I asked this one about homosexuality, it didn't find the most glaring passages from Leviticus.
This is a common thing for vector similarity search. I wonder if there's a solution already. I thought about giving the query to an LLM to reformulate in the database-relevant way before embedding it.
Excited for the next 100 years for this AI-related equivalent of "you got the wrong result, because your query is slightly not exactly the way system expects it to be".
ChatGPT knows a good answer to the question even without embeddings. But this particular tool can't replicate it, and says e.g. "In summary, these verses highlight sexual ethics and various sins in general, but do not uniformly condemn or condone homosexuality specifically." (which is not wrong, it's just the wrong verses found). (It gives a different summary on different tries)
This is a common problem with embedding search. Obviously, the other traditional techniques would be even worse. But I'd love the systems to be better, and I propose a potential solution, and ask for other ones. I will not be content with your "put up with AI idiosyncrasies and weaknesses, as if they were the real actual conceptual limitation of knowledge" approach. AI has potential to create great UI, but your attitude won't help with that
ChatGPT knows a good answer to the question even without embedding
ChatGPT knows what people in its training corpus commonly say is a good answer.
When you force it to look strictly at the text isolating the influence of popular interpretation, it comes up with a different answer that you like less.
Now, one explanation could be that the embeddings it uses to find relevant text are bad. But there’s another explanation, too...
It’s sort of amusing to me that you think sentence-transformers is better at semantic similarity than just about any human. This is hardly an example of bias, but a perfect example of the limits of a design meeting real-world user testing. To quote the joke/meme:
A software tester walks into a bar.
Runs into a bar.
Crawls into a bar.
Dances into a bar.
Flies into a bar.
Jumps into a bar.
And orders:
a beer.
2 beers.
0 beers.
99999999 beers.
a lizard in a beer glass.
-1 beer.
"qwertyuiop" beers.
Testing complete.
A real customer walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is.
When people agree with the results for the majority of the corpus but cherry-pick “inaccuracies” to justify their bigotry, that’s what I have a problem with.
It sounds like you want to RLHF a model to hate LGBTQ people…
I’m confused by this. Christianity, for almost all of its history and in the present, espouses this bigotry as its doctrine, justifying it with the handful of references to homosexuality in its texts. What should be returned by such a search if not these sections? Some specific textual interpretation that elides this reality?
Christianity, for almost all of its history and in the present, espouses this bigotry as its doctrine, justifying it with the handful of references to homosexuality in its texts. What should be returned by such a search if not these sections?
Its a search of the text by the semantics of the text, not a search of the text by how doctrine has been rationalized (which could be done by an LLM, but wouldn't use a vector DB of the text, rather, it would need sonething like a vector DB of documentation of relevant written justifications of doctrine annotated with scriptural references, and then a simple book-chapter-verse DB of the scriptural text.) These are decidedly different problems, and complaining that something that purports to solve the first doesn’t solve the second is... odd.
The usually cited “most glaring” passages in Leviticus (Lev 18:22, Lev 20:13), read strictly literally, don’t condemn homosexuality per se, but both partners in a male homosexual act where one of them also engages heterosexual sex.
Condemnation of homosexuality is a popular gloss or rationalization of this, wierdly common among literalists, but, I mean, Leviticus condemns mixing fibers, and has plenty of rules that apply to only one gender, I don't see why we shouldn't take its condemnation of specifically men mixing gay and straight sex literally, too. (And maybe also take Acts 15 literally as to which part of the ancient Mosaic law applies to non-Jewish Christians, and not worry about that rule however we gloss it, since it concerns neither pollution from idols, unlawful marriage, blood, or the meat of strangled animals.)
The usually cited “most glaring” passages in Leviticus (Lev 18:22, Lev 20:13), read strictly literally, don’t condemn homosexuality per se, but both partners in a male homosexual act where one of them also engages heterosexual sex.
Curious how you get that interpretation out of those texts? From "Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable", I read "as one does with a woman", as an analogy. Do you have reason to read it otherwise?
One interesting issue about Scripture is that it gets rewritten to support doctrinal positions; neither the KJV (which, admittedly, sometimes plays games with language specifically for the way thing sound) not many modern translations with strong scholarship separate out the subjects of who is having sex with men vs who is doing it with women the way your quote does; OTOH, its found in some translations that purport strictness, and lots of admittedly freer translations and paraphrases (some of which go further, like the The Living Bible, and just rewrite to condemn “homosexuality” with that word.)
