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by repeekad 598 days ago
I only added “Explain the reference to Plato’s Cave below:\n\n” before the copy pasted parent comment

What comes to mind is how language itself is merely a projection of human knowledge? experience? culture? social group? and trying to reverse engineer any kind of ground truth from language alone (like an LLM trying to “reason” through complex problems it’s not explicitly taught) is like trying to derive truth from the shadows while locked in the cave? maybe we just need more/higher fidelity shadows :)

2 comments

If you consider the whole of the problem, a portion is due to fundamental and unavoidable shortcomings of the language, and the rest is unskilled/normative usage of language.

Which set is bigger? I'd bet my money on the latter.

Complicating matters: you have to consider usage for both the sender and the receiver(s) (who then go on to spread "the" message to others).

I would say LLM has nothing with knowledge and Plato's Cave. LLM is The Great Gambler who was looking at the earth for a long time (but o ly through internet and for some reason repositories) and he excels in gambling, i.e. putting his/hers/its money on the most probable things to come up after the words someone spoke