[aeternum]

Whose knowledge is trustworthy? We've somehow come to associate certain institutions or scientific authorities with truth when that is about the furthest from real science:

"Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, Is it reasonable?" -Richard P. Feynman

"One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." -Carl Sagan

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -Galileo Galilei

[burnished]

I think part of the issue is that it’s easier to test the limits of or a humans knowledge, and ironically with your quotes I think you’ve supplied evidence that trust is crucial, in that the truest expression of those quotes would be to just deliver the payload and not attach any sort of authority by association to it.

You can’t trust it’s answers (to be fair that’s the existing status quo), but you also can’t easily test it because it will return reasonable sounding garbage. Conversely you can discover ignorance in most humans pretty quickly by exhausting their ability to respond (or your ability to ask).

[visarga]

A generative system, be it a neural network or a human, needs a way to test ideas in order to align with reality. If testing is available, then it is possible to advance the state of the art. Ideas are cheap, results matter.

[burnished]

Sure, but that doesn’t seem to square with the topic at hand - “why does an infinite truth and lies machine feel less trustworthy than another human”. It just isn’t a question that needs a high degree of abstraction to respond to.

[visarga]

It is sometimes a lie machine because it lacks grounding in verification. Humans get more grounding than language models but even we are not 100% there - remember the antivax hysteria. The most grounded field is science, but even in scientific papers most things don't replicate. Verification is hard on all levels and requires extensive work. In particle physics all scientists clump together around the CERN accelerator as it is the only source of verification they have (almost, I exaggerate a bit).

It's going to be important to develop AI methods to test and verify, I think unverified model outputs are worthless verbiage. Verification can be based on references, code execution, physical simulations, lab experiments and even language based simulations.

In a few years the situation is going to flip, AI is going to become more reliable than humans. Being tested on millions of cases, it will be more trustworthy than us, no human can be tested to that extent. It's going to be interesting to see how we react to super-valid AI. Our guiding role is going to shrink more and more, we will be the children.

[baandang]

Those quotes are not about trust, they are about the rhetorical technique of appeal to authority.

The actual payload though is the mistrust of authority exactly because we are all so susceptible to the logical fallacy of appeal to authority masquerading bullshit as truth.

There is no problem to solve here. ChatGPT should never be an authority on anything.

[ajuc]

I, too, always recreate double blind experiments before I take the drugs my doctor gives me :)

I also double-check the transistors in my computer work correctly before I run any code on them, and of course I re-derive the physics to be able to do that :)

In practice you are an expert in a very small domain (if any) and in all the other domains you have no choice but to accept somebody's authority.

[aeternum]

That's good, I don't go quite as far, but do try to consult multiple independent sources.

Doctors have been known to overprescribe things like Benzos, and opioids from time to time.

I also just use tools like a RAM diagnostic that can check large numbers of transistors at once. I imagine you're quite good at QM after all that practice applying the wave equation though. Impressive!

[hippich]

There is some kind of recursion in here with authors names and "have no respect..." part:)

[aeternum]

Fair point

[AnthonyMouse]

Actually, it isn't.

Their arguments are of the form "this statement could be false."

If you evaluate it as a true statement, you have no problems. It could be false; you have to evaluate it for yourself instead of trusting some authority.

It's only if you assert that it's certainly false that you have a problem. Because then it's clearly true -- since otherwise these authorities would be telling you something false, which proves their assertion true.

Put another way, it can get you from the undesirable position of blindly trusting authorities to the desirable position of questioning them, but not the other way around. Which is the intended result.

[alasdair_]

It’s slightly ironic that the only reason we pay attention to these particular quotes is that they come from famous physicists, i.e. authorities.