A lifestyle that includes brain-fog avoiding habits and activities, notably socialization, family and friends, and so on -- anything that provides outsize stimulus to the brain.
Generally, I wager the main cause of the brain-fog (as well as sensory issues) in most who received it from COVID is due to the lock-downs, and coinciding loss of activities that normally would keep the hypothalamus functioning properly. Instead these "creative" activities are no longer present to create and reinforce "good" neural pathways, so they start becoming pruned, so the hypothalamus shrinks, and then come the cascading effects such as reduced neuroplasticity, reduced creativity, reduced "zest" for life -- but these are just the psychological, I've ignored the physical changes that can manifest due to dysregulation in the HPTA axis.
I myself have been able to reverse a lot of this (from COVID, but also from being dealt a bad hand in life) with various experimental peptides that interact with BDNF.
A striking realization I had was that this "brain-fog" can be seen in a lot of people and its causes have become obvious to me. A notable example is senior citizens (60+ y.o.) that are "stuck in their ways" and have various forms of dementia. The easiest trick to reverse such "age-dependent reduction in neurological function" is to take steps toward integrating them into social groups with those who are "mentally young." I have tried this with both my European-born mother and my American-born father. The former succeeded at 73 in reversing age-related mental deficits and physical maladies, but the latter did not.
I posit that this is a cultural issue. European socialization is much more varied in conversation, emotion, expression, subject, and so on. While American socialization is much less in these respects. The other issue is that those socialized in the American way are more likely to be unable to "adapt" to the European way, and so will fail because they do not have the skills necessary to integrate, due to a life of having American socialization engraved in their neural pathways.
Generally, it's my opinion that a large bulk of America's mental, physical, and political maladies are greatly amplified by this lack of novel and consistent stimulus. That is to say nothing about having to commute alone daily (stress and routine boredom), cities that do not cater to exploration and low-cost novelties, a culture of individualism that precludes having deep bonds with others, anti-intellectualism, an over-bearing work culture and cautioned work-place atmosphere, and so on that reduce creativity, reduce neuroplasticity, reduce a zest for life, and create a society filled with effectively robots who have had their neural pathways reinforced so heavily into a very narrow "model of living and being" that escape is simply impossible without sustained exogenous influence.
With that, I have other things to do! -- because I do not foresee any interesting and novel conversation to serendipitously irrupt from my thoughts.
My bike, with a Sturmey Archer three-speed, cost £160 (from a very reputable shop that services pretty much everything for free or only charges for parts). It is perfectly good for commuting and hobby rides up to at least 50 miles—and I say this as someone rather out of shape.
First, thanks for the conatructive tone. Every day I am astonished that people directly impacted—whose friends died and might have been sexually abused on 7.10 and people whose families have been blown to pieces by aerial bombardment—somehow still manage to be more reasonable (on occasion) than many of their supporters in the West.
Second, I am not sure that this is a ‘small’ minority. Even ignoring the Channel 14 polls (which do seem to be made up) the current coalition is on about 50 seats (looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_I...). And then I am not really convinced that Sa’ar or Lieberman would really be opposed to this specific action, which would make a majority. For that matter, I saw one poll saying a Sa’ar+Cohen+Bennett tie-up would hit a whole thirty-two seats and reduce the Likud to twelve (that's the one labelled ‘Merger of Gideon Sa'ar, Naftali Bennett and Yossi Cohen & Labor and Meretz under Yair Golan’…) Admittedly maybe Lieberman would say that it’s stupid but that’s different from saying it’s disgraceful.
What change do you see in the institutional power of the army that would allow that to happen? And why do you think the Muslim Brotherhood would be so much more radical than it was under Morsi?
The army and governments moved out of kairo into there own city, a retreat in all but name. And isil and the likes set new standards of purity, one must outcompete as a radical to be taken serious. Add to that bread price spikes made by putin.. Then again, i honestly don't care, the past is scanned ans thus eternal. Im more worried for the future..
