[squidbeak]

You seem to be replying to a completely different post. You'll see I didn't once use the term 'intelligence', so the reprimand you lead with about the use of that term is pretty odd.

The ramble that follows has its curiosities, not least the compulsion you have to demean or insult your 'gullible', 'credulous' opponents, but is otherwise far from any point. The contention of yours I was replying to was your curiously absolute statement that human performance doesn't degrade with the introduction of irrelevant information. I gave you instances any of us can relate to where it definitely does degrade. Rather than dispute my point, you've allowed some kind of 'extra information' to bounce you around irrelevancies from one tangent to the next - through torture, blenders, animals as systems, etc etc. What you've actually done, quite beautifully, is restate my point for me.

[n4r9]

I may not agree with you but I appreciate your efforts to call out demaning and absolutist language on HN. It really drags the discussion down.

[mjburgess]

So you strawman'd my claim about degradation of performance to one in which "substantial", "irrelevant" and "almost all cases" have no flexibility to circumscribe scenarios, so that i must be making a universal claim... And then you take issue with my reply?

Why would you think that I'd deny that you can't find scenarios in which performance substantially degrades? Would I not countenance toture? As in my reply?

My reply is against your presumption that an appropriate response to the spirit-and-plain-meaning of my argument is to "go and find another scenario". It is this presumption, when addressed, short-circuits this scenario-finding dialogue: In my reply I address the whole families of scenarios you are appealing to where we fail to function well and show why there existence remains irrelevant to our analysis of llms