[HN Gopher] Which Humans? (2023)
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       Which Humans? (2023)
        
       Author : surprisetalk
       Score  : 24 points
       Date   : 2025-12-29 19:57 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (osf.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (osf.io)
        
       | jdkee wrote:
       | As an aside: Last year a student of mine (we're at a U.S.
       | college) told me that his teenage cousins back in Mongolia were
       | all learning English in order to use ChatGPT.
        
         | croisillon wrote:
         | is it a steppe up?
        
       | MengerSponge wrote:
       | /usr/bin/humans, presumably
        
         | dwa3592 wrote:
         | /usr/bin/human/weird, to be precise.
        
       | mncharity wrote:
       | Since the page didn't load for me several times, and the title is
       | ambiguous, here's the Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have
       | recently made vast advances in both generating and analyzing
       | textual data. Technical reports often compare LLMs' outputs with
       | "human" performance on various tests. Here, we ask, "Which
       | humans?" Much of the existing literature largely ignores the fact
       | that humans are a cultural species with substantial psychological
       | diversity around the globe that is not fully captured by the
       | textual data on which current LLMs have been trained. We show
       | that LLMs' responses to psychological measures are an outlier
       | compared with large-scale cross-cultural data, and that their
       | performance on cognitive psychological tasks most resembles that
       | of people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and
       | Democratic (WEIRD) societies but declines rapidly as we move away
       | from these populations (r = -.70). Ignoring cross-cultural
       | diversity in both human and machine psychology raises numerous
       | scientific and ethical issues. We close by discussing ways to
       | mitigate the WEIRD bias in future generations of generative
       | language models.
        
       | rokizero wrote:
       | This was submitted 30 months ago. Still interesting. I would be
       | interested if this got 'worse' or 'better' with newer models.
        
       | andy99 wrote:
       | 2023, and using some kind of in-page pdf reader from 2002
        
         | wellthisisgreat wrote:
         | It's 2025 today, Andy :)
        
       | didgetmaster wrote:
       | Surprise, Surprise. LLMs will respond according to the set of
       | data that their model was trained on!
       | 
       | While just about every LLM is trained on data that far surpasses
       | the output of just one person, or even a decent sized group; it
       | will still reflect the average sentiment of the corpus of data
       | fed into it.
       | 
       | If the bulk of the training data was scraped from websites
       | created in 'WEIRD' countries, then it's responses will largely
       | mimic their culture.
        
       | cathyreisenwitz wrote:
       | I wonder whether it might be useful to the continued existence of
       | humanity to correct for the individualism bias in WEIRD countries
       | with some collectivism
        
       | levocardia wrote:
       | I think it is mostly a good thing that LLMs have "WEIRD" values.
       | We are at a very fortuitous point in history, where the modal
       | position in extant written text is classically liberal and
       | believes in respecting human rights. Virtually no other point in
       | history would be that way, and a true modal position among values
       | and moral beliefs held among all 8 billion people currently alive
       | on earth -- much less the modal position among all ~100 billion
       | humans ever -- would, I'd hazard to guess, not be a very nice
       | place to end up.
        
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       (page generated 2025-12-29 23:00 UTC)