All posts tagged: contrarian

The right way to be a scientific contrarian

The right way to be a scientific contrarian

Published by Jenni Sidey

There are, in general, two ways in which scientific advancement occurs. There’s the slow, incremental change that represents most scientific advances: where the existing scientific foundation gets built upon in a small but meaningful way. Typically, we perform experiments or observations, acquire new data, better determine key parameters about whatever it is we’re investigating, but in a way that doesn’t invalidate our revolutionize our prior understanding. On the other hand, there are also scientific revolutions: where a new discovery, or sometimes even just a new theoretical framework, blows up our old scientific foundation, and demands that we replace it with an entirely new conception about how some phenomenon in the Universe actually works. This latter class of advances — representing huge shifts in our scientific foundations — have happened many times before. Examples include: Kepler’s development of a heliocentric solar system with elliptical planetary orbits, the theory of continental drift and plate tectonics for describing Earth’s crust, the Darwin’s theory of evolution, guided by the mechanism of natural selection and random mutations, and Einstein’s overthrow …

7 Tricks to Disarm a Contrarian Spouse or Partner

7 Tricks to Disarm a Contrarian Spouse or Partner

Published by Jenni Sidey

If you have ever told your spouse or partner, “Y’know, it feels like you debate everything I say,” and they responded, “No, I don’t,” you may have felt as if you were trapped in a verbal Escher painting. Some people seem to take a tad too much pleasure in contradicting or at least qualifying whatever we say. These people are sometimes referred to as contrarians, and it can be challenging and even disagreeable to be committed to them in long-term relationships. Most of us assume that there are infinite ways that people can respond during conversations; however, I believe that conversational dynamics tend to fall into patterns. During my 18 years of private practice as a psychotherapist and interacting with thousands of students, I’ve observed that people have default responses with clear motivations: to connect with, comfort, or contradict other people. Firstly, the human mind has a negativity bias, and my personal philosophical belief is that people subconsciously search for supposed “truth” or accuracy by coming to a synthesis of disparate viewpoints. Attributed to 18th-century …

Yann LeCun’s new venture is a contrarian bet against large language models

Yann LeCun’s new venture is a contrarian bet against large language models

Published by skeptic

You were working on AI long before LLMs became a mainstream approach. But since ChatGPT broke out, LLMs have become almost synonymous with AI. Yes, and we are going to change that. The public face of AI, perhaps, is mostly LLMs and chatbots of various types. But the latest ones of those are not pure LLMs. They are LLM plus a lot of things, like perception systems and code that solves particular problems. So we are going to see LLMs as kind of the orchestrator in systems, a little bit. Beyond LLMs, there is a lot of AI that is behind the scenes that runs a big chunk of our society. There are assistance driving programs in a car, quick-turn MRI images, algorithms that drive social media—that’s all AI.  You have been vocal in arguing that LLMs can only get us so far. Do you think LLMs are overhyped these days? Can you summarize to our readers why you believe that LLMs are not enough? There is a sense in which they have not been …