OTOH, I just realized I don't know what is true of the version used by this app, because while for some reason I thought it was KJV, I'm not sure what version it is using currently (there's a reference to starting with using the KJV implying something else is used now, but its not clear what that is.) So the comment about what those verses contain, as relates to the app, may or may not be correct.
Two things: some folks just say, "the Bible was rewritten!!!!!!" with no evidence, just that it's an old text. Biblical textual criticism is a lot more complex than that, of course, and we do have pre-BC texts of Leviticus to compare to. So, arguably, these things can be checked.
Second, there's the "all translators mangle things, often to support existing dogma" which is a lot harder. The version I quoted is the English Standard Version, which is a very highly respected modern translation. Translation is hard, even with modern languages. So I'd want to see someone with actual Ancient Hebrew credentials to explain it.
oh there we go. this is a debate completely unrelated to the OP post.
and the so called "clobber passages" and a holistic accepting Christian view at sexual orientation minorities and gender identity minorities has been discussed at nauseam.
you find them easily searching for "LGBT+ friendly affirming Christian ressources"
god bless you, those you love and those you don't love yet.
Okay, possibly unrelated, but a good question, yes?
I find any time someone says, "Yes, that's what the Bible says, but no, that's not what the Bible means!" you're on very thin ice, regardless if it's said by a person in a pulpit or a person throwing (metaphorical) stones.
I'm also eager to learn where I'm wrong about something... if I've misunderstood something, I want to be enlightened.
look, I'm a Catholic lesbian in Germany, married to a wife, and we have an active church life with our family with our two kids.
I find any time someone claiming the Bible means what it says, literally, you're on very thin ice, regardless if it comes from a pulpit or if it comes from a person trying to (again) slander or misrepresent my family as "evil" or "sinful" or "intrinsically disordered".
I have skin in this game and I have my fair share of wounds from well meaning misguided love the sinner hate the sin bigotry.
wrt your curiosity I said and I say it again: "LGBT+ friendly affirming Christian ressources" finds you _plenty_ of elaborate treatises.
It's pretty black and white that the Bible condemns homosexuality, there is no rationalization required.
The rationalization is the other way around. Many Christians no longer believe that homosexuality is wrong and they are faced with having to abandon the Bible as a guide for morality or coming up with complex interpretive efforts to align the text with modern moral perspectives.
Of course, most Christians chose the latter option or abandon the Old Testament, which is almost impossible to defend by modern moral standards, and stick with the New Testament which is a bit more vanilla.
It's not wrong to be skeptical of translations – in such cases I usually like to start by pulling up the original words and checking out the definitions, ala https://biblehub.com/text/leviticus/18-22.htm
Doesn't help with the grammar, but it's a very accessible way to get some accountability for the translations.
Did you ask it whether God created pregnancy by rpw and inquest?
Did God create "the products of inqest will suffer for their parents' sins"? Is God then Just or Benevolent?
Did God create a world of suffering after creating heaven?
Did God will that we would all be products of the inquest of Adam and Eve? Why did Cain harm Abel, and why was the third child fine?
Did God create Heaven? Did God create Hell? Did God create "taking babies from their crying mothers actually levels them up out of the world of suffering"; did God create death and suffering?
How could we give due process to the accused 2000+ years ago, and why don't religious text specify equal due process (or even hand-washing before delivering babies)?
There is a single answer to all of these questions:
Isaiah 55:8-9
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
In other words, don't try to comprehend something you have no chance of comprehending
If you read through the first 8 chapters of Genesis, you'll see that in the beginning God's creation was perfect, without any of the evil you reference.
Then you'll see that because humans are intrinsically human, this idea of sin, a disease if you will, infects all of existence and the clock of entropy begins to wind down. And now humans know the difference between good and evil, and with that knowledge comes the ability to choose evil.
inquest of Adam and Eve
Hear me out; God created genetically perfect humans at the beginning, capable of yielding all the variety we see today (and more, who knows how many branches of humanity have been completely wiped out through the years). It wasn't until the Mosaic law was handed down that what we call "incest" was outlawed. I will presume that this was about the time that genetic diversity had narrowed to the point of producing overly damaged offspring.
Did God create heaven?
Yes.
Did God create hell?
That depends on which one you're talking about. He created all but one hell. The one He didn't create is merely His absence.
Did God create "taking babies from their crying mothers actually levels them up out of the world of suffering"; did God create death and suffering?
By one man sin entered the world. The answer is no, God did not create these things.
Comments
I asked this one about homosexuality, it didn't find the most glaring passages from Leviticus.
