Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Badri's avatar

In other words, the "proof" of the pudding is in eating it :)

Yes, over a long period of time (economic incentives?), people who cling on to the Lakatosian defense, will indeed admit diminishing returns, a need for a paradigm shift, or even redefine their objective! What methods can accelerate this and enable more first principles architecting of ideas?

We have seen them all in the LLM world:

- Redefinitions: Reasoning is "thinking harder" before you answer.

- If only: Claiming that it is just around the corner, but we are hitting a scaling wall, we are running out of tokens, we are short a few trillion dollars

- Defending "Jagged Intelligence" as if it were a thing, leave alone intelligence.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it

Expand full comment
rif a saurous's avatar

Nits: You write that "substances are just combinations of substances and structures", which is probably not what you meant to write, and "states describe properties of entities," but entities are not part of your ontology. Perhaps you meant that states describe properties of substances?

More centrally, you write (to me, correctly) that in vision, language, and robotics, the defense of construct validity is mostly vibes, but isn't all this nomological networks stuff mostly vibes with extra steps? You've got a big complicated nomological network, but we can argue forever about whether you've got the *right* network, before running any experiments. Even if your predictions look good, it seems you've got the same problems with an LLM and a nomological network --- maybe you didn't give it the right test yet.

Expand full comment
3 more comments...

No posts