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by maxaw3 hours ago |
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upvoteby razodactyl46 minutes ago|
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Yep. I'm with you here. If it's a 4% loss now for training data to catch up and improve later, we're better off in the long run. I'd like to believe that generally people are nice to AI for the sheer sake of enforcing good communication practices.
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upvoteby dlev_pika1 hours ago|
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My choice too. Paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius -

You are not your thoughts, but they dye your soul.

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upvoteby madaxe_again1 hours ago|
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The sad thing is that you also lose at least 4% in real world actions by practicing kindness.

I'm 42. I have found that a depressingly large number of times in my life, being kind has got me precisely nowhere, whilst turning around and being decidedly unkind has made people move. I still always prefer kindness, and only resort to cruelty when kindness does not work - and to be clear this isn't some kind of "you are not bending to my impetuous whim", rather "you are not doing the one thing that you are being paid to do".

I've also found the same applies to me. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

So - I think the LLMs are just responding accurately to a real social phenomenon.

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upvoteby dwa35921 hours ago|
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sometimes i worry about this when i am yelling at the bot but i have experienced the opposite effect which is that by yelling at the bot i am done with yelling for that day or week. i am very calm afterwards and relieved thinking that, "yeah, these sota models are just word processor bricks after all".
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upvoteby irthomasthomas2 hours ago|
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But you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program. A computer is incapable of receiving it.

We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity. You be kind hoping the other person will reciprocate. That is the social contract. AI cannot participate in this, yet.

Edit: Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive. If there is no receiver, there is no kindness.

Apparently some people get a dopamine hit from roleplaying kindness toward inanimate objects. Whatever turns you on, no hang ups here. For me, that dopamine hit is not worth the 4% intelligence tax.

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upvoteby saulapremium7 minutes ago|
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>Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive. If there is no receiver, there is no kindness.

I guess, in some pendantic interpretation, but that doesn't seem relevant. Whether I am "practicing" or "roleplaying", I do it too, and I don't expect reciprocity.

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upvoteby irthomasthomas3 minutes ago|
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Your subconscious does. It is a trait selected by evolution for a reason. It builds stronger communities and improves survival rate. But none of that is applicable to LLMs. I am disputing that it is worth anything more than a temporary dopamine hit to pretend to be kind to an LLM and suffer 4% lower intelligence for it.
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upvoteby ahknight1 hours ago|
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Kindness is that, yes. Fundamentally, though, it's about being considerate in one's actions so as to not harm others. If someone truly believes that acting a certain way at any point risks their ability to reliably be kind in others, then it's a social kindness to be kind and considerate in all actions.

I'll not reach for the easy response and say "Be kind to the Earth" fails your definition without reaching for pedantry with "the Earth has living things" because the Earth is instead a wet rock that cannot understand kindness, yet we show it.

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upvoteby ricogallo1 hours ago|
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> We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity.

Yet, this law is so embedded in us that practicing kindness even towards a rock makes us feel good.

So practice kindness, first and foremost for yourself.

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upvoteby irthomasthomas1 hours ago|
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I do. But only towards entities capable of receiving it. Otherwise I am deceiving myself, and projecting intelligence that is not there. We (some of us) practice kindness automatically, but that trait was likely selected due to the benefit it gives us by activating the law of reciprocity.

Edit: Also, your feeling good after being kind essentially completes the transaction. But I know being kind to an LLM has zero impact on that LLM and I feel silly pretending it does.

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upvoteby dnautics50 minutes ago|
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> A computer is incapable of receiving it

Citation please.

Without examining the corpus, it's entirely possible that the training corpus has better results when you are kind to it, so one can imagine a situation where "reception of kindness" is meaningful, and in principle if you were an AI provider, you could RLHF your way to "being rude gets you worse results" as a means to train the human users.

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upvoteby Havoc2 hours ago|
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> But you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program.

And yet rubber duck debugging is a thing

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upvoteby moralestapia2 hours ago|
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What's your definition of rubber duck debugging?

Mine does not have anything to do with being kind to a computer program.

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