• 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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        7 months ago

        If you discount the pop-culture numbers (for us 7, 42, and 69) its the number most often chosen by people if you ask them for a random number between 1 and 100. It just seems the most random one to choose for a lot of people. Veritasium just did a video about it.

      • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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        7 months ago

        Probably just because it’s prime. It’s just that humans are terrible at understanding the concept of randomness. A study by Theodore P. Hill showed that when tasked to pick a random number between 1 and 10, almost a third of the subjects (n was over 8500) picked 7. 10 was the least picked number (if you ditch the few idiots that picked 0).

          • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
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            7 months ago

            I remember watching a lecture about probability, and the professor said that only quantum processes are really random, the rest of things that we call random is just the human inability to measure the variables that affects the random outcome. I’m an actuarie, and it’s made me change the perspective on how I see and study random processes and how it made think on ways to influence the outcome of random processes.

            • jarfil@beehaw.org
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              7 months ago

              …which is kind of a hilarious tautology, because “quantum processes” are by definition “processes that we are unable to decompose into more basic parts”.

              The moment we learn about some more fundamental processes being the reason for a given process, it stops being “quantum” and the new ones become “it”.

            • K0W4L5K1@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              7 months ago

              Even quantum just appears random I think. it’s beyond our scope of perspective, it works in multiple dimensions. we only see part of the process. That’s my guess though it could be totally wrong

              • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                7 months ago

                it’s a matter of interpretation, but generally the consensus is that quantum measurements are truly probabilistic (random), Bell proved that there can’t be any hidden variables that influence the outcome

                • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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                  7 months ago

                  Didn’t Bell just put that up as a theory and it got proven somewhat recently by other researchers? The 2022 physics Nobel Prize was about disproving hidden variables and they titled their finding with the catchy phrase “the universe is not locally real”.

                • K0W4L5K1@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  7 months ago

                  Interpretation for sure. Bells theory and then it being proven winning a Nobel prize to me only proves more we really don’t understand the world around us and only perceive what we need to survive. And that maybe we should be less standoffish to ideas that change our current paradigm, because we obviously have a lot to learn.

                  • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                    7 months ago

                    Bells inequality is a statement about math, it gives an inequality that could only be violated if there were no local hidden variables (read: if measurements were truly random). That was a statement of math, which is rigorously provable. It took experimental confirmation, but we can now say with high confidence that there are no local hidden variables (i.e. there is no information hidden that we simply cannot measure, instead the outcome is only decided the moment you measure).

                    Global hidden variables are still an option, but they would require much of the rest of physics to be rewritten

      • gigachad@feddit.de
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        7 months ago

        I didn’t know either, but it seems to be an often picked ‘random’ number by people. Here is an article about it, I didn’t read it though.

        • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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          7 months ago

          What you’ve described would be like looking at a chart of various fluid boiling points at atmospheric pressure and being like “Wow, water boils at 100 C!” It would only be interesting if that somehow weren’t the case.

          • jarfil@beehaw.org
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            7 months ago

            Where is the “Wow!” in this post? It states a fact, like “Water boils at 100C under 1 atm”, and shows that the student (ChatGPT) has correctly reproduced the experiment.

            Why do you think schools keep teaching that “Water boils at 100C under 1 atm”? If it’s so obvious, should they stop putting it on the test and failing those who say it boils at “69C, giggity”?

            • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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              7 months ago

              Derek feeling the need to comment that the bias in the training data correlates with the bias of the corrected output of a commercial product just seemed really bizarre to me. Maybe it’s got the same appeal as a zoo or something, I never really got into watching animals be animals in a zoo.

              • jarfil@beehaw.org
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                7 months ago

                Hm? Watching animals be animals at a zoo, is a way better sampling of how animals are animals, than for example watching that wildlife “documentary” where they’d throw lemmings of a cliff “for dramatic effect” (a “commercially corrected bias”?).

                In this case, the “corrected output” is just 42, not 37, but as the temperature increases on the Y axis, we get a glimpse of internal biases, which actually let through other patterns of the training data, like the 37.

      • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        “we don’t need to prove the 2020 election was stolen, it’s implied because trump had bigger crowds at his rallies!” -90% of trump supporters

        Another good example is the Monty Hall “paradox” where 99% of people are going to incorrectly tell you the chance is 50% because they took math and that’s how it works.

        Just because something seems obvious to you doesn’t mean it is correct. Always a good idea to test your hypothesis.

        • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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          7 months ago

          Trump Rallies would be a really stupid sample data set for American voters. A crowd of 10,000 people means fuck all compared to 158,429,631. If OpenAI has been training their models on such a small pool then I’d call them absolute morons.

          • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            A crowd of 10,000 people means fuck all compared to 158,429,631.

            I agree that it would be a bad data set, but not because it is too small. That size would actually give you a pretty good result if it was sufficiently random. Which is, of course, the problem.

            But you’re missing the point: just because something is obvious to you does not mean it’s actually true. The model could be trained in a way to not be biased by our number choice, but to actually be pseudo-random. Is it surprising that it would turn out this way? No. But to think your assumption doesn’t need to be proven, in such a case, is almost equivalent to thinking a Trump rally is a good data sample for determining the opinion of the general public.