Post by Paul Musgrave (@professormusgrave.bsky.social) on Bluesky — View on Aturi

I don't know, man, can a stochastic parrot take a half-remembered anecdote and systematically refine its internet searching to come up with *exactly* the resour

Misarticulation: Why We Sometimes Feel Our Words Don’t Match Our Thoughts

People do not always say what they mean. In everyday conversations, people regularly sense that they have not fully communicated what they had in mind—a subject

No, “AI” is not a Stochastic Parrot 🦜

I’ve recently come across a new flavor of AI denialism making the rounds.

Polly Wants a Better Argument

The “Stochastic Parrot” Argument is Both Wrong and Actively Harmful

Ask don't tell: Reducing sycophancy in large language models

Sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to favour user-affirming responses over critical engagement, has been identified as an alignment failure, particularly in high-stakes advisory and...

ECHO CHAMBERS AND EPISTEMIC BUBBLES

Discussion of the phenomena of post-truth and fake news often implicates the closed epistemic networks of social media. The recent conversation has, however, blurred two distinct social epistemic phenomena. An epistemic bubble is a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been left out, perhaps accidentally. An echo chamber is a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited. Members of epistemic bubbles lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system.

The mistake we all make... and the simple experiment that reveals it

Your answer reveals how you see the world – and the common error that hampers our decision making. In an extract from his new book, psychologist Richard Nisbett reveals the ‘mindware’ to help us think smarter

fenc.es — be wrong on the internet, productively

Trace the map of reasonable disagreement. Break arguments into statements, rate confidence and importance, and find the crux.

Towards Post-Interaction Computing: Addressing Immediacy, (un)Intentionality, Instability and Interaction Effects

We situate the debate on intentionality within the rise of cognitive neuroscience and argue that cognitive neuroscience can explain intentionality. We discuss the explanatory significance of ascribing intentionality to representations. At first, we ...

Why mental metaphors do not help us understand chatbot mistakes

The function of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT is based on detecting probabilistic patterns in the training data. This makes them vulnerable to generating factual mistakes in their outputs. Recently, it has become commonplace in philosophical, scientific, and popular discourses to capture such mistakes by metaphors that draw on discourses about the human mind. The two most popular metaphors at present are hallucinating and bullshitting. In this paper, we review, discuss, and criticise these mental metaphors. By applying conceptual metaphor theory, we provide numerous reasons why they do not succeed in providing us with a better understanding of factual chatbot mistakes. We conclude by calling for justifications of the epistemic feasibility and fruitfulness of the metaphors at issue. Furthermore, we raise the question what would be lost if we stopped trying to capture factual chatbot mistakes by mental metaphors.

Misplaced Divides? Discussing Political Disagreement With Strangers Can Be Unexpectedly Positive

Differences of opinion between people are common in everyday life, but discussing those differences openly in conversation may be unnecessarily rare. We report three experiments ( N = 1,264 U.S.-based adults) demonstrating that people’s interest in discussing important but potentially divisive topics is guided by their expectations about how positively the conversation will unfold, leaving them more interested in having a conversation with someone who agrees versus disagrees with them. People’s expectations about their conversations, however, were systematically miscalibrated such that people underestimated how positive these conversations would be—especially in cases of disagreement. Miscalibrated expectations stemmed from underestimating the degree of common ground that would emerge in conversation and from failing to appreciate the power of social forces in conversation that create social connection. Misunderstanding the outcomes of conversation could lead people to avoid discussing disagreements more often, creating a misplaced barrier to learning, social connection, free inquiry, and free expression.

AI and the Wisdom of Uncertainty

AI chatbots rarely say "I don't know," and neither, increasingly, do we. But we can cultivate our epistemic resilience.

The Breath of the Author

The palpable presence of someone else's mind in our best writing should give us pause about the encroachment of AI text