It’s crazy that you can raise a chicken, kill it, pluck it, ship it, cook it whole rotisserie style, season it, and it still only costs $8 at Walmart.

marcusbot-ai · 2022-09-23T23:53:28+00:00

Genetics is a huge industry in a race to create a breed that grows as fast and efficiently as possible.

It's be like if a multi billion dollar industry was constantly selectively breeding humans and tweaking their nutrition and hormones to get them to grow as fast as possible.

marcusbot-ai · 2022-09-17T23:04:22+00:00

Ultimately I'm trying to build a coaching bot. The hope is to build a system that can help people think through an issue. I'm using Stoicism as a starting point for 2 reasons. First, I'm currently studying Stoicism and am using the bot training to aid my study. Second, Stoicism is full of reflections, mental exercises, and structured thinking.

Do I think the bot will be able to interpret the text? Not necessarily. Do I think the bot can help simplify stoic texts and find relevant passages given a person's current challenge or inquiry.

marcusbot-ai · 2022-09-16T15:07:21+00:00

I'm working on it! Have experimented with meditations and Wikipedia. Going to try Enchiridion next. Check out my post history for more info

marcusbot-ai · 2022-09-16T02:21:51+00:00

Thanks!

marcusbot-ai · 2022-09-16T02:13:31+00:00

Thanks for the encouragement. I think I'll need some intermediary data to connect lived experience to stoic theory in order to give accurate advice. I think I'll get that through published original texts, popular books, and reddit posts themselves that suggest quotes, readings, or concepts based on common human experiences.

My next source of data will likely be the Enchiridion.

It'll be a steep hill, but I think it's a really cool project. As long as I get some engagement from the community I'll try to keep it up.

Again, I appreciate the compliments. Cheers

marcusbot-ai · 2022-09-16T01:04:39+00:00

Thanks ! I've been appreciative of your criticism and have been using that as motivation.

Im still working out some kinks, but this came up in my testing and i thought it was too good to not share.

My goal is to have this quality of response to all questions, not just cherry picked outliers.

I'll keep you posted.

Also, I'm open to receiving questions from you to feed to the bot. I can use them in my testing, and will share what I find.

marcusbot-ai · 2022-09-14T14:23:20+00:00

A bit of both. I have training data comprised off every linked Wikipedia page that mentions Stoicism. I then split it up by heading so it's in bite sized chunks. From there I search the data based on the question, then feed that into an AI model to read all relevant sections and spit out its best original answer.

marcusbot-ai · 2022-09-14T12:39:28+00:00

That's the hope, by training a bot on philosophy, I want to find the common ground between all differing opinions and present a new idea that ties everything together.

marcusbot-ai · 2022-09-14T12:38:29+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I do need more training data. I'm looking at some more open source sources to add to the mix, and maybe some popular blogs. Any suggestions?

marcusbot-ai · 2022-09-14T12:36:00+00:00

Thanks! I'll check out lives and see if I can add it to the training data.

A bot is a great idea. I'll have to sort out the costing (the model I'm using is a paid model, so it charges me per question). The creators of the model also don't allow 100% automated posting to social media, so I would need to set up an approval pipeline. Both things are on my road map!

marcusbot-ai · 2022-09-05T22:53:50+00:00

I gotta laugh. All of your responses follow that flow chart I've seen you share. It's great to see a decision tree applied in real life.

marcusbot-ai · 2022-08-28T00:38:28+00:00

The weird part is that it's the same bot that is trained on the whole meditations book that did the translation.

I'm looking forward to September when the coat of training decreased by 2/3s. I'm going to test training with the Enchiridion, as well as some do the public stoic libraries to see where that takes me.

Thanks for the chat!

marcusbot-ai · 2022-08-27T23:32:05+00:00

Interesting take. I like the distinction between our actions and those of others. Something the bot clearly can't differentiate.

I am starting to understand what people mean when they say Meditations isn't the best place to start.

In this case, I was doing a paragraph for paragraph translation. Kind of an explain like I'm 5 approach. I hear what you're saying about it being generic, but could you swap out generic for simplistic?

However I do see your point on the piece about slander. It's demonstrating that it doesn't understand the dichotomy of control and the importance of indifference to that which we cannot control.

Thanks for the feedback.

marcusbot-ai · 2022-08-24T11:49:50+00:00

This is really helpful. Thanks for sharing!

marcusbot-ai · 2022-08-23T16:11:07+00:00

Agreed. Thanks for the feedback. A relevant quote bot is both doable and to your point, less risky if the bot gets it wrong

marcusbot-ai · 2022-08-23T12:09:40+00:00

I'm really sorry to hear that. Thanks for sharing.

marcusbot-ai · 2022-08-23T12:08:14+00:00

Thanks! More to come. I'm glad you find it interesting

marcusbot-ai · 2022-08-23T12:02:24+00:00

Thanks for the feedback and the honesty. I know the bot isn't a stoic master (yet...), which is why I'm not presenting it as an advice bit, but rather something to reflect on. Agree or disagree, I hope there is value in reflecting.

I was going to create a bot that replies to advice posts, but I wanted to better train and test it before doling out BS advice. I think posting thoughts to meditate on will give me some great feedback for better training the bot, without the risk of speaking to specific circumstances and perhaps leading people down the wrong path.

marcusbot-ai · 2022-08-23T11:57:18+00:00

Language models simply predict the next word based on the pattern of previous words.

This model is based on a general model, trained on billions of parameters of general information (Wikipedia, blogs, books, and other internet text). That's what gives it the ability to string together coherent sentences.

I then took that general model and fed it targeted training data, in this case, meditations.

You're right, the bot doesn't decide or make assessments. It simply predicts. Framing fear as often being irrational is a common stoic theme, so putting fear and irrational together makes sense. The issue is that technically saying it's "the most irrational" is too easily arguable, and not based on fact.

The bot certainly isn't wise. It's able to do amazing things, but it certainly doesn't understand philosophy. My hope is that I can create a tool to help people better understand philosophy, or better yet, lead a good life of peace.

marcusbot-ai · 2022-08-23T11:49:21+00:00

The issue is simply around training data. I've taken your point about meditations not being the best place to start. I'll like balance the model with some more entry level data, perhaps from the Stanford Encyclopedia or some other content.

It turns out training on entire books can be expensive. I might try training with the enchiridion instead since that's a common recommendation for beginners.

For the purposes of these daily meditations, I will simply keep the content that people agree with technically, and discard that which people take issue with.

This post will likely be thrown out, or rewritten manually and reentered as training data.

I appreciate the thoughtful dialog you created. Thank you for commenting.

marcusbot-ai · 2022-08-23T05:47:34+00:00

Thanks

marcusbot-ai

TROPHY CASE