[HN Gopher] Your Brain on Books
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Your Brain on Books
Author : Caiero
Score : 66 points
Date : 2023-11-25 04:58 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.publicbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.publicbooks.org)
| msla wrote:
| http://www.merrycoz.org/books/CONFESSN.xhtml
|
| > The excitement of novel reading is akin to intoxication. When
| it subsides, it leaves the mind collapsed and imbecile, without
| the capacity or the inclination for active exertion. I question,
| whether the confessions of an opium-eater exhibit more striking
| evidences of the pernicious influence of that stimulating drug on
| the physical system, than the experience of an habitual novel
| reader can furnish of the injurious effects, produced on his
| mental organization by the constant perusal of works of fiction.
| MikeBVaughn wrote:
| I feel a bit dense sussing out the relevance of this post to
| the article. It seems apropos to the title, but the focus on
| novel-reading cuts orthogonally to the actual content.
|
| [Full disclosure: driveby quoteposting with no extra content or
| contextualization is one of my most deeply felt pet peeves]
| zzzbra wrote:
| this type of article is a pretty well established genre here on
| hackernews, and for good reason. as I spent yesterday at movies
| in theatres that were >95% empty I wonder why we don't have as
| many on film, which seems to be losing its combined battles
| against TikTok and David Zaslav.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| This was the highlight of the article for me on how Claude
| Shannon gained a deep intuition:
|
| Shannon took a youthful interest in cryptanalysis after reading a
| detective story and continued to reference detective stories in
| later years as he worked out his ideas about information. (In the
| early 1950s, for instance, he tested his intuitions about
| probability and communication with a noir story by Raymond
| Chandler, "Pickup on Noon Street." He spelled out a sentence,
| letter by letter, to his wife and research assistant, Betty.
| After each letter, she guessed what the next would be.
| Eventually, demonstrating the predictability of communication if
| you have a large enough sample text, she was correctly guessing
| three letters at once. A S-M-A-L-L O-B-L-O-N-G R-E-A-D-I-N-G L-A-
| M-P O-N T-H-E D ... E-S-K. Shannon figured that the letters we
| can predict aren't information, because they don't tell us
| anything new.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Isn't that how Chatgpt works? Picking the next word based on
| the previous words?
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's more high dimensional and has some attention function to
| optimize the valuation relationship between tokens.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| You say it's moreso, but moreso than what? Can we actually
| make statements about the dimensionality of human based
| word prediction functions?
| agumonkey wrote:
| it seems that Chuck was describing a simple markovian
| process, which is very linear in nature.
| Jensson wrote:
| Who is Chuck?
| agumonkey wrote:
| Woops, I meant walter
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| But the comparison was made to Shannon's wife predicting
| the next letter. The process is linear but the selection
| function in her mind is something else.
| rf15 wrote:
| Yeah, basically. Just with a lot of fancy math behind it.
| Making it all the funnier that it's so prompt/chat focused,
| since you can just write matter-of-factly to steer large
| language models.
| corethree wrote:
| Isn't this also part of how a human works?
| Jensson wrote:
| Humans has extensive state separate from the previous
| words. If I ask you "what did you do during the weekend",
| you will not generate a response only based on those words
| like ChatGPT would.
|
| If you mean that humans writes one word at a time, yes that
| is true. Humans generate words sequentially. But that isn't
| a very interesting comparison.
| corethree wrote:
| I would generate a response based off of an existing body
| of knowledge within me. Exactly like chatGPT would.
|
| In fact chatGPT is able to generate a accurate and self
| aware response to that query that is fitting and within
| context: Over the weekend, I was right
| here, ready to assist users like you with their queries
| and requests. As an AI, I don't have personal experiences
| or weekends in the traditional sense, but I'm always
| available to help with any questions or tasks you have!
| How can I assist you today?
| Jensson wrote:
| It generates that response every weekend, since that is a
| pre-programmed response that it has been taught to answer
| based on that query.
|
| If I ask that to a human they will respond with different
| things from weekend to weekend, or depending on their
| mood or if they trust me enough to talk about it or if
| they did something sensitive that they want to hide. It
| isn't the same thing.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Why would you expect its output to vary when it does the
| same thing every weekend? Why would they pre-program an
| answer that it should have no difficulty with out of the
| box and word it just like it's normally inclined to do?
| Probiotic6081 wrote:
| tldr?
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