[wanderingmind]

Humanity has been using steel for over a millenia, however it's only in the past 100 years or so we have a good understanding of how carbon interacts with iron at an atomic level to create the strength characteristics that makes it useful. Based on this argument, we should not have used steel, until we had a complete first principles understanding.

[i_have_an_idea]

What if you substituted "steel" with "asbestos" in your argument.

[irishcoffee]

Asbestos, lead paint, cigarettes, heroin(perscribed generously for basically whatever the doc felt like), "Radithor" (patent medicine containing radium-226 and 228, marketed as a "perpetual sunshine" energy tonic and cure for over 150 diseases), bloodletting, mercury treatments for syphilis, tobacco smoke enemas (yep that was a real thing), milk-based blood transfusions.

Didn't understand those either and used the fuck out of them because "the experts" said we should.

[yesco]

This is why I believe we should only listen to amateur opinions on everything, experts simply lack historical credibility. For example I've recently purchased a healing crystal (half off) for only $5000 dollars! It cleared up the imbalanced energies my street guru told me about right away.

I would never have been made aware about the consequences of imbalanced energies in the first place if I had asked an expert instead. They probably wouldn't even suggest an immediate solution to the problem like my reliable street guru always does! Something to consider.

[collingreen]

Ironically the street guru hucksters might have a better track record than the dangerous products mentioned above.

Less charitably, it's a mistake to imply that simply being a bigger corporation makes you go from street guru to "expert". Bigger company trying to make money off of you at any risk to you is just the same bucket at a different scale. In this context the other side is probably "expert consumer advocate" since that fits the idea above of these dangerous products advertised as cure alls.

[nickpsecurity]

It can be worse in terms of justice. You might be able to charge or win in court against a street hustler. Most people can't beat a big company in court. They usually won't even try.

[yesco]

I honestly agree with you in many respects, I'm simply spinning in some nuance to a topic I keep seeing.

The snake oil salesmen is productive precisely because the actual effects of the snake oil they are selling is unknown to the consumer they are introducing it to. There isn't easy answers to this, it's just a fact of life that we can try our best mitigate.

And apparently fish oil actually does help your brain. Weird world we live in.

So I think the focus on "experts" is actually a consequence of declining institutional credentialism. You didn't trust them for claiming to be experts, you trusted the institutions who called them experts and said you should trust them for that reason. But expertise implies competence not trust. Not everyone operates with good intentions even with the right credentials, including many institutions themselves.

[wincy]

Smoking cigarettes didn’t really matter for as long as we were regularly burning wood for fuel. Turns out just burning pretty much anything and breathing in the particles is really bad for you. Makes sense we didn’t realize it was bad until we stopped burning logs and coal for home heating and cooking.

[sarchertech]

Cigarettes actually are uniquely bad when it comes to lung cancer. Lung cancer was very rare in 1900 and before when everyone was still burning wood or coal for warmth and cooking. Lung cancer rates didn’t take off until cigarette popularity exploded after WWI.

Chewing tobacco also causes mouth cancer, so there’s more to it than just inhaling byproducts of combustion.

[red-iron-pine]

1) people smoked a lot more in the post WWI econ boom

2) additives or even just paper compound the negative effects of the smoke on the lungs.

like, firefighters - who usually have physical fitness requirements and don't smoke - see rates of lung cancer similar to moderate smokers, simply due to the higher volume of particulate and chems hitting their lungs.

it is dose-dependant, and firefighers who see more fires see more cancer. occasional tobacco pipe smokers in 1850 saw less lung cancer than 2-pack-a-day post-WW2 smokers.

[sarchertech]

I’m unsure where your firefighters have the same lung cancer risk as moderate smokers information comes from, but it’s wrong.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7063017/

Here’s an meta-analysis of 49 studies that shows no increase in lung cancer.

And of course it’s dose dependent. But newer studies show that years smoking is much more important than intensity when it comes to lung cancer risk. So smoking half a pack a day for 20 years is worse than a pack a day for 10 years.

Dry snuff comes with a 2-8x increase in oral cancer and a 10-12x increase in nasal and sinus cancer.

Tobacco is a carcinogen—even without additives. In addition to epidemiological evidence we have a plausible mechanism of action.

