• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • The original marshmallow experiment is so popular to cite because it is a “just so story” – that is, as typically explained, it presents a moral lesson that seems intuitively obvious. That’s one reason the result stood for so long without attempts to reproduce it.

    Such attempts have now been made, and no one can reproduce the reported clarity of the original. One interpretation of this is related to the wealth of the families involved: the original subjects were, after all, children of Stanford University students, and as such came from families of relative wealth.

    There are studies which reach the conclusion you’re reporting (likely popularized by this Atlantic article but it’s paywalled so I can’t check), but the way you present this as a “fun fact” is turning the test into a different “just so story”.

    The reality is that, while there are some stats gathered from the marshmallow test and followups that could be interpreted that way, the actual data gathered is too messy and inconclusive to draw any definitive conclusions.



  • As far as I can tell from the article, the definition of “smarter” was left to the respondents, and “answers as if it knows many things that I don’t know” is certainly a reasonable definition – even if you understand that, technically speaking, an LLM doesn’t know anything.

    As an example, I used ChatGPT just now to help me compose this post, and the answer it gave me seemed pretty “smart”:

    what’s a good word to describe the people in a poll who answer the questions? I didn’t want to use “subjects” because that could get confused with the topics covered in the poll.

    “Respondents” is a good choice. It clearly refers to the people answering the questions without ambiguity.

    The poll is interesting for the other stats it provides, but all the snark about these people being dumber than LLMs is just silly.






  • That’s an overly negative take. Yes, there are serious challenges to the production of lab-grown meat; Wikipedia provides a good summary. This isn’t a business that’s ready to take off soon. But humans who are actually smart and do know what they’re doing are working to solve these things.

    The challenges are serious, and anyone telling you “world is simple and future is bright” about the future of this industry, yeah, that’s bullshit. I’ve never heard anyone say that, and I don’t know where you heard that from. It might never be a viable industry. But it’s not just a gimmick to keep fleecing VC investors.