
Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences - andreyk
https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/humans-not-concentrating
======
lostmsu
Dupe
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251755)

Also a copy-paste of [https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans-
who-are...](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans-who-are-not-
concentrating-are-not-general-intelligences/)

~~~
andreyk
For some context, as noted at top of article we re-posted it with permission
since the release of the larger GPT2 model led to a new slate of fearful
articles on the topic and this has remained one of the best takes on it. Was
not aware it was already upvoted a bunch on HN before though, cool to see.

~~~
lostmsu
The guideline on HN is to use original link whenever possible.

The link should be changed.

~~~
andreyk
ah, whoops, was not aware. Seems I can't change the link, maybe mods can or
can just delete.

------
JackFr
Makes me think of "Hook" by Blues Traveler:

    
    
      It doesn't matter what I say
      So long as I sing with inflection
      That makes you feel I'll convey
      Some inner truth or vast reflection
      But I've said nothing so far
      And I can keep it up for as long as it takes
      And it don't matter who you are
      If I'm doing my job then it's your resolve that breaks

------
xtiansimon
Now if GPT-2 could write yet another beginner Python lists and tuples blog
post, I prolly wouldn’t notice. If it could write a description which helped
me to get my head around my client’s Swagger API I would be thrilled. No one
really has the time nor patience to explain it to me in a way that clicks.

------
EchoAce
> “I’ve taught public school teachers, who were incredibly bad at formal
> mathematical reasoning (I know, because I graded their tests), to the point
> that I had not realized humans could be that bad at math”

Is it just me or does this come off as incredibly rude? It’s one thing to say
people are bad at math but the phrasing of this seems insulting without
reason, in my opinion.

~~~
Chlorus
It just reeks of the same lazy garbage of that whole "separating the
programming goats from the sheep" meme that went around a few years back.
"It's not that my pedagogy has faults, people are just inherently bad and
there's no point trying to teach them"

~~~
Sniffnoy
She doesn't claim that she couldn't teach them. She claimed that they were bad
at formal reasoning.

------
Geee
I've certainly noticed that most people speak on auto-pilot, basically just
repeating what they've heard or read. I wonder if just a few % of people are
actually generally intelligent and everyone else is following along. Or is it
just a random process, in which we are just repeating each other and making
mistakes leads to new ideas.

~~~
GaryNumanVevo
It's an energy problem. Take the average mental energy level and divide it up
among all the facets of daily life. Most of that is probably going to go into
working, eating, relaxing. Developing original opinions in every single field
isn't realistic, so we'll find someone with authority and repeat what they
said.

------
bitL
I am thinking about using GPT-2 or better to write homeworks for my MBA...
Nobody would spot a difference (I am worried/relieved).

~~~
julienreszka
Do it

------
Fnoord
Can someone explain the title? It doesn't make sense to me.

~~~
visarga
I think an even stronger version applies. Humans are not general
intelligences. We are just good at keeping ourselves alive and making more of
us on this planet (and in this ecosystem). All the rest - language, science,
culture, economy - are just our current solution to solving the constraints of
life.

In order for an intelligence to be called general it would be necessary to be
effective in all situations. Humans only perceive the world through our five
limited senses and then filters it through the coloured glass of our concepts.
We can't escape the limitations of our senses and mental models taken
together.

Humans can't even keep in the working memory more than 7 objects at once, some
people can handle a few more but not on the order of hundreds or thousands.
What if the real ultimate theory of physics required a working memory of 1000
objects? We'd be forever blocked from grasping it like an ant vs. the stock-
market. Programmers live at the edge of this grasping power and know the
horror of not being able to take it all in at once, and it's so easy to get
into such a situation.

It is possible that there is no general intelligence anywhere. It's always an
intelligence of a specific environment, solving specific types of problems. A
general intelligence would need a much more varied and challenging environment
in order to reach that level of intelligence.

The more complex the environment, the higher the intelligence of its agents.
So there is always going to be an upper limit to intelligence, and the
environment has a lot to do with it. No intelligence is truly general.

~~~
coldtea
> _In order for an intelligence to be called general it would be necessary to
> be effective in all situations._

So, basically, the author made a contrived definition of their own, and hand-
waved about how humans don't meet it...

------
jerf
If you'd like to innoculate yourself, and have a bit of fun in the meantime,
consider reading
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/)
.

It's not just for fun, you can get a good sense of the algorithm. One of the
things it is somewhat prone to is some weird looping, like this:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/d1nwdg/if...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/d1nwdg/if_the_president_of_the_united_states_was_your/ezo3sce/)
in which the algorithm generates the sentence "Toss some leeches around and
wait 'til we get there." (no, it does not make any more sense in context), and
then repeats that sentence nearly (but not quite!) exactly 23 more times. (I
expect this is a consequence of the way it is tracking some internal state; I
assume these sentences are strange attractors in some sort of state that is
getting iteratively modified.)

You can also see that while it picks up some deep structure, a check of
anything trained on /r/jokes
([https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/d055mt/a_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/d055mt/a_guy_is_having_a_hard_time_with_his_wifes/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x)
) or /r/math
([https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/d1yz1e/ho...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/d1yz1e/how_exactly_does_the_number_1_not_equal_2/)
) the algorithm is definitely unable to deal with deeper structure right now.
The /r/jokes bot is humorous in its complete lack of humor, I mean, well
beyond any sarcastic snark about how unfunny /r/jokes may be. It has the
structure of jokes. There was one recent one that even asked "What's a
pirate's favorite letter?", and the bot had noticed the answer was being given
in the form of letters, but I don't think a single instance of the bot
proposed "r". But it does not understand humor in the _slightest_. Of the
several dozen attempts at jokes I've at least skimmed, I believe it only
achieved something that was at least recognizable as an attempt at humor once,
and it still wasn't that funny. Likewise math. It's got a good idea there's
these "prime number" things and they're pretty important, but I've seen at
least half-a-dozen wrong definitions of what one is.

It's a very interesting algorithm. It's a great babbler. But on its own, it's
not a great solution to generating text. Although it may very well be able to
generate text that can pass a casual skim text, as the article suggests.
Still, it takes human curation to get that far. Any human that can read is
going to guess something's inhuman about repeating "Toss some leeches around
and wait 'til we get there." 24 times in a row.

~~~
outworlder
> If you'd like to innoculate yourself,

Dude, my malady got worse, not better. The comments there are up to a better
standard than most Youtube or Facebook comments.

~~~
whatshisface
Reading that sub was a surreal experience. The most interesting part for me
was how it (completely subconsciously) changed the "voice in my head" reading
voice into something very dull and stilted, like a second grader reading a
terrible essay out loud.

------
fallingfrog
I’ve definitely had the experience of reading a human written paper, and just
skimming it because it didn’t really seem to have a point. Then I sighed and
decided to really give it my attention and quickly realized that the reason it
was hard to read was because it was chock full of lazy thinking, bad
analogies, unexamined assumptions, and non sequiturs to begin with.

------
Shorel
Now, make an hybrid system merging this text generator with the classic
symbolic AI called CYC from Doug Lenat.

It could be able to generate all our news articles in whatever style we
prefer.

Bye bye freelancer writers.

