[mjburgess]

You're protecting your ego more when you compare people to LLMs, since that is your existing prejudice.

The sort of fashionable pseudo-scientific scientism in the belief that animals are alike digital electrical machines is a kind of egoism. It says, "the engineer of these machines (me!) knows all!"

The real hit to your ego is to suppose you are vastly more complex than you understand -- and this is why these engineers crop up and demand that there is nothing more to know than what they have already learned

this is an illusion of humility: these engineers take the implied nihilism of this view (that of the emptyness of animal life) as evidence that it is the humble one.

But, as ever nihilism, ends up being the most profound kind of arrogance, here its an ego-defence against the threat of their own ignorance.

And the threat is real: all you have ever learned about how to sequence transformations of natural numbers (all the algorithms of computer science) are of no use at all in the study of intelligence. What an injury to the ego!

[kelseyfrog]

Sorry, but in my experience, I've seen "LLMs and human intelligence are incomparable," used to protect fragile egos more than critique them.

It sounds like your experience is different.