It is hard for me to give an honest, thorough, and charitable response to this post. Possibly no fault of the author: this has been a persistent problem for me on many Simulator Theory posts. I always come away with an impression of “I see interesting intuitions mixed with some conceptually/mathematically obscure restatements of existing content mixed with a lot of strained analogy-making mixed with a handful of claims that seem wrong or at least quite imprecise.” I’ll try to think about how to tease out these different components and offer better feedback, but I figured it’d be worth expressing my frustrated state of mind more directly first.
For people that are just reading cfoster0′s comment and then skipping a read of the post, I recommend you still take a look. I think his comment is a bit unfair and seems more like a statement of frustration with LLM analysis in general than commentary on this post in particular.
It is hard for me to give an honest, thorough, and charitable response to this post. Possibly no fault of the author: this has been a persistent problem for me on many Simulator Theory posts. I always come away with an impression of “I see interesting intuitions mixed with some conceptually/mathematically obscure restatements of existing content mixed with a lot of strained analogy-making mixed with a handful of claims that seem wrong or at least quite imprecise.” I’ll try to think about how to tease out these different components and offer better feedback, but I figured it’d be worth expressing my frustrated state of mind more directly first.
Maybe I should break this post down into different sections, because some of the remarks are about LLM Simulators, and some aren’t.
Remarks about LLM Simulators: 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 17
Other remarks : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18
For people that are just reading cfoster0′s comment and then skipping a read of the post, I recommend you still take a look. I think his comment is a bit unfair and seems more like a statement of frustration with LLM analysis in general than commentary on this post in particular.