It's because LMSYS is an aggregate elo across a range of different tasks. Individually in some very important areas, Claude Opus may be better than GPT-4 by 50-100 elo points which is quite a lot. However there are specific domains where GPT-4 has the advantage because it's been fine tuned based off a lot of existing usage. So weak points around logic puzzles or specific instructions don't bring down its elo whereas Claude Opus doesn't have this advantage yet. I believe Opus's eventual elo, after all these little areas of weakness are fine tuned, will be something like 1300.
Seasons are reversed, so that winter in the Northern Hemisphere is summer in the Southern Hemisphere and vice versa.
But our holidays and working calendar is the same as in the Northern Hemisphere.
So whereas Americans are celebrating Christmas and taking a break during their coldest part of the year, and resting up, we Australian's continue to work throughout our winter, which is in July.
I recently realised this too, while trying to integrate moon phases into my app. The ASCII emoji names for the 1st and last quarter moon are completely reversed and that makes complete sense since we're technically upside down.
( ||) First quarter in Northern Hemisphere, 3rd (or last) quarter in Southern
(|| ) Last quarter in Northern Hemisphere, 1st in Southern
He never suggested that the influx of newbies should change the existing culture, precisely the opposite. The existing culture doesn't do a good enough job of helping onboard the newbies in a gentle way that integrates them. Instead, there's just indifference to this process.
> Instead, there's just indifference to this process
kind of. There are two things that often happen if people don't integrate, mostly wrt company culture:
1. The newbies don't integrate because they have created their own culture because either they don't realize that they are excluded from the "adults table" (different departments, etc) or that their experiences interacting with the existing hierarchy makes them want to reject the existing culture. They surround the "core" even though they may not often interact with it (and maybe management realizes this but most often not). Maybe they do some shadow IT but the projects that they work on are not core to the business because they are locked out from those systems and the work that they do is seen as useless because it is never integrated (maybe their code kind of sucks because they don't get mentorship, etc). The core is mostly untouched by the social group(s) that surround it. The different social groups are not as rigid as departments but if the core has any legitimate power the non-complaint people are usually shuffled around. Some people in the "wrong-group" may learn to respect the existing culture and they are promoted into the sacrosanct.
2. Similar to #1 except that the newbies are better at self-marketing or socializing with management and eventually the core culture is entirely replaced by the newer culture. The business allows this, even perhaps risking business continuity, because they start to see the old clique as stubborn, not inclusive, not open to change or suggestions, perhaps even a liability to the company.
I would second not looking at fiction. So much of the cultural morés around relationships come from what we see in media and so much of it is just wrong and designed to create excitement through dramatisation and negative archetypes. We subconsciously imitate these archetypes and then we're surprised that conflict occurs in real life too. Find people in real life who you respect deeply and try and see what they're doing instead.
Also, exposure therapy, which is essentially what you recommended by saying go to Starbucks, Toastmaster etc, doesn't really work at a fundamental level either. I've done this deeply but didn't really get anywhere for many years. The real problem that creates lack of emotional understanding is our upbringing and how our parents raised us. One can force themselves into social situations for decades and still be anxious or lack empathy and this is simply because how we were raised in the first several years of our lives reverberates into the rest of our life unless awareness is brought into these dynamics.
I wouldn't recommend reading more books, psychology, theories or how to step guides. I've been in your shoes, good awareness but still offending or rubbing people the wrong way despite genuinely not intending to. I recommend a more experiential approach, which would obviously make more sense for something like our emotions. To be mentally capable one has to think more, to be emotionally capable one has to feel more. Therefore, I recommend meditation that is focused more on introspection, self-realisation. These processes will help you empathize more deeply with yourself, understand yourself deeply (much more deeply than merely in an intellectual manner) and then apply that to others. This way the dynamics between yourself and yourself, yourself and family, and finally yourself and others in the wider community will be clearer. The dynamics will then naturally resolve themselves over time. Good luck :)
And I'd also like to add that psychological hacks and tricks, from books like "Never Split The Difference" and "How to Win Friends and Influence People" don't really work in an effective way. The best way to navigate relationships is naturally, in the moment with no playbook in your mind. It all comes naturally once one is relaxed, but getting to that relaxed state is the challenge, especially if one has spent one's life doing the opposite by being constantly in their mind.
So it turns out the answer is, it depends. I studied linguistics a bit in college and Sapir-Whorf was then derided (late 90s), though we never got into it. Wiki explains the popularization of linguistic relativism was more due to Whorf (than Sapir), and that perhaps he was a poor scientist.