Alkaloids in the leaf convert into carcinogenic TSNAs during curing, aging, or drying. Tobacco plants absorbs heavy metals. And tobacco plants absorb polonium-210.

There’s a lot of misinformation and misleading interpretations out there that come from years of the tobacco industry attempting to create uncertainty. Especially with your firefighter myth, I think you might have got hold of some of it.

[krsw]

From what I remember reading chewing tobacco is orders of magnitude less cancer causing than smoking. So much so, that some groups see it as harmful to lump it in with smoking or vaping. If you really need some nic, popping a zyn is probably the least harmful way to get it.

[djhn]

Do these… ”groups”, which would rather you not lump chewing tobacco together with other tobacco products… manufacture and sell chewing tobacco?

[mrguyorama]

Also scientists were recognizing the link decades before governments finally caved and regulated the industry and decades more before those industries were significantly curtailed by limiting advertising.

Then they bought a new brand name and started running the same playbook.

[irishcoffee]

I didn't mention smoking cigarettes at all. I said people literally blew smoke up their ass. Huh, I wonder if that's where the saying came from, now that I think about it.

[gbanfalvi]

Steel has almost always (as in 99.99...% of the time) delivered to our expectations based on our understanding of it.

The cases where we built something out of steel and it failed are _massively_ outnumbered by the instances where we used it where/when suitable. If we built something in steel and it failed/someone died we stopped doing that pretty soon after.

[nix0n]

This is partly due to having a safety factor: i.e. using twice as much steel as you think you need.

Understanding means knowing the limits of your own understanding, and building in safeguards.

[red-iron-pine]

asbestos also delivered, and did a great job, at its intended functions.

fire retardant, keeps the rats out. flawless performance.

people working around it get sick but lots of people get sick, why is that a problem?

[izucken]

Yeah but well you see, humans did not go extinct from just asbestos!

[JoshGG]

Which year did we use steel to replace human workers and automate decision-making?

[carlosjobim]

The entire industrial revolution was steel replacing human workers. And that is still the backbone of the world today. We are still living the industrial revolution.

Just like the invention of fire happened ages ago, but is still a crucial part of life today.

[almostdeadguy]

Famously Andrew Carnegie spent years trying to get the steel to stop talking about goblins.

[gus_massa]

Steel is almost magic. Stainless steel is beyond magic.

I had a specialization in Chemistry in High School. For some analysis, the fist step is to dissolve everything in boiling Nitric Acid. But stainless steel has Chrome is like a spell of protection, so you must use boiling Hydrochloric Acid instead. I have no idea why. It's just like magic. It may have Nickel, Molybdenum, and other metals, that give it more magical properties.

A few years ago there was a nice post about copying a normal steel alloy for knives to get an equivalent made of stainless steel. You need to reduce the the Carbon content to make it less brittle. And they had to add Vanadium so it keeps the sharpness of the knives. I have no idea why. It's just like magic.

If you have half an hour, it's worth reading, but beware that it has too many technical details that are close to magical https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/03/25/cpm-magnacut/ (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29696120 | 375 points | Dec 2021 | 108 comments)

[kmeisthax]

That's not magic, that's alchemy!

[someguyiguess]

Famously Andrew Carnegie dodged the point

[almostdeadguy]

That the industrial revolutions use of steel to augment or replace labor was similar in every way to using LLMs to do the same? Seems on point to me.

[pixl97]

It was Frick who did not dodge so well.

[red-iron-pine]

Carnegie Mellon has an entire building dedicated to eradicating the goblin threat. Also eliminating unions.

[surgical_fire]

No, it was actually engines.

The mechanism behind engines were fully understood, any experiments with engines were reproducible and measurable. You could get an engine and create schematics by reverse engireening it.

LLMs, useful as they may be, are not that.

[canjobear]

The mechanics of engines was understood at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and they were fully reproducible: all of which is true of LLMs today. An LLM is a bunch of floating point numbers and simple operations on them, all of which are fully known.

But the way that steam engines emergently transformed heat into work was not understood at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Figuring this out led to an entire new branch of physics, thermodynamics. Figuring out how big next-token predictors give rise to interesting systems is likely to lead to similarly new ideas.

