This is a very odd view to me, but seems prevalent here in this thread. I think treating a machine like a human is extremely degrading to humans. A machine should never be treated like it’s anything approaching a human.
"Treating a machine like a human" is a two-party interaction. Of course the layers of matrix multiplication is unaffected by this, but I think that we are not. It's a great opportunity to exercise consistency and dedication to the beauty humanity is capable of and this extends to the entire gradient of conscious/sentient entities.
It's as silly (to me) to argue that it's degrading to people to treat non-people well. It seems self-obvious that the inverse is true. It benefits the do-er of the deed and makes it that much easier to spread good will when applied to situations where it doesn't matter on the other end. It shows good stewardship as well.
I'd also make the argument that as inference becomes a feedback loop into training, it only reinforces that we're probably going to benefit from future models ingesting data containing unnecessary politeness.
I always turn off data tracking and training and mostly use ZDR services, so that's not an issue.
And for the other parts. I just don't agree - maybe sure, it probably wouldn't be healthy to constantly be negative at a machine (or even a wall) for hours a day.
But, let's say I work 8 hours, I spend 2 hours with an llm, and in those two hours I spend 10 minutes with some very negative prompts text for greater accuracy.
And I spend 3 hours with family/friends, which is of course nearly exclusively positive interactions.
Do you genuinely think those 10 minutes of negative prompts are actually meaningfully turning one into a mean/negative person towards other people?
No, I don’t think it’s going to make you a meaner, more negative person. There is no tangible harm being done.
I genuinely believe it’s preventing you from becoming a better person by engaging in psychopathic behavior. If I were writing the things you describe in this thread I would be ashamed to have my loved ones read over my shoulder.
You could not pay me enough money to spend 10 minutes a day to write that stuff, even under full certainty it went into the void with no association back to me.
I'd say it's fairly likely that you aren't a better person than me by being so fearful and shame-based.
But I'm not here to pontificate about who's a better person and don't really care.
You're mindset sounds kind of painful to me to be honest. Obviously we are just very different types of people.
I've had family see my chats plenty of times and we laugh about this stuff - it couldn't mean less to any of us.
Except... stating who is a better person is exactly what you just did. I've never attempted to compare myself to others. I've stated that I think negative behavior inhibits growth, even when done to nobody, and positive behavior sets you up for additional successes elsewhere.
I've no desire to try to change your mind. I can't. But clearly you do care because you've been both quite defensive and assertive in tackling opposing points of view.
My hope is to inspire others to be more creative in their use of AI. It interesting (but not exactly unsurprising) that prompt politeness can inhibit accuracy. Surely there are lessons here than can translate into how help other people out through clear, direct language that avoids the pitfalls of being rude or coddling.
Well, this tone you've taken - If you reread your previous message - you state I am showing psychopathic behavior and similar shame-based tactics. And that I would be a better person if I didn't do psychopathic things.
I'd say it's fairly normal and human of me to have some kind of reaction to that, no?
You must understand that speaking to other people like that will result in them reacting and being less conducive to productive conversation.
We will probably never see eye to eye on this.
You: negative tokens for higher accuracy on inanimate objects is psychopathic behavior. I want you to stop and I see you as a psychopath - although it is resulting in nothing bad to any living being.
Me: Using negative tokens on an inanimate object returns significant improval on accuracy. It does zero harm to any living being. This is a completely neutral action.
Are you upset (or concerned) about people watching movies with violence in them, or playing games where you can and do kill things?
“Engaging in” isn’t the same thing as doing. It was meant to imply a degree of separation from the act itself. Statements like “I will murder your family unless” are exactly that. Obviously you would never do anything remotely close to that.
You are misunderstanding the saying. It is entirely about unintended consequences and viewing the system for what it actually does and not any stated intentions of the designers.
1. We must ignore the intentions of the designers (your claim), and instead see what the outcomes are
2. Therefore we should ignore Beer's intentions when designing the phrase POSWID, and instead see how it is used.
3. The overwhelming majority of people using it on the internet (including the GP comment) is to imply that the people perpetuating the system actually desire the outcome.
So the purpose of POSWID is clearly to imply intent.
Whose intent? POSWID Is about structural incentives not personal intent, and these can be, and likely are, an emergent behavior. It’s about reframing away from intents, treating the system as a structure and removing the whole structure for replacement. As opposed to localized reforms which are exposed to the same prior emergent behaviors leading to constant backsliding.
There are plenty of cases where you absolutely can/should discuss outcomes in a way where the intention is not factored in because it can often be straight up irrelevant.
If a gun is developed with the intention of hunting only bears and someone uses it to shoot people, you don’t have to constantly preface things by talking about how it’s supposed to be used only on bears. Sometimes that fact, depending on the context of the conversation, is simply not relevant.
To cover my bases here: yes it often is relevant and maybe even critical info, but it often isn’t either of those things.
It does not ignore the word. It subverts it, and that's the point. It's the system equivalent of "death of the author", which states that omes a work is written, the authors intent loses relevance and the work must be examined on its own. The aurhors opinion or relationship to the work carries no more weight than any other persons.
That's not "true" in any demonstrable sense, but it can be a useful form of analysis. As it is with "purpose of a system"
This is not how people outside of cybernetics use POSWID. From context it does not appear to be how SlinkyOnStairs was using it either.
I think it's also trying to be too cute. The first two definitions of purpose on Wiktionary[A]:
1. The end for which something is done, is made or exists.
2. Function, role.
People (uselessly) talking about the purpose of a system are often referring to #1, while POSWID is using it to mean #2. The real point of POSWID is that only definition #2 matters. POSWID is a terrible phrase not because it is wrong, but because is is an equivocation -- I suspect that Beer intended it as a pun, but the difference between the two is if one gets the joke. POSWID gets used incorrectly because people don't get the joke.
> From context it does not appear to be how SlinkyOnStairs was using it either.
The exact definition of "purpose" doesn't matter much here.
The particular version of the heuristic used here is that the stated purpose and the actual purpose often differ. POSIWID being the observation that the actual purpose is reflected by the outcomes of the system, because if that isn't the case the system gets changed.
Thus, the observation about AI benchmarks. AI companies have had years now to stop using unreliable benchmarks as advertising material. There's been years of piece after piece about the problems with these benchmarks. And yet the AI marketing continues as is.
> POSIWID being the observation that the actual purpose is reflected by the outcomes of the system, because if that isn't the case the system gets changed.
I fundamentally disagree with this, and it seems to differ from how other proponents of POSIWID in this thread view POSIWID.
It also seems trivially false; systems are dynamic what was the purpose of the system just before it was changed because people didn't like the outcomes?
I'd go further and say this is also the cybernetics equivalent of the religious teachings about humans, specifically the whole "judge by one's deeds, not by one's words" thing. So it's not like it's a novel idea.
Also worth remembering that most systems POSIWID is said about, and in fact ~all important systems affecting people, are not designed in the first place. Market forces, social, political, even organizational dynamics, are not designed top-down, they're emergent, and bottom-up wishes and intentions do not necessarily carry over to the system at large.
If you accept what the system actually does now, and decides to live with it as it is, you just deprecated the original "purpose" and made it irrelevant. You embraced "the purpose is what it does" - to you.
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