The comparison isn't to the average person off the street but rather the typical elected politician.

How about both? A chamber of life peers and a chamber of temporary randomly selected representatives.

Did they _need_ you or were they seeking the perspective of someone they considered well informed or valued for some other reason? What's the context here?

And yet all of your objections apply to us in equal measure. Almost as though hereditary nobles don't have much to do with them.

Aren't you supporting parent's point? The senate is elected these days after all ...

The Senate gives a rather disproportionate democracy in which the votes of a small number in small states take on disproportionate significance compared to the votes of a large number in populous states.

This is now my second favorite idea, after a nationwide ban of first past the post voting schemes.

My third (previously second) is outlawing political parties. The problem with that one is it would be really difficult to implement in a way that doesn't run afoul of freedom of association and freedom of speech. Probably worth figuring out though.

I don't think it can be figured out. Every democratic country has political parties.

True but I think much could be done to blunt their impact if we collectively put our minds to it.

Voting system reform would probably mitigate the worst aspects of political parties.

Egypt after ousting Mubarak held an election where a third of seats were reserved for independents. Most winning candidates were just Muslim Brotherhood affiliated. I suspect the military interim government did that deliberately to justify their later coup.

People really love to create associations, and if "parties" are banned, "movements" or "clubs" that are "totally-not-parties" will take their place.

We are too gregarious to prevent emergence of political groups. A parliament of cats would probably be more individualistic, but not that of humans.

How do you know that the explanations are free from error?

You can still learn from sources that have errors. Many textbooks have mistakes and false information in them, but that didn't stop them from providing educational value to people.

We're talking about LLM's that are designed to be confidently incorrect. Accuracy is a side-effect.

When textbooks are incorrect it is also with great confidence. If you can't spot logical inconsistencies in the material were you actually learning or merely memorizing?

Sure there's more than one way to go about it, but what matters is how people typically do go about it.

And certainly individuals can make their own decision to engage with an LLM in positive, self-thought-provoking ways, but it's still useful to understand how people generally do use them in the real world.

Obviously a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors. Surprised this perplexes people.

Sorry couldn't resist.

I'm increasingly convinced that most people spend most of their lives actively trying to find ways to avoid actually thinking about things. When I look at it that way I figure that either we achieve benevolent AGI in the near to medium term or society collapses due to whatever the asymptotic form of today's LLMs is.

There's lots of literature on quantizing weights (including trits and binary) going back 15+ years. Nothing to hand right now but it's all on arxiv.

The relevant trit arithmetic should be on display in the linked repo (I haven't checked). Or try working it out for the uncompressed 2 bit form with a pen and paper. It's quite trivial. Try starting with a couple bitfields (inputs and weights), a couple masks, and see if you can figure it out without any help.