> Situations sometimes benefit from irrational approaches (think gradient descent with random jumps to improve optimization performance).
What?
Irrational is sprinkling water on your car to keep it safe or putting blood on your doorframes to keep spirits out
An empirical optimization hypothesis test with measurable outcomes is a rigorous empirical process with mechanisms for epistemological proofs and stated limits and assumptions.
You have a narrow perspective that says there is no value in sprinkling your car with water to keep it safe. That’s your choice. Another, might intuit that the religious ceremony has been shown throughout their lives, to confer divine protection. Yet a third might recognize an intentional performance where safety is top of mind, might program a person to be more safety conscious, thereby causing more safe outcomes with the object in persons who have performed the ritual, and further they may also suspect that many performers of such ritual privately understand the practice as being metaphorical, despite what they say publicly. Yet a fourth may not understand the situation like the third, but may have learnt that when large numbers of people do something, there may be value that they don’t understand, so they will give it a try.
The optimization strategy with jumps is analogous to the fourth, we can call it ‘intellectual humility and openness’. Some say it’s the basis of the scientific method, ie throw out a hypothesis and test it with an open mind.
I’m not narrow, you just wrote a lot of positive psychology babble.
This is an epistemological question and everything you wrote is epistemically bankrupt. To wit:
“Another, might intuit that the religious ceremony has been shown throughout their lives, to confer divine protection”
This kind of mythology is why humans and human society will never escape the cave, and semi-literate people sound smart to the illiterate with this bullshit
Well now, here’s a puzzle for you. If literate humans don’t believe in myth, and all US Presidents had religious affiliation, were they all a) semi-literate ‘cave people’, b) cynical manipulators of the semi-literate cave-people, c) something else?
And if a person practices any myth-based festival, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, is that indicative to you of a semi-literate cave-person? Or do you make exemptions for how a person interprets the event, and if so, how do you apply those exemptions consistently across all myth-based societies? Also do you reject science-fiction and fantasy works as works of idle fancy or do you allow that they use metaphor to convey important ideas applicable to life, and how do you square that with your treatment of myth in religion?
It is my hope, that you will consider my comment, and come to a better understanding of what LLMs are. They aren’t baking any universal truth, or world model, they are collating alternative narrative systems.
What?
Irrational is sprinkling water on your car to keep it safe or putting blood on your doorframes to keep spirits out
An empirical optimization hypothesis test with measurable outcomes is a rigorous empirical process with mechanisms for epistemological proofs and stated limits and assumptions.
These don’t live in the same class of inference