I’ve listened to the episode a few days back (this is an excellent post and transcript btw).
Even though they pin-point varies issues in society such as radical leftism, stagnation in the Scientific community, the student debt, etc; In my opinion, most of the episode was “meh” (Ignoring also that they are two outsiders of academia criticizing it so much and that Weinstein claims that he has a unifying theory of Physics!).
The thing which interested me the most was the bit about Mimetic Theory. I’m surprised at how evident it’s what he is saying.
How the theories of Rene Girard are an antidote to strong libertarian impulses.
So, I think there’s so much more to Rene Girard than an antidote to “libertarian impulses”. For me, this was the biggest takeaway of the entire podcast and shed a new light on Thiel’s book: Zero To One and his investment philosophy (e.g. Facebook).
We are so worried about the desires of our neighbors that we do not realize the web of opportunities that hides on what we’re not seeing. Re-contextualizing our desires and analyzing them is key in creative and innovative work and much of these ideas I take from Thiel and Rene Girard.
Someone ran the same questions through GPT and got similar responses back, so that’s a point towards this not being a hoax, but just a sophisticated chat-bot. Still doesn’t avoid editing or cherry-picking.
Now, while I feel this article being a bit interesting, it’s still missing the point of what would get me interested in the first place… if it has read Les Miserables and can draw conclusion on what it is about, what else has LaMDA read? Can it draw parallels with other novels?
If it would had responded something like, “Actually… Les Miserables is plagiarized from so and so, you can find similar word-structure in this book...” something truly novel, or funny that would have made the case for sentience more than anything. I think the response about being useful are correct to some extent, since the only reason why I use copilot is because it’s useful.
So this point would actually be more interesting to read about e.g. has LaMDA read interesting papers, can it summarize it? I would be interested in seeing it ask difficult questions… try to get something funny/creative out of it. But as this wasn’t shown I think they were asked and the responses were edited out.