habitude/knack" (empeiria), I've been thinking more and more about how this is the key to my problems with LLMs.
Claude Bernard: "A great surgeon performs operations for stone by a single method; later he makes a statistical summary of deaths and recoveries, and he concludes from these statistics that the mortality law for this operation is two out of five. Well, I say that this ratio means literally nothing scientifically and gives us no certainty in performing the next operation;
for we do not know whether the next case will be among the recoveries or the deaths. What really should be done, instead of gathering facts empirically, is to study them more accurately, each in its special determinism….to discover in them the cause of mortal accidents so as to master the cause and avoid the accidents."
That ties into the point about it not reliably producing the same thing twice. And it can never be proven to anyone's satisfaction that it will so long as it's only probability. Even when we believe the probabilities of error are very small, (1) they are never the same thing as an algorithm, and (2) we are often wrong because we don't and can't intuitively or algorithmically understand the relationship between the input and the output. A billion parameters is not a selling point for a scientist.
(Also, it has practical applications, like crummy guardrails. Just recently my colleague was asking about allowing AI image generation on students' Macbooks with the latest OS update, and turning off unsafe content. I told him how my brother tried to generate an image including the word "stupid" and it refused to because it was NSFW — it accepted the prompt with the removal of that word. Later he noticed that when he tried "tooth fairy smoking", one of the first images was topless.)
Wikipedia comment on the Bernard work the above quote comes from: "Although the application of mathematics to every aspect of science is its ultimate goal, biology is still too complex and poorly understood. Therefore, for now the goal of medical science should be to discover all the new facts possible. Qualitative analysis must always precede quantitative analysis."
To which I would add that it must also always dominate over quantitative analysis. Actually, quantitative analysis rarely if ever tells us anything completely new; it only discovers relationships open to (unreliable, intuitive) interpretation.
Gorgias: "There is no subject on which the rhetorician could not speak more persuasively to the crowd than a member of that profession." Socrates: "So then he who does not know will be more convincing to those who do not know than he who knows."
Socrates: "I take rhetoric to be a certain habitude of producing a kind of gratification … to sum it up: flattery. … The arts of medicine and gymnastic, justice and legislation ... are noticed by the art of flattery, which, insinuating itself into each of those four branches, pretends to be that into which it has crept. It cares nothing for what is the best, but dangles what is most pleasant for the moment as a bait for folly."
LLMs are exactly that: they don't understand the nature of what they see, they only notice and imitate. And it's a hollow, surface-level imitation. More and more perfect as an imitation, but still just a cardboard cutout, not the real thing...
... and a Pied Piper for those who follow it to the demise of qualitative analysis.
