pepinator

I'm not saying humanity is impossible to describe (on the contrary!). your physics example is too different to what happens in social sciences, it's not a good analogy. you can largely control the conditions under which you throw the balls, while if you're, for instance, studying the recent socio political events in the USA, things are given and then you need to rely on similar past event to understand current ones. even in fields like psychology it's too difficult to even measure initial conditions and outputs. that's why you rely on qualitative analysis.

no, but we're talking about Europe on general. and the initial claim is surely false in countries like Spain, France, Poland and Belgium

I agree with what you say, but that doesn't make social sciences the same as astrology. their conclusions, even if qualitative, can be valid and useful.

The problem is that there are no two equal situations in social sciences, so you won't ever have the same set of initial conditions. I don't know why they call them sciences, but the scientific method is intrinsically incompatible with social phenomena.

I agree that a lot of people speak two languages. But man, I've lived in several countries in Europe for many years, and even the average university student doesn't really speak English (and I work at the university so I interact with many of them). Even in countries like Belgium where there're three official languages!

However, I'd agree with that the average educated person can somewhat communicate ideas in a second language. This is what polls usually show, around 30% to 50% of people.

> Your average European speaks at least three

ok ok I get the point but let's not exaggerate

how do you falsify a hypothesis in social sciences?

saying that social science is astrology at best is quite extremist. serious people work in those fields

it surprises me how many people simply don't get the point. they say "they make more money this way, so it's ok". no big picture at all.

mmmh I don't think so. I've read several papers on cellular automata and I don't recognize the terms

That's an awfully simplistic way of seeing things. It always surprises me how disconnected from reality Americans are.

This is obviously not true. You don't have to do the math to realize: when you pay rent, every moth, an important part of your salary simply disappears, leaving nothing for the future. When you pay a mortgage, your paying the house you'll own. Of course, there are interests and fees and whatnot, but you'd need to pay huge amounts so that it becomes unviable; I can't imagine a single scenario where that occurs.

Even if not all LLMs are equal, almost all of them are based on the same base model: transformers. So the general idea is always the same: predict the next token. It becomes more obvious when you try to use LLMs to solve things that you can't find in internet (even if they're simple).

And the testing does not always work. You can be sure that only 80% of the time it will be really really correct, and that forces you to check everything. Of course, using LLMs makes you faster for some tasks, and the fact that they are able to do so much is super impressive, but that's it.

This is where one can notice that LLM are, after all, just stochastic parrots. If we don't have a reliable way to systematically test their outputs, I don't see many jobs being replaced by AI either.

We call it breakthrough. And it's just math and code. We've had many of those.