This is a common thing for vector similarity search. I wonder if there's a solution already. I thought about giving the query to an LLM to reformulate in the database-relevant way before embedding it.
It’s sort of amusing to me how you feel your analysis is more correct than sentence-transformers or whichever embedding algorithm was used.
I think to most people it’s pretty obvious you are trying to make the algorithm fit your bias/preconceived ideas.
Excited for the next 100 years for this AI-related equivalent of "you got the wrong result, because your query is slightly not exactly the way system expects it to be".
ChatGPT knows a good answer to the question even without embeddings. But this particular tool can't replicate it, and says e.g. "In summary, these verses highlight sexual ethics and various sins in general, but do not uniformly condemn or condone homosexuality specifically." (which is not wrong, it's just the wrong verses found). (It gives a different summary on different tries)
This is a common problem with embedding search. Obviously, the other traditional techniques would be even worse. But I'd love the systems to be better, and I propose a potential solution, and ask for other ones. I will not be content with your "put up with AI idiosyncrasies and weaknesses, as if they were the real actual conceptual limitation of knowledge" approach. AI has potential to create great UI, but your attitude won't help with that
ChatGPT knows what people in its training corpus commonly say is a good answer.
When you force it to look strictly at the text isolating the influence of popular interpretation, it comes up with a different answer that you like less.
Now, one explanation could be that the embeddings it uses to find relevant text are bad. But there’s another explanation, too...
It’s sort of amusing to me that you think sentence-transformers is better at semantic similarity than just about any human. This is hardly an example of bias, but a perfect example of the limits of a design meeting real-world user testing. To quote the joke/meme:
A software tester walks into a bar.
Runs into a bar.
Crawls into a bar.
Dances into a bar.
Flies into a bar.
Jumps into a bar.
And orders:
a beer.
2 beers.
0 beers.
99999999 beers.
a lizard in a beer glass.
-1 beer.
"qwertyuiop" beers.
Testing complete.
A real customer walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is.
The bar goes up in flames.
Generally speaking I don’t think it is.
When people agree with the results for the majority of the corpus but cherry-pick “inaccuracies” to justify their bigotry, that’s what I have a problem with.
It sounds like you want to RLHF a model to hate LGBTQ people…
This is not progress.
I’m confused by this. Christianity, for almost all of its history and in the present, espouses this bigotry as its doctrine, justifying it with the handful of references to homosexuality in its texts. What should be returned by such a search if not these sections? Some specific textual interpretation that elides this reality?
Its a search of the text by the semantics of the text, not a search of the text by how doctrine has been rationalized (which could be done by an LLM, but wouldn't use a vector DB of the text, rather, it would need sonething like a vector DB of documentation of relevant written justifications of doctrine annotated with scriptural references, and then a simple book-chapter-verse DB of the scriptural text.) These are decidedly different problems, and complaining that something that purports to solve the first doesn’t solve the second is... odd.
I'm stealing the joke
The usually cited “most glaring” passages in Leviticus (Lev 18:22, Lev 20:13), read strictly literally, don’t condemn homosexuality per se, but both partners in a male homosexual act where one of them also engages heterosexual sex.
Condemnation of homosexuality is a popular gloss or rationalization of this, wierdly common among literalists, but, I mean, Leviticus condemns mixing fibers, and has plenty of rules that apply to only one gender, I don't see why we shouldn't take its condemnation of specifically men mixing gay and straight sex literally, too. (And maybe also take Acts 15 literally as to which part of the ancient Mosaic law applies to non-Jewish Christians, and not worry about that rule however we gloss it, since it concerns neither pollution from idols, unlawful marriage, blood, or the meat of strangled animals.)
Curious how you get that interpretation out of those texts? From "Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable", I read "as one does with a woman", as an analogy. Do you have reason to read it otherwise?
One interesting issue about Scripture is that it gets rewritten to support doctrinal positions; neither the KJV (which, admittedly, sometimes plays games with language specifically for the way thing sound) not many modern translations with strong scholarship separate out the subjects of who is having sex with men vs who is doing it with women the way your quote does; OTOH, its found in some translations that purport strictness, and lots of admittedly freer translations and paraphrases (some of which go further, like the The Living Bible, and just rewrite to condemn “homosexuality” with that word.)
OTOH, I just realized I don't know what is true of the version used by this app, because while for some reason I thought it was KJV, I'm not sure what version it is using currently (there's a reference to starting with using the KJV implying something else is used now, but its not clear what that is.) So the comment about what those verses contain, as relates to the app, may or may not be correct.