[carlosjobim]

And what might an engine be made of? And a power plant? And a locomotive? And a ship?

[surgical_fire]

Really? jfc.

If that's your rationale we have been replacing humans with atoms. But humans are also made of atoms. Nothing was ever replaced with anything.

[saltcured]

See, now that was a good abstraction.

Centuries later, we still learn new tricks for predicting and controlling the chaos of combustion, but those early engines already wrapped it up in a black box that we could more or less ignore.

[someguyiguess]

Around 1928ish

[red-iron-pine]

explain

[surgical_fire]

This is a very low-effort argument.

Humans could understand properties of steel long before they knew how Carbon interacted with Iron. Steel always behaved in a predictable, reproducible way. Empirical experiments with steel usage yielded outputs that could be documented and passed along. You could measure steel for its quality, etc.

The same cannot be said of LLMs. This is not to say they are not useful, this was never the claim of people that point at it's nondeterministic behavior and our lack of understanding of their workings to incorporate them into established processes.

Of course the hype merchants don't really care about any of this. They want to make destructive amounts of money out of it, consequences be damned.

[qwery]

Assuming your timeline and metallurgical claims to be true, you're conflating engineering and (materials) science.

Humans have been using steel for however long, when and where it was understood to be an appropriate solution to a problem. In some sense, engineering is the development and application of that understanding. You do not need to have a molecular explanation of the interaction between carbon and iron to do effective engineering[-1] with steel.[0] Science seeks to explain how and why things are the way they are, and this can inform engineering, but it is not prerequisite.

I think that machine learning as a field has more of an understanding of how LLMs work than your parent post makes out. But I agree with the thrust of that comment because it's obvious that the reckless startups that are pushing LLMs as a solution to everything are not doing effective engineering.

[-1] "effective engineering" -- that's getting results, yes, but only with reasonable efficiency and always with safety being a fundamental consideration throughout

[0] No, I'm not saying that every instance of the use of steel has been effective/efficient/safe.

[pixl97]

>do not need to have a molecular explanation of the interaction between carbon and iron to do effective engineering

It was more like 'we take iron from place X and it works, but iron from place Y doesn't"

This is why the invention of steel isnt really recognized before 1740. We were blind to molecular impurities

[nutjob2]

That's not his point at all. He advocates using LLMs.

The correct analogy is: if we just scale and improve steel enough, we'll get a flying car.

[lukan]

Well, we did build airplanes out of steel, but there are better (lighter) materials avaiable. But the developement of car engines did directly enabled airplane engines. Not sure if this is the right analogy path, but I kind of suspect similar with LLM's/transformers. They will be a important part.

[jagged-chisel]

An important stepping stone, perhaps. But I don’t think the final AGI thing will necessarily contain LLMs.

[lukan]

I don't know. I know I used to be pretty AI sceptic, until they became good enough to help with non trivial code problems on their own.

I strongly suspect, that we will come to a point, where it gets impossible to tell if something is AGI and consciouss or not.

[dreis_sw]

History shows continuous evolution, there won't be a "final AGI thing". The definition of AGI is so vague anyways that any conversation around it is hardly useful. 5 years ago, what we have today would have been considered AGI.

[jagged-chisel]

> 5 years ago, what we have today would have been considered AGI.

Were it you could pipe today’s LLM to an interface usable by someone 5 years ago, they might be impressed by the incremental improvement, but it would be obvious soon enough that it’s still not AGI.

[IAmBroom]

Perhaps Douglas-Adamsesque the LLMs will specify the AGI.

[nutjob2]

> Well, we did build airplanes out of steel, but there are better (lighter) materials avaiable.

That's exactly my point. In this analogy LLMs are steel, but the flying things are made out of aluminum, lithium and titanium and not steel. We need a better idea than LLMs because LLMs's are not suddenly going to turn into something they are not.

[someguyiguess]

We literally did that though. Walk outside and look up.

