Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by williamcotton 799 days ago
Good god, people, we measure knowledge all the time with testing. We have a difficult time measuring intelligence but we have no problem measuring someone’s knowledge about the major events that led up to the Battle of Waterloo.

Just give the participates the final from my French 3 exam but also in 100 different language combinations. I bet you do worse than ChatGPT.

1 comments

>> Good god, people, we measure knowledge all the time with testing.

In humans. Not in machines.

You're proposing to use a test of human knowledge as a test of computer knowledge, when the question in the first place is whether a computer can have knowledge at all. It's like giving an IQ test to a frog and concluding that the frog has no IQ because it can't answer the questions, only reversed: the machine answers the questions, therefore it has knowledge. Who cares about mechanisms, who cares how the answers are generated, if I see answers, that's knowledge.

Well that is a pre-scientific way to look at the world. I observe the sun, it looks like it's moving around the Earth, therefore the sun turns around the Earth. No room left for critical inquiry or understanding of the cause of phenomena. We have a test? Bash it against anything and we'll get some answers, and then we'll claim that they're the right answers because that's the right test, since it gave us the right answers. And all that, not for some mysterious physical phenomenon that we're not responsible for, but for a machine, created and programmed by humans, and we know exactly how.

No no. That's not good engineering, and it's not good science: it doesn't explain the how, and it doesn't explain the why.