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by localhost 816 days ago
This is exactly the kind of task that I want to deploy a long context window model on: "rewrite Thinking Fast and Slow taking into account the current state of research. Oh, and do it in the voice, style and structure of Tim Urban complete with crappy stick figure drawings."
8 comments

Then we just need the LLM that will rewrite your book taking into account the current state of LLM hallucination behaviour.
Not me, if I'm going to take the time to read something, I want it to have been written, reviewed and edited by a human. There is far too much high fidelity information to assimilate that I'm missing out on to put in low fidelity stuff
Most human authors are frankly far too stupid to be worth reading, even if they do put care into their work.

This, IMO, is the actual biggest problem with LLMs training on whatever the biggest text corpus us that's available: they don't account for the fact that not all text is equally worthy of next-token-predicting. This problem is completely solvable, almost trivially so, but I haven't seen anyone publicly describe a (scaled, in production) solution yet.

> This problem is completely solvable, almost trivially so, but I haven't seen anyone publicly describe a (scaled, in production) solution yet.

Can you explain your solution?

I imagine it looks something like "Censor all writing that contradicts my worldview"
It hardly matters what sources you are using if you filter it through something that has less understanding than a two year old, if any, no matter how eloquent it can express itself.
Then don't copy and paste your copy of Thinking Fast and Slow into your AI along with my prompt then?
(My comment was less about my behavior but an attempt to encourage others to evaluate my thinking in hopes that they may apply it to their own in order to benefit our collective understanding)
Same! Just earlier today I was wanting to do this with "The Moral Animal" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel."

It's probably the AI thing I'm most excited about, and I suspect we're not far from that, although I'm betting the copyright battles are the primary obstacle to such a future at this point.

The thing with Guns, Germs, and Steel is that it make it essentially all about geographic determinism. There's another book (Why the West Rules--For Now written before China had really fully emerged on the stage) which argues that, yes, geography played an important role in which cores emerged earliest. BUT if you look at the sweep of history, the eastern core was arguably more advanced than the western core at various times. So a head start can't be the only answer.
The book specifically considers Eurasia to be one geographical region and it does acknowledge the technological developments in China. The fact that Europe became the winner in this race, according to GGS, is a sign that while geography is important it does not determine the course of history. It is not all about geographic determinism
It is a snapshot in time, and so wrong if viewed in a longer context.

People from Europe, came to have the Industrial Revolution at just the correct moment.

Some small changes in history and it would have happened in India.

It is making a theory to fit the facts.

I do not think the author is a "white supremacist" but the book reads like that. Taking all the accidents of history and making them seem like destiny that Europeans rule the world (they do not, they never did, and they are fading from world domination fast)

I enjoyed both GGS and WTWRFN, but in a mode where I basically ignored the thesis, reading instead for the factual information so clearly presented. Like the coverage of the Polynesian diaspora in GGS that has really stuck with me.

Thinking Fast & Slow was a fun read, but I did not retain much more than the basic System I/II concept which I find is a useful device.

I thought the OP was joking!
It's not even clear that the dual process system 1/system 2 metaphor is accurate at all, so it may not be possible to redeem a book whose thesis is that the dual process model is correct.

It's not just that individual studies have failed to replicate. The whole field was in question at least a decade before the book was written, and since then many of the foundational results have failed to replicate. The book was in a sense the last hurrah of a theory that was on its way out, and the replication crisis administered the coup de grace IMO.

>This is exactly the kind of task that I want to deploy a long context window model on: "rewrite Thinking Fast and Slow taking into account the...

I want something similar but for children's literature. From Ralph and the Motorcycle to Peter Pan, a lot of stuff doesn't hold up.

The books provide plenty of utility. But many things don't hold up to modern thinking. LLMs provide the opportunity to embrace classic content while throwing off the need to improvise as one parses outmoded ideas.

It will not be anything lice classic content anymore.

You could not redact piece of art out of "old ideas". It is like re-drawing classics paintings but mask nipples and removing blood.

And books which could be redacted this way without falling apart — well, don't read such books at all and don't feed them to the children.

Literature for children must not be dumbed down, but exactly as for adults, but better.

It isn't redaction but reasonable and artful substitution. It isn't about dumbing down, but removing dumb ideas.
Maybe use chatGPT to make this make sense.
I would actually like to have books that had "Thinking Fast and Slow" as a prerequisite. Many data visualization books could be summed up as a bar chart is easily consumed by System 1. The visual noise creates mental strain on System 2.
"please finish game of thrones treating the impending zombie invasion as an allegory for global warming"

Also please omit "who has a better story than bran"

Didn't George say it is such an allegory?
Awesome prompt!