• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle

  • I only use Windows because I have to work with a corporation’s IT helpdesk staff to get on their VPN if I want to do contract work for them. They are not likely to help me get connected from Linux; they’ll just find another contract dev. Once in, I do everything in Linux because my code will ultimately run in a Linux cloud container of some sort. WSL works well enough for me to do this. I’d rather have Linux on bare metal, but whatever. I’m in; I’m coding; I’m getting paid. I’ll put up with a little bit of suck.











  • The original marshmallow experiment is so popular to cite because it is a “just so story” – that is, as typically explained, it presents a moral lesson that seems intuitively obvious. That’s one reason the result stood for so long without attempts to reproduce it.

    Such attempts have now been made, and no one can reproduce the reported clarity of the original. One interpretation of this is related to the wealth of the families involved: the original subjects were, after all, children of Stanford University students, and as such came from families of relative wealth.

    There are studies which reach the conclusion you’re reporting (likely popularized by this Atlantic article but it’s paywalled so I can’t check), but the way you present this as a “fun fact” is turning the test into a different “just so story”.

    The reality is that, while there are some stats gathered from the marshmallow test and followups that could be interpreted that way, the actual data gathered is too messy and inconclusive to draw any definitive conclusions.



  • As far as I can tell from the article, the definition of “smarter” was left to the respondents, and “answers as if it knows many things that I don’t know” is certainly a reasonable definition – even if you understand that, technically speaking, an LLM doesn’t know anything.

    As an example, I used ChatGPT just now to help me compose this post, and the answer it gave me seemed pretty “smart”:

    what’s a good word to describe the people in a poll who answer the questions? I didn’t want to use “subjects” because that could get confused with the topics covered in the poll.

    “Respondents” is a good choice. It clearly refers to the people answering the questions without ambiguity.

    The poll is interesting for the other stats it provides, but all the snark about these people being dumber than LLMs is just silly.