Did I manage to actually convey something meaningful to you or did I just wordcel 5,000 nice-sounding words together? How would you be sure?
I think you can actually judge that by the value/effort balance of the communication.
I see a kind of spectrum between teaching and.. let’s call it meditation (as in “meditate on X”), where both can convey meaningful ideas and concepts, but the latter takes much more effort to get anything useful, and yields more random results.
With teaching, I’m probably getting all the intended ideas on my first interpretation, and then it’s reliably useful to me. With meditation, I have to bring a lot more effort and ideas myself to try to get something meaningful out of it, and I might still be wrong. You can pick any random sentence and ponder it as a koan, free-associating about it until you feel like you learned or realized something useful. But that’ll feel very different from just going on wikipedia and learning something useful.
It is a spectrum though. GPT-3 doesn’t give random sentences, but when I play around with it and occasionally find something “useful,” it feels more like I’m doing the koan thing (more effortful). Reading good blog posts is much less effortful per value added.
I think you can actually judge that by the value/effort balance of the communication.
I see a kind of spectrum between teaching and.. let’s call it meditation (as in “meditate on X”), where both can convey meaningful ideas and concepts, but the latter takes much more effort to get anything useful, and yields more random results.
With teaching, I’m probably getting all the intended ideas on my first interpretation, and then it’s reliably useful to me. With meditation, I have to bring a lot more effort and ideas myself to try to get something meaningful out of it, and I might still be wrong. You can pick any random sentence and ponder it as a koan, free-associating about it until you feel like you learned or realized something useful. But that’ll feel very different from just going on wikipedia and learning something useful.
It is a spectrum though. GPT-3 doesn’t give random sentences, but when I play around with it and occasionally find something “useful,” it feels more like I’m doing the koan thing (more effortful). Reading good blog posts is much less effortful per value added.