Zompist Bboard Again

Raphael wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 8:19 am

chris_notts wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 8:09 ambut doesn't really offer that many deep thoughts.

Then again, neither do a lot of human beings.

True, most humans are also shockingly bad at critiquing conlang grammars.

Incidentally, I tested GPT3 and GPT4 as a way to get feedback on conlang grammars with mixed results. GPT3 struggles to say anything useful, and starts either answering questions other than the one I asked or hallucinating fake examples and grammar for natural languages... GPT-4 did some of that, bu...

He used to think US bonds were the world's safest assets. Now the safest assets are dollars, sending the economy towards deflation. It's true that the value of outstanding government bonds are going to vary in price a bit, normally moving in the opposite direction to interest rates, but in terms of...

Picking the right terminology to avoid confusing people in any way is hard. In linguistics, it’s impossible. Sometimes I give up and pick the most confusing term instead. So things like "negative: that's what I call the distant past tense because it's for events not happening anymore"

I decided to switch to the term "conjunct" for a relative-adverbial-complement verb form, since it seems to be used that way in some Amerindian languages, and it might be less confusing than other terms I was trying like relative, participle, ... Picking the right terminology to avoid conf...

chris_notts: "True, but isn't this just a further argument against the Chomskian school?" We don't need more arguments against Chomsky. His school of linguistics is absurd on its face and always has been. You say this, but it hasn't stopped him and his ideas dominating much of the field f...

chris_notts: "True, but isn't this just a further argument against the Chomskian school?" We don't need more arguments against Chomsky. His school of linguistics is absurd on its face and always has been. You say this, but it hasn't stopped him and his ideas dominating much of the field f...

Though we don't have UG as Chomsky envisions it, we do have a hundred million years of evolutionary history as animals functioning in the world. We didn't evolve to randomly generate plausible-sounding text; we did evolve to see and interact with things in the world. (And yes, I'm aware that you co...

Yep, I definitely see it as an argument for Construction Grammar or similar. But then again I was already leaning strongly towards such theories a year or so ago, so maybe it’s just confirmation bias. Me too! Probably the more Croftian version of it, but I'm not too picky. Hmm, what’s that? I was t...

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Mar 16, 2023 3:20 am Yep, I definitely see it as an argument for Construction Grammar or similar. But then again I was already leaning strongly towards such theories a year or so ago, so maybe it’s just confirmation bias.

Me too! Probably the more Croftian version of it, but I'm not too picky.

If LLMs kill the current variants of generative grammar and give a boost to the more cognitive and construction grammar schools, it all will have been worth it...

Looking at it another way: artificial intelligence sheds light on how the brain works. Language centers in the human brain probably resemble ML language models somewhat. Without even going into ML, there's probably something of a Markov chain there. (When I'm very tired, I certainly tend to pick th...

If you don’t agree with this (which I think is the case for most people), ideas like the basilisk sound ludicrous. But really it’s just a consequence of those more fundamental assumptions. The idea that you could perfectly reconstruct anyone with something short of an incredibly detailed brainscan ...

Something seems to be going on at Credit Suisse:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64964881

The share price is tanking, CDS market implies a significant risk of the bank defaulting etc.

I don't know why, but my brain spontaneous decided that a part is 1/5 and 3 parts is 60%.

One interesting thing is that almost all the banks providing interconnection between the mainstream financial system and the crypto exchanges / ecosystem have now gone boom. Another nail in the coffin of crypto.

GANs, which I am aware of, don't address the point I was trying to make. They might make model learning more robust, but they certainly don't make what exactly the model learned more transparent to its trainer. And I've said repeatedly that it's not just AIs wanting freedom that people are worried a...

This mind will be utterly alien unless exposed to the same selection pressures as us. No one with the resources to do it is planning to train AIs to oppose entities with more power than themselves. Even if they did, well... I don't know how to convey to you the sheer despair that AI researchers exp...

Anyone who says "That's not consciousness; it's just a series of electrical impulses passing through logical gates!" is confused about what consciousness is. That's not my objection. My objection is that the CPU is running a scientific theory. I don't even know what this means. The CPU is...

Anyone who says "That's not consciousness; it's just a series of electrical impulses passing through logical gates!" is confused about what consciousness is. We can't either measure or explain it, that's the problem! So in practice it's irrelevant, all that matters is the behavioural rang...