[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.

[somewhatgoated]

Yea I didn’t mean actual physical violence but rules need painful consequences in some way to be meaningful?

[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...