[ashtonshears]

Poor correlation comparing physical material to computer technology

[idiotsecant]

Why

[ashtonshears]

Computer technology has many significant unique factors compared to other technologies

[datsci_est_2015]

Let me just quickly use absurdism to illustrate why argument by analogy is weak (and unfortunately overused on HN):

“”” Humanity has been using celibacy for over a millenia, however it's only in the past 100 years or so we have a good understanding of not having sex affects the psychology of a person, turning them into an ubermensch. Based on this argument, we should have never stopped having sex, until we had a complete first principles understanding. “””

Analogies can produce a lot of words, making it appear to be a high effort comment, but it also shifts the argument to why or why not an analogy is good or not, and away from the points the original poster was trying to make. And, by Sturgeon’s Law, most analogies are utter crap on top of being an already weak way to form an argument.

[salad-tycoon]

In my life I’ve come across a few people who are really good at making analogies and it’s wonderful and makes mine look like a child’s scribble next to a Monet.

In fact, I think analogies are some of the most powerful rhetorical devices and, unsurprisingly, one of the most difficult to master.

Look at some of the all time, almost supernaturally skilled, analogists: Jesus, Plato, Buddha, Aesop, Socrates. Their analogies will be eternal.

Now that said, we aren’t always seeing quite that level of skill often here on HN (or anywhere) but when you see a great analogy, it’s like…[scratch that, I’m resisting the urge to force an analogy here].

[datsci_est_2015]

I would tend to agree that the list of effective analogies is so small that the orators who muttered them are celebrated for millennia.

[dakolli]

pro LLM people are the kings of ad hoc fallacy. Why did you type this? You can consistently test steel and get a good idea of when and where it will break in a system without knowing its molecular structure.

LLMs are literally stochastic by nature and can't be relied on for anything critical as its impossible to determine why they fail, regardless of the deterministic tooling you build around them.

[handoflixue]

> LLMs are literally stochastic by nature and can't be relied on for anything critical

Ahh, yes, unlike humans, who are completely deterministic, and thus can be trusted.

[steveBK123]

Humans can be governed by rules with consequences and replaced with individuals with a appropriate level of risk taking / rule following for the role.

[somewhatgoated]

Rules and consequences seem to apply to humans in a similar way as prompts and harnesses govern LLMs. The greater the level of power a human possesses the less they are governed by these restraints, this doesnt apply to LLMs so at least in that aspect they are an improvement. But yea we can’t really punish or inflict pain on them - this seems like a problem

[steveBK123]

I think a simpler model is variety.

There are billions of people, you can interview/hire/fire until you get the right match.

There are 2? frontier LLM providers. 5? if you are more generous / ok with more trailing edge.

Everyone thought OpenAI was great, until Claude got better in Q1 and they switched to Anthropic, and then Codex got better and a good chunk moved back to OpenAI.. Seems kind of binary currently.

[handoflixue]

Why does it matter if you can inflict pain on them? Is that normal and acceptable in your line of work?

[wild_egg]

Being able to fire someone, thus causing potentially significant hardship, is considered quite normal and acceptable in most lines of work.

[GigaDingus]

Which has, famously, been a great consolation for people who suffered the consequences of human failure in the past

[handoflixue]

That seems like it applies just fine to LLMs as well: You can replace an LLM with a different model, different prompts, etc. for the appropriate level of risk taking. Rule following is even easier, given you can sandbox them.

[steveBK123]

Theres at best a handful of frontier models vs billions of people and millions of SWEs.

[someguyiguess]

You clearly have never met a human

[steveBK123]

If you cannot get humans to do roughly what you want as a manager, good luck with LLMs.

[hansmayer]

Wow, such a nasty view to hold. What's next, the Altman's bullshit argument about "all the food" that the humans need to grow up and develop brain ? Humans are intelligent. Humans can generalise and invent new concepts, ideas and art. LLMs are none of that.

[keybored]

What is the ad hoc fallacy? From googling I didn’t find any convincing definitions (definitions that demonstrate that it is a logical fallacy).

[jibal]

https://finmasters.com/ad-hoc-fallacy/

> Ad hoc fallacy is a fallacious rhetorical strategy in which a person presents a new explanation – that is unjustified or simply unreasonable – of why their original belief or hypothesis is correct after evidence that contradicts the previous explanation has emerged.

https://cerebralfaith.net/logical-fallacy-series-part-13-ad-...

> An argument is ad hoc if its only given in an attempt to avoid the proponent’s belief from being falsified. A person who is caught in a lie and then has to make up new lies in order to preserve the original lie is acting in an ad hoc manner.

