alt Hacker NewsIf I'm understanding you, it seems like you're struck by hindsight bias. No one knew the miasma theory was wrong... it could have been right! Only with hindsight can we say it was wrong. Seems like we're in the same situation with LLMs and AGI.
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0x3f • today at 6:01 PM
> Only with hindsight can we say it was wrong
It really depends what you mean by 'we'. Laymen? Maybe. But people said it was wrong at the time with perfectly good reasoning. It might not have been accessible to the average person, but that's hardly to say that only hindsight could reveal the correct answer.
The miasma theory of disease was "not even wrong" in the sense that it was formulated before we even had the modern scientific method to define the criteria for a theory in the first place. And it was sort of accidentally correct in that some non-infectious diseases are caused by airborne toxins.