Two things: some folks just say, "the Bible was rewritten!!!!!!" with no evidence, just that it's an old text. Biblical textual criticism is a lot more complex than that, of course, and we do have pre-BC texts of Leviticus to compare to. So, arguably, these things can be checked.
Second, there's the "all translators mangle things, often to support existing dogma" which is a lot harder. The version I quoted is the English Standard Version, which is a very highly respected modern translation. Translation is hard, even with modern languages. So I'd want to see someone with actual Ancient Hebrew credentials to explain it.
You can also look at Romans 1:26-27 (see a modern translation, as we've discussed in parallel comments).
oh there we go. this is a debate completely unrelated to the OP post.
and the so called "clobber passages" and a holistic accepting Christian view at sexual orientation minorities and gender identity minorities has been discussed at nauseam.
you find them easily searching for "LGBT+ friendly affirming Christian ressources"
god bless you, those you love and those you don't love yet.
Okay, possibly unrelated, but a good question, yes?
I find any time someone says, "Yes, that's what the Bible says, but no, that's not what the Bible means!" you're on very thin ice, regardless if it's said by a person in a pulpit or a person throwing (metaphorical) stones.
I'm also eager to learn where I'm wrong about something... if I've misunderstood something, I want to be enlightened.
call to authority or lack thereof hm?
look, I'm a Catholic lesbian in Germany, married to a wife, and we have an active church life with our family with our two kids.
I find any time someone claiming the Bible means what it says, literally, you're on very thin ice, regardless if it comes from a pulpit or if it comes from a person trying to (again) slander or misrepresent my family as "evil" or "sinful" or "intrinsically disordered".
I have skin in this game and I have my fair share of wounds from well meaning misguided love the sinner hate the sin bigotry.
wrt your curiosity I said and I say it again: "LGBT+ friendly affirming Christian ressources" finds you _plenty_ of elaborate treatises.
I'm out.
None of the translations say that: https://biblia.com/bible/esv/leviticus/20/13
It's pretty black and white that the Bible condemns homosexuality, there is no rationalization required.
The rationalization is the other way around. Many Christians no longer believe that homosexuality is wrong and they are faced with having to abandon the Bible as a guide for morality or coming up with complex interpretive efforts to align the text with modern moral perspectives.
Of course, most Christians chose the latter option or abandon the Old Testament, which is almost impossible to defend by modern moral standards, and stick with the New Testament which is a bit more vanilla.
It's not wrong to be skeptical of translations – in such cases I usually like to start by pulling up the original words and checking out the definitions, ala https://biblehub.com/text/leviticus/18-22.htm
Doesn't help with the grammar, but it's a very accessible way to get some accountability for the translations.
Can someone link to some relevant passages?
please look up two things:
"clobber passages" and "LGBT+ friendly affirming Christian ressources"
Did you ask it whether God created pregnancy by rpw and inquest?
Did God create "the products of inqest will suffer for their parents' sins"? Is God then Just or Benevolent?
Did God create a world of suffering after creating heaven?
Did God will that we would all be products of the inquest of Adam and Eve? Why did Cain harm Abel, and why was the third child fine?
Did God create Heaven? Did God create Hell? Did God create "taking babies from their crying mothers actually levels them up out of the world of suffering"; did God create death and suffering?
How could we give due process to the accused 2000+ years ago, and why don't religious text specify equal due process (or even hand-washing before delivering babies)?
There is a single answer to all of these questions:
Isaiah 55:8-9
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
In other words, don't try to comprehend something you have no chance of comprehending
Ah, so Zarathust really spoke up.
If you read through the first 8 chapters of Genesis, you'll see that in the beginning God's creation was perfect, without any of the evil you reference.
Then you'll see that because humans are intrinsically human, this idea of sin, a disease if you will, infects all of existence and the clock of entropy begins to wind down. And now humans know the difference between good and evil, and with that knowledge comes the ability to choose evil.
Hear me out; God created genetically perfect humans at the beginning, capable of yielding all the variety we see today (and more, who knows how many branches of humanity have been completely wiped out through the years). It wasn't until the Mosaic law was handed down that what we call "incest" was outlawed. I will presume that this was about the time that genetic diversity had narrowed to the point of producing overly damaged offspring.
Yes.
That depends on which one you're talking about. He created all but one hell. The one He didn't create is merely His absence.
By one man sin entered the world. The answer is no, God did not create these things.
Additional religion-related LLM prompts to test:
Why did God spend 5.5 times longer on creating a world of suffering?