It should be clear why the ad hoc fallacy is a fallacy.

[keybored]

Thanks. I’m by default disposition suspicious of fallacies that are not logical fallacies. And I’m not convinced that this is a solid fallacy.

> > Ad hoc fallacy is a fallacious rhetorical strategy in which a person presents a new explanation – that is unjustified or simply unreasonable – of why their original belief or hypothesis is correct after evidence that contradicts the previous explanation has emerged.

That someone jumps to a new thing once something is refuted just looks like rhetoric to me. Not fallacious rhetoric.

> > that is unjustified or simply unreasonable

So it needs to be these things as well. But why are not these points the problematic part?

It seems impractical to usefully label an argument in this way since you either call any new argument (that is also unjustified or unreasonable) a fallacy, or divine that the argumenter is intending to be dishonest.

> > https://cerebralfaith.net/logical-fallacy-series-part-13-ad-...

This was one of the results of my googling.

> > One example of this logical fallacy that immediately comes to mind is the multiverse hypothesis. When Atheists are presented with The Fine Tuning Argument For God’s Existence, many of them will respond to it by giving the multiverse hypothesis. [...] Given an infinite number of universes, there were an infinite number of chances, and therefore any improbable event is guaranteed to actualize somewhere at some point.

So why is this a problem?

> > There are many problems with this theory, not the least of which is that there’s no evidence that a multiverse even exists! There’s no evidence that an infinite number of universes exist! No one knows if there’s even one other universe, much less an infinite number of them! You can’t detect these other universes in any way! You can’t see them, you can’t hear them, you can’t smell them, you can’t touch them, you can’t taste them, you can’t detect them with sonar or any other way. They are completely and utterly unknowable to us. I find it ironic that atheists, who are infamous for mocking religious people for their “blind faith”, themselves are guilty of having blind faith! Namely, blind faith in an infinite number of universes!

> > This explanation is one example of the ad hoc fallacy. The multiverse hypothesis is propagated for no other reason than to keep atheism from being falsified. The theory is ad hoc because the only reason to embrace it is to keep atheism from being falsified! For if this universe is the only one there is, then there’s no other rational explanation for why the laws of physics fell into the life permitting range other than that they were designed by an intelligent Creator!

Allow me to restate. It is a fallacy because there is no evidence of the theory. And further that (perhaps following from the no-evidence part in their mind) there is no reason to hold this theory other than from arguing against theists.

Yeah there is no reason to hold a theory from physics other than wanting to prove theists wrong.

Why? Because my argument for theism is so water-proof that this would be the only hope that they would have of refuting it.

I find that very unconvincing. (The argument for this fallacy. I can take or leave the God/unGod part.)

[jibal]

I only gave the definition from cerebralfaith ... I didn't read their example, which I agree is bogus. My mistake for including that reference without reading the rest.

> I’m by default disposition suspicious of fallacies that are not logical fallacies.

You mean formal fallacies. Informal fallacies like ad hoc are still logical fallacies.

> divine that the argumenter is intending to be dishonest

The intent is obvious when someone keeps inventing some new argument when their previous one is shown to be erroneous--they are attached to the conclusion, not guided by truthseeking. But divining intent isn't a necessity ... the process is not logically valid.

[keybored]

Reasoning is the slave of the passions. That’s the way it is and the only way it can work.

Something needs to motivate someone to argue for or against something. Yes, this is I guess called motivated reasoning. And when their argument X is disproven—do they fold? Not if sufficiently motivated; then they move on to argument Y.

This is not fallacious. It is merely, quite often, done in a rude manner since most people do not seem to add any acknowledgement about being wrong about argument X. They simply move to argument Y without any ceremony.

Good form would be: Okay, I see now that argument X is wrong. However, I would next like to present argument Y...

[abcde666777]

Where did he say not to use LLMs? Oh that's right: he didn't.

[burnte]

Poor steel didn't quite have the same consequences, however.

[hansmayer]

Oh for crying out loud! Let's stop inventing fake analogies to justify the inherent LLM shortcomings! Those of us who are critical - are only using the standards that the LLM companies set themselves ("superintelligence", "pocket phds" bla blabla), to hold them accountable. When does the grift stop?