Seems as if one guy wrote a book where he took down a straw man version of Sapir Whorf, and now a bunch of people who never fully grokked the idea are convinced it's wrong. I bet they're monolingual.
Some people don't have good detection for bad logic and rhetoric, and yet are easily convinced they understand things they haven't fully understood. See: crypto, politics, economists, law, etc.
I wonder how many will fall for the trick you just pulled (intentionally or not), and the degree to which it deviates from their stance on Whorfism (not much I bet).
It is so fascinating how Normative Westerners describe "reality".
Not really, no. The book in question has many, many reviews asserting that the author created a strawman of Sapir-Whorf to 'take down', that he doesn't really understand the hypothesis in the first place, and that the author struggles to even write well or do basic logic.
> It feels as though this book were written in a weekend, one man's simmering grudge against his own imagination of pop-culture's neo-Whorfian enthusiasms.
> It was very frustrating for me to get through the book as I had very high expectations for it. I had some problems with the tone (his use of rhetoric detracting from actual credible claims), but mostly with the lack of evidence to support his claims. He evokes intuition, but that made the argument very unscientific and uncredible. In the end, McWhorter's argument did not conflict with many proponents of the idea of linguistic relativity, and his actual argument against the strict interpretation of Sapir-Whorf is essentially a straw man.
> He trots out a bunch of thought experiments to support his arguments, but these are always things he's made up and have no empirical backing beyond that they feel right -- and in many cases they feel right because the alternative would undermine certain assumptions that are the basis for modern liberal societies. For instance, Chinese is less grammatically complex than many other languages, therefore the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would indicate that their cultural world-view is also less complex. [! wtf?]
> Saw McWhorter give a talk, and thought this would be interesting. It isn’t. He’s an embarrassingly poor thinker, and this is a useless contribution to the language question.
> In short, the guy is kind of a poor thinker, and the book is an embarrassing example of the worst kind of academic sophistry. Two stars only because it might provoke some discussion.
> A dismally argued little book.
> This author raises belaboring a point to an art form that I don't think I'd ever imagined.
> Do you love horses? If so then I recommend avoiding this book, in which the author beats a dead one for 100+ pages.
Etc.
Again, all the people in this thread asserting that 'Sapir Whorf is debunked' are referring to this one book, by this one author, who plainly has misinterpreted the essence of the hypothesis and seems to have some kind of grudge about it for whatever reason.
In another comment I talked about how I observed a phenomena similar to the one described where neuronal activations would create waves, I've quoted it here. I would summarize it as 3D waves of light, resulting in a spherical enamation that readjusts the physical substrate of the mind and body.
""
I tried to observe the phenomena yesterday again and couldn't observe it but it was very specifically this in the past: spherical orbs of white light expanding from a centre. There were many of these, and my perception was that the nature of this geometric expanding shape was healing. To describe it more clearly, many years ago I felt that the perfect geometric spherical nature of these expanding waves were designed to gently round off rough edges. To make an analogy, imagine kneading some play dough over and over again. When you use your hands to do so, every time your hands make contact with the play dough, the play dough changes shape slightly because of the contact between your hands and the play dough and it gets softer. Now apply this concept to the idea of energetic waves making contact and passing through the material substrate of the brain and the rest of the body (yes I observed the waves applying to more than just my mind). It was my physical and conscious perception that as the spherical waves emanated from some center, they gently readjusted the physical substrate that they passed through. And because there were so many of them in different spatial locations, this readjustment was incredibly refined.
That's a really interesting scientific finding. From a personal experience, once I closed my eyes and actually observed this phenomenon. I could observe many spherical waves of light each pulsating, and not only that but I could feel the effect of each wave viscerally. It definitely felt healing. I wasn't sure what this was, was it the vibes of meditators around the world? Maybe this research finding is what I was observing.
Reflexively, that doesn't make sense. I cannot imagine perceiving ionic CSF flow with my eyes.
But thinking about it more, maybe there is something to it? I'm wholly unqualified to speculate here, but I know computers and computers are exactly the same as everything in the real world, so let's go! ...
- When restful and with my eyes closed, I definitely "see" waves move across my field of vision. My eyes see "black" (or dark gray) with slightly lighter edges that move and act like a wavefront in a fluid. There's distinct flow, and (minor) swirling and interference. I've seen these since I was very young, and I have no idea if it's a common thing or if it has a name. It must. I've mentioned it to a very small number of other non-experts but no one has ever recognized it. (I also sometimes see tiny colored tiles that light up in moving masses -- again rarely mentioned but never recognized, probably an unrelated phenomenon...)