I don’t see how the move out of Cairo really indicates a loss of control anywhere else. It’s not like all the army bases in the Sinai or Alexandria or anywhere else are going anywhere. And there are good reasons to leave Cairo otherwise—for example, the severe mismanagement of the Cairene urban environment, traffic, &c. As for the second point, there have always been Islamists more radical than the Muslim Brotherhood, and Daësh if anything has less power now than it did at its peak.
This still doesn’t address the claim that ‘first’ is wrong, and that sort of hyperbole, if wrong, is quite off-putting. If this is really ‘quite promising compared to existing…solutions’, there’s no need for inflated claims.
Beliefs derived from the output of LLMs that are ‘right most of the time’ pass one facially plausible precisification of ‘justification’ in that they are generated by a reliable belief-generation mechanism (see e.g. Goldman). To block this point one must engage with the post-Gettier literature at least to some extent. There is a clear difference between beliefs induced by reading the outputs of LLMs and those induced by the contents of a reference work, but it is inessential to the point and arguably muddies the water to present the distinction as difference in status as knowledge or non-knowledge.
Upon a second reading, this is an excellent point.
For the sake of clarity, let's remove LLMs from the equation and posit the existence of Encyclopedia Eric. Ask Eric any question, and he will happily research it and come back to you with the answer. But he can sometimes be sloppy in his research, and he gives the correct answer only X percent of the time.
Furthermore, Encyclopedia Eric steadfastly refuses to cite his own sources or explain his reasoning in any way. He simply states his answer.
Can Eric be a source of knowledge? It seems evident that the answer is no, for low values of X. For higher values of X, the question becomes murkier.
The temptation at this point is to give up on defining knowledge at all and fall back on a sort of Bayesian epistemology where everything is ultimately a matter of probabilities.
Yet there does seem to be a distinct practical difference between a knowledge source that is "traversable" (like a standard encyclopedia) vs a knowledge source that is not (like Eric.) Is that part of the definition of knowledge? You're right, that is at least a Gettier adjacent question.
I think we can all agree that for current LLMs the value of X is definitely too small to count as knowledge.
I think that this might be a nice way of getting round my objection, but there is one worry, which is that X is relative to a distribution on the questions we ask when we aren’t dealing with Encyclopedia Eric but with an LLM. I don’t actually use LLMs very much myself, partly out of arrogance and Luddite tendencies. But I suspect that the value of X for some sorts of questions (simple quiz questions, maybe?) and some LLMs (maybe not Google’s) will be high enough to end up in the murky case.
Of course, both you and I agree that there /is/ clearly a difference. I can see the attraction of appealing to the intuitive or pretheoretic notion of knowledge, since it’s a fairly straightforward way of stating the difference and it’s not obvious how else one might put it (I suppose ‘LLMs don’t explicitly think through the facts stored when deciding what to say’ is one way of putting it.)
I remember some time ago rather sleepily watching John Hawthorne talk about conditionals; my sole memory was of his banging on about ‘the little logician in the brain’ (I think the point was something like: some conditionals seem [in]felicitous in virtue of form because the little logician in the brain is reading them; others seem infelicitous because we examine them more closely and look e.g. at the referents involved, in which case e.g. Gricean considerations apply). One difference at least in the case of LLMs that makes sense to me is that there is no ‘little logician’ in LLMs.
> X is relative to a distribution on the questions we ask when we aren’t dealing with Encyclopedia Eric but with an LLM.
Assuming I understand what you mean here correctly, this should be the case for both LLMs and Encyclopedia Eric - there are topics Eric knows by heart (or thinks they know); there are specific phrases seared into his mind through sheer exposure during his life prior to becoming a living Encyclopedia. There are words he's used to, and exact synonyms he barely recognizes. All that means your chance of getting correct answer to your query depends, in complex and unknown to you way, on how you state it.
I think the thought experiment can be set up both ways. In one case Eric has a fixed probability of getting /any/ query right. (This might leave boosting open so we might want to gerrymander repeated queries out.) In the other this is relative to the distribution of queries.
