[Eugene Volokh] "God, … Some of Your Early Work on Neural Networks Was Genuinely Groundbreaking, …"

["but honestly you’re the worst offender here."]

From Astral Codex Ten:

God: …and the math results we're seeing are nothing short of astounding. This Terry Tao guy -

Iblis: Let me stop you right there. I agree humans can, in controlled situations, provide correct answers to math problems. I deny that they truly understand math. I had a conversation with one of your "humans" yesterday, which I'll bring up here for the viewers … give me one moment …

When I give him an easy problem that he's encountered in school, it looks like he understands. But when I give him another problem that requires the same mathematical function, but which he's never seen before, he's hopelessly confused.

God: That's an architecture limitation. Without a scratchpad, they only have a working context window of seven plus or minus two chunks of information. We're working on it. If you had let him use Thinking Mode…

Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, okay, calm down. One way of reconciling your beliefs is that although humans aren't very smart now, their architecture encodes some insights which, given bigger brains, could -

Iblis: God isn't just saying that they'll eventually be very smart. He said the ones who got through graduate school already have "PhD level intelligence". I found one of the ones with these supposed PhDs and asked her to draw a map of Europe freehand without looking at any books. Do you want to see the result? …

You can come up with excuses and exceptions for each of these. But taken as a whole, I think the only plausible explanation is that humans are obligate bullshitters….

Read the whole thing; I much enjoyed it.

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