The Slodderwetenschap (Sloppy Science) of Stochastic Parrots -- A Plea for Science to NOT take the Route Advocated by Gebru and Bender · HackerPapers discussions

The Slodderwetenschap (Sloppy Science) of Stochastic Parrots -- A Plea for Science to NOT take the Route Advocated by Gebru and Bender — mentioned by DonHopkins

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 21:26:46 GMT

And any next-comment predictor could have predicted your totally unhelpful, uninsightful, and unoriginal comment. You -- along with everyone else who keeps parroting this thought-stopping phrase and other tired cliches like "stochastic parrot", simply because you heard other people say them, without understanding what they really mean, which published research papers they came from, or what those and other papers actually argued -- are desperately clinging to a reductive, short-sighted, shallow, simplistic model like a drowning person clutching a concrete life preserver. Seriously, we are…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

The Slodderwetenschap (Sloppy Science) of Stochastic Parrots -- A Plea for Science to NOT take the Route Advocated by Gebru and Bender — mentioned by DonHopkins

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:05:37 GMT

I was reacting to you saying "LLMs are stochastic parrots", which gives parrots a lot more credit for being able to write and debug code than they deserve, regardless of how rich their inner lives may be. It sounds like you're saying there's no more to LLMs than what a parrot randomly does (which is to repeat things it has already heard, not synthesize new things): no emergent behavior, no compressed generalizable transferable knowledge and problem solving ability, no ability to write and debug code and iteratively diagnose and solve problem. >My point was that 'stochastic parrot' is…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.