A relevant point to this is the notion of "System-1" vs "System-2" thinking. Somewhat dubious when applied to actual human psychology but I think a valid metaphor for how LLMs work: they are only capable of System-1 thinking; a single forward pass through the weights of intuition
In my actual life, I don't trust my own System-1 thoughts: for anything important, I'm always going to engage System-2. And LLMs don't have a System-2.
(I also agree that when dealing with LLMs the value of X is not a single value but a highly complex space depending on the nature of the question and the training data of the model. In my mind it does not change the epistemological equation, it just means that even the value of X itself is harder to "know", so this ambiguity can only ever make LLMs a less viable source of knowledge.)
I am not sure that the ambiguity has to work that way. The suggestion I am making is that if we fix the distribution on questions and the training data, we might (a) know the value of X in this specific case, (b) be able to ensure that it is fairly high.
I’d say this is the murky case because on the fixed training data and query distribution X ≈ 1 and we know that even though we don’t know the value of X on other training data and other query distributions. I think that might be where the disagreement lies.
To be clear he is saying that the LLM is not capable of justified true belief, not commenting on people who believe LLM output. I don’t think your comment is relevant here.
I do think trusting an LLM is less firm ground for knowledge than other ways of learning.
Say I have a model that I know is 98% accurate. And it tells me a fact.
I am now justified in adjusting my priors and weighting the fact quite heavily at .98. But that’s as far as I can get.
If I learned a fact from an online anonymously edited encyclopedia, I might also weight that a 0.98 to start with. But that’s a strictly better case because I can dig more. I can look up the cited sources, look at the edit history, or message the author. I can use that as an entry point to end up with significantly more than 98% conviction.
That’s a pretty important difference with respect to knowledge. It isn’t just about accuracy percentage.
That reading of the comment did occur to me, but I think neither dictionaries nor LLMs are capable of belief, and the comment was about the status of beliefs derived from them.
Okay we are speaking past each other, and you are still misunderstanding the subtlety of the comment:
A dictionary or a reputable Wikipedia entry or whatever is ultimately full of human-edited text where, presuming good faith, the text is written according to that human's rational understanding, and humans are capable of justified true belief. This is not the case at all with an LLM; the text is entirely generated by an entity which is not capable of having justified true beliefs in the same way that humans and rats have justified true beliefs. That is why text from an LLM is more suspect than text from a dictionary.
I think the parent comment ultimately concerned the reliability of /beliefs derived from text in reference works v text output by LLMs/, and that seems to be what the replies by the commenter concern. If the point is merely that the text output by LLMs does not really reflect belief but the text in a dictionary reflects belief (of the person writing it), it is well-taken. Since it is fairly obvious and I think the original comment really was about the first question, I address the first rather than second question.
The point you make might be regarded as an argument about the first question. In each case, the ‘chain of custody’ (as the parent comment put it) is compared and some condition is proposed. The condition explicitly considered in the first question was reliability; it was suggested that reliability is not enough, because it isn’t justification (which we can understand pretheoretically, ignoring the post-Gettier literature). My point was that we can’t circumvent the post-Gettier literature because at least one seemingly plausible view of justification is just reliability, and so that needs to be rejected Gettier-style (see e.g. BonJour on clairvoyance). The condition one might read into your point here is something like: if in the ‘chain of custody’ some text is generated by something that is incapable of belief, the text at the end of the chain loses some sort of epistemic virtue (for example, beliefs acquired on reading it may not amount to knowledge). Thus,
> text from an LLM is more suspect than text from a dictionary.
I am not sure that this is right. If I have a computer generate a proof of a proposition, I know the proposition thereby proved, even though ‘the text is entirely generated by an entity which is not capable of having justified true beliefs’ (or, arguably, beliefs at all). Or, even more prosaically, if I give a computer a list of capital cities, and then write a simple program to take the name of a country and output e.g. ‘[t]he capital of France is Paris’, the computer generates the text and is incapable of belief, but, in many circumstances, it is plausible to think that one thereby comes to know the fact output.
