Comment by fc417fc802

Comment by fc417fc802 2 days ago

I frequently see this characterization and can't agree with it. If I say "well I suppose you'd at least need to do A to qualify" and then later say "huh I guess A wasn't sufficient, looks like you'll also need B" that is not shifting the goalposts.

At worst it's an incomplete and ad hoc specification.

More realistically it was never more than an educated guess to begin with, about something that didn't exist at the time, still doesn't appear to exist, is highly subjective, lacks a single broadly accepted rigorous definition to this very day, and ultimately boils down to "I'll know it when I see it".

I'll know it when I see it, and I still haven't seen it. QED

jdhwosnhw a day ago

> If I say "well I suppose you'd at least need to do A to qualify" and then later say "huh I guess A wasn't sufficient, looks like you'll also need B" that is not shifting the goalposts.

I dunno, that seems like a pretty good distillation of what moving the goalposts is.

> I’ll know it when I see it, and I haven’t seen it. QED

While pithily put, thats not a compelling argument. You feel that LLMs are not intelligent. I feel that they may be intelligent. Without a decent definition of what intelligence is, the entire argument is silly.

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fc417fc802 a day ago

Shifting goalposts usually (at least in my understanding) refers to changing something without valid justification that was explicitly set in a previous step (subjective wording I realize - this is off the top of my head). In an adversarial context it would be someone attempting to gain an advantage by subtly changing a premise in order to manipulate the conclusion.
An incomplete list, in contrast, is not a full set of goalposts. It is more akin to a declared lower bound.
I also don't think it to applies to the case where the parties are made aware of a change in circumstances and update their views accordingly.
> You feel that LLMs are not intelligent. I feel that they may be intelligent.
Weirdly enough I almost agree with you. LLMs have certainly challenged my notion of what intelligence is. At this point I think it's more a discussion of what sorts of things people are referring to when they use that word and if we can figure out an objective description that distinguishes those things from everything else.
> Without a decent definition of what intelligence is, the entire argument is silly.
I completely agree. My only objection is to the notion that goalposts have been shifted since in my view they were never established in the first place.

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Jensson a day ago

> I dunno, that seems like a pretty good distillation of what moving the goalposts is.
Only if you don't understand what "the goalposts" means. The goalpost isn't "pass the turing test", the goalpost is "manage to do all the same kind of intellectual tasks that humans are", nobody has moved that since the start in the quest for AI.

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