- I do not think these are simply phosphenes, because there is no external proximate stimuli. Though I suppose we all live in environments saturated with EMF, most of the time, and a proper test would require being in a very remote area (and that's probably not enough). Though if I can "see" the presence of EMF, I'm totally making some phone calls to Charles Xavier's people.
- I've theorized that this was fluid in my eye (eyelid is too thin) moving around and refracting what little light is getting through in a dark room. But it also happens when I am completely still (though nothing in the body is ever completely still), and it also happens in complete darkness.
- The "shape" of the waves does not resemble anything that could be related to blood vessels in the eyelid. And again, complete darkness.
- So, is it possible that it's actually this ionic flow of CSF through the vision-sensing part of the brain? Not actually light coming through my eyeballs at all, but fluidlike electrical variations in the parts of the brain itself which are sensitive to the electrical signals normally coming from the optic nerves?
I have no idea. But it's an fun new angle to consider in the idle moments while I watch the waves flow before I fall asleep.
(That said, please feel free to correct my wild speculation if there's an obvious explanation that has not intersected my completely-unrelated fields of study! :)
I deliberately didn't use the word "see" when phrasing my response. I used the word observed because it was an observation, not a seeing. And I'm not describing a flow of vague amorphous whitish material, I know what you're talking about and I'm not describing that.
I tried to observe the phenomena yesterday again and couldn't observe it but it was very specifically this in the past: spherical orbs of white light expanding from a centre. There were many of these, and my perception was that the nature of this geometric expanding shape was healing. To describe it more clearly, many years ago I felt that the perfect geometric spherical nature of these expanding waves were designed to gently round off rough edges. To make an analogy, imagine kneading some play dough over and over again. When you use your hands to do so, every time your hands make contact with the play dough, the play dough changes shape slightly because of the contact between your hands and the play dough and it gets softer. Now apply this concept to the idea of energetic waves making contact and passing through the material substrate of the brain and the rest of the body (yes I observed the waves applying to more than just my mind). It was my physical and conscious perception that as the spherical waves emanated from some center, they gently readjusted the physical substrate that they passed through. And because there were so many of them in different spatial locations, this readjustment was incredibly refined.
I was slightly disappointed to see my comment down voted but I'm not too surprised. I stand by my description as an accurate and well considered, rational description of what I had observed in the past.
I didn't mean to put you on the defensive. I used the word "perceive" in response to your comment, and only used "see" for the description of my personal observations.
I didn't downvote it, but I wasn't sure I understood your first comment. Others might have also been confused.
Anyway, it's all fascinating to me. I am inadequately schooled to know what is a novel observation, but when I hear experts talk the common theme is how little we really understand about the brain. Obviously, my "little" and their "little" are very different things.
Ok, I have never told anyone this, but I also sometimes wake up and “see” like a waterfall effect over my vision. It only happens very rarely and only for less than a minute after I get woken from a deep sleep. It is not unlike a moving sensation or water moving over my eyes. I realized that it is probably fluid moving over my visual cortex and being interpreted as vision. Seems weird and I have nothing to back it up on, but it has happened multiple times over my lifetime and the sensation is exactly the same every time.
I'm not talking about the vague flow of amorphous material, I can perceive that too but it's not what I'm referring to. I made a follow up reply where I describe specifically what this phenomena is and my hypothesis on the mechanism behind the healing.
Perhaps it's how meditation balances the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. But yeah, I know when my mediation is deepening because the rhythmic pulsation up my spine into my base brain begins.
I'm not talking about the general effect of meditation which is to relax the body and increase the flow throughout the body. I was talking very specifically about this concept of spherical expanding waves of light. To make an analogy, it resembles a moderately white light expanding from a centre. See my other comment where I describe how such a phenomena could be healing and restorative using a physical analogy.
I have this too. My cognitive processes are not related to my thinking brain, which I define as the part of my mental process which produces the sounds of words in my mind. Instead, I've observed that first, my subconscious processes concepts at a much more fine grained level, much like the latent space of a machine learning model. Only substantially after, let's say 10ms after, do thoughts arise, which are just pointers to the already processed subconscious process. A very rough analogy would be the inference of an LLM in words, vs all the processing of embeddings that happens internally.
