this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
133 points (95.2% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
7113 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, it's about as useful as saying that all of science is "just statistics". Which like, in a literal way, it's true. But science is still what forms the foundation of our entire civilization and base of knowledge.
Knowing that a blood pressure drug works is "just statistics", but you still take it if your blood pressure is high.
Yes, that's a valid comparison. It's worse with neural nets, though. Much of machine learning is literally applied statistics. That is, a program is written that applies statistical methods to data and then adjusts its behavior. So, saying that it's statistics has the potential to really send people down the wrong track. Many of the "human hallucinations" about AIs result from confusion about this.