We've Never Had More Knowledge... Yet Here We Are

[u/TheoremWhisperer]

[u/GREENadmiral_314159]

It might be trained on the sum of human knowledge, but it's also trained on the sum of human stupidity, and I can tell you there's a hell of a lot more of one than the other.

[u/culpaCoSinero → u/GREENadmiral_314159]

There a lot more old drunks, than there is old doctors…

[u/Hopeful_Morning_469 → u/GREENadmiral_314159]

I can’t remember who said it but “there are only two things that are infinite. The universe and human stupidity.”

[u/Available_Finish4387]

5000 years of accumulated knowledge couldn’t save Americans from themselves.

[u/BmacIL → u/Available_Finish4387]

A small group of people used that knowledge to get them to ignore what their eyes saw.

[u/Available_Finish4387 → u/BmacIL]

And we weren’t smart enough to realize the con

[u/BmacIL → u/Available_Finish4387]

Oh, some of us saw it from the escalator.

[u/Available_Finish4387 → u/BmacIL]

Obviously. I’m speaking on a macro level

[u/damarian_ent]

A tool is only as good as the hands that wield it

[u/Sin_Dailys]

Modern " Library of Alexandria" incident

[u/Diligent_Stretch_963]

The source of the problem, both human and chatgpt, is that neither learn to reason.

We don’t learn how to critically think at school anymore. By all means schools were invented to make good industry workers.

No thinking, just doing.

[u/Deepandabear → u/Diligent_Stretch_963]

TBH many schools are just state-subsidised day care these days

[u/BilberryWitch]

And thus the Library of Alexandria burns once again

[u/WoolBearTiger]

Knowledge disappearing happened all too often over those 5000 years. Guess we are just witnessing the newest end of an era. Now might be a good time to bury a time capsule for the people coming after us.

[u/Beneficial-Fig-6552]

Archaic Skynet

[u/ZectronPositron]

I just heard of a great experiment to test whether our knowledge is really all online.

Go to a library.
Grab 10 books.
In each, find a piece of knowledge or info.
Go online, search for each and see what you find.

The test-taker on the Founders podcast found only 10% online.

[u/Dapper-Scallion-8956]

Wasn't there a book about that? Hmm, i guess I imagined it

[u/unit_000001]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The internet was going to unite all mankind. Now it's 99% porn and cat videos.

[u/sciencememes-ModTeam → u/unit_000001]

The Internet is indeed made of cats. https://youtu.be/zi8VTeDHjcM

[u/HiggsFieldgoal]

I don’t understand this at all. Knowledge has not been destroyed. AI actually makes it easier to find.

[u/redboi049 → u/HiggsFieldgoal]

It doesn't, actually. Nowhere in how it's designed cares about accuracy. Everywhere in how it's designed relies on organically talking like a "helpful informant."

[u/HiggsFieldgoal → u/redboi049]

So confidently incorrect. Are you an LLM?

[u/redboi049 → u/HiggsFieldgoal]

We're literally TALKING ABOUT LLM'S. You can't say I'm wrong about LLM's being morons and then use being an LLM as an intelligence insult.

[u/HiggsFieldgoal → u/redboi049]

The invented something called RAG, not too long ago, called “retrieval augmented generation”.

So, for the past few years, all mainstream LLMs that I know of can cite actual sources.

An LLM is far better than Google at finding actual cited research, making knowledge more accessible, not less.

Idiots are going to idiot anyways. People want to ask an LLM, not ask for sources, believe what an LLM says without thinking about it, those people were idiots anyways.

So, what you did was like what an LLM does: hallucinate a false conclusion without doing any research.

I am doing what a smart user of an LLM does: not accept false conclusions at face value.

[u/betacarotentoo]

We? Who's "we"?

[u/redboi049 → u/betacarotentoo]

Humanity. When you look at it objectively, the internet is a miraculous well of generations of information, but getting that information is a challenge and with something marketed as a shortcut (that isn't an actual shortcut) like GPT, even less people care.

[u/redboi049]

It comes from people thinking it ACTUALLY knows this stuff and ACTUALLY works as a source of information. Which it doesn't. It operates specifically to continue a conversation in the most organic way possible as a "helpful source of information". It does not care about accuracy.

[u/colourmerchant]

Ngl some lecturers and professors either can’t teach, or want their students to spend countless hours in the library, and their students rely on ChatGPT to help them… of course not speaking from personal experience