I don’t think that that is a reductio of the point about LLMs, because the output of LLMs is different from the output of, for example, an algorithm that searches for a formally verified proof, and the mechanisms by which it is generated also are.
I wouldn’t say that Chinese verbs have no tense so much as that they are uninflected and that tense is marked with particles (which admittedly do not cause difficulties with irregular infexions).
Chinese technically does not have grammar tenses, but it has aspects indicated by particles. They mark the completion status, direction, presence, and so on.
However, the verbs themselves don't have tense. So these sentences can be identical: "I will walk home, then I will eat a cake" and "I walked home, then I ate a cake".
The overall timeframe can be given by a larger context: "Once my shift is over, I ..." / "I drank too much yesterday, that's all I remember: ".
It's simply not possible in English because every verb has a grammar tense built into it.
> Scarlet Johansson is threatening legal action against OpenAI for this
Scarlet Johansson cannot prosecute anyone. She can sue them, in civil court, for civil damages. Prosecution is done in connection with crimes. Nobody is alleging any crimes here.
Where did you get this? I'm seeing "to officially accuse someone of committing a crime" [1]. Criminality is esssential to the term. (EDIT: Found it. Cambridge Academic Content dictionary. It seems to be a simplified text [2]. I'm surprised they summarised the legal definition that way versus going for the colloquial one.)
You have to go back to the 18th century to find the term used to refer to initiating any legal action [3][4].
> is looking/sounding like somebody else (even if its famous) prosecutable or not?
No. And if a lawmaker claimed they would like it to be, and then claimed they meant civilly litigible, they’d be labelled dishonest. (Even if it was an honest mistake.)
The third definition listed on your Merriam-Webster link seems to be what's applicable here, and very clearly describes the term as applicable to any legal action.
This is consistent with my understanding of the term as a native English speaker, having experienced the term "prosecute" being used in reference to both criminal and civil cases in all forms of discourse, verbal and written, formal and informal, for decades, and only first encountering the claim that it shouldn't be used for civil cases here in this thread, today.
> very clearly describes the term as applicable to any legal action…only first encountering the claim that it shouldn't be used for civil cases here in this thread, today
Partly why I used that citation. It’s one of the few (adult) dictionaries that acknowledges as much.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Webster 3b usage is incorrect—it’s in some dictionaries and was historically unambiguously correct. But it’s non-standard to a high degree, to the extent that Black’s Law Dictionary only contains the criminal variant. (I’ll leave it open whether publicly referring to someone who has only been sued as someone who has been prosecuted, when intended as an attack, qualifies as defamation.)
More to the point of clear communication, I’d put it in a similar category as claiming one’s usage of terrific or silly was intended in its historic sense [1]. (Though I’ll admit my use of “nice” falls in that category.)
All that said, I’m very willing to entertain there being a dialect, probably in America, where the historic use is still common.
I'd regard what you're calling "historical" as being the actual standard usage in conventional speech -- again, I've never encountered the notion that "prosecute" doesn't apply to civil litigation until today, and I've been speaking English for decades, and have had many discussions involving legal cases, conversed with lawyers, signed contracts, etc. throughout my life.
The fact that you're referring to an intra-disciplinary dictionary to make the opposite argument implies that the narrower definition is jargon, and not an accurate representation of the common meaning of the term.
Why would that make it more common in the UK? Being able to bring a private prosecution strengthens the distinction, a regular citizen can both sue someone for a civil offense and prosecute someone for a criminal offense. It makes it more clearly nonsense to refer to suing someone for slandering you as "prosecuting" them because you can bring prosecutions and that is not one!
Taiwan doesn’t fully drop the legal pretence of being China because the /mainland authorities/ would complain. Otherwise, they would do it immediately.
(Compare the CPG’s vetoing of democratisation in Hong Kong prior to in the 50s and 60s.)
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