John's Covid-19, politics and futurism blog

 Having fiddled with ChatGPT for a while now, I have identified the following two risks. 1. Hallucination . It sometimes just makes stuff up. This is particularly annoying when you give it the information and it goes on a tangent and makes stuff up that was not in the source information. For example, when I gave it some meeting notes, it went on a tangent about N-P completeness in computer science. OK?!? 2. Memory errors . The memory feature that they have added messes up a lot. I have noticed that it performs two mistakes: Recites what it gave you previously , even if the topic was utterly different . For example I gave it some meeting notes to summarise and it spat out some Python code that I had asked for last year. Totally irrelevant! Recites what it gave you previously, because the content was similar , in its opinion. I created a new chat, gave it the meeting notes, and it gave me the PREVIOUS summary of the previous set of meeting notes. In one case it was even worse! It g...

Had an interesting discussion and took the following notes.  Differentiating epistemic positions and beliefs What is the difference between fake news and a conspiracy theory? First, let me define my understanding of a conspiracy theory. I understand it to mean: a) There is a theory (belief, proposition, hypothesis) that b) There exists a conspiracy (secret plan amongst a group of two or more people) c) To do something malevolent (harmful) to society. So for example, if we know Lee Harvey Oswald or John Wilkes Booth worked with others, then they were conspirators. At the time they were planning to perform their malevolent acts (assassination), they were effectively, conspiring (Latin: Con- together; -spirare: to breathe or hope; compare e.g. to be inspired). So, if someone at the time suspected them of plotting murder, then, that person would have a theory that there was a conspiracy afoot. A person believing in that theory would, in fact, on my definition, have a conspiracy theory....