alt Hacker News> On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
I guess many of us quality for british parliament.
Replies
billynomates • today at 9:39 AM
Maybe the joke was on Babbage. Possible that they were asking about trust and over-reliance, which turned out to be the real problem.
jumploops • today at 8:45 AM
Funnily enough, with the most recent models (having reduced sycophancy), putting in the wrong assumptions often still leads to the right output.
I cannot shake the feeling that with that quote the people were trying to point out a problem with something he’d said.
“With this machine, all the results will be correct, no more errors in log tables”
“And what if people put the wrong figures in?” (Hint - we’d still have the wrong results)
Babbage walks away thinking them an idiot, they walk away thinking Babbage hasn’t considered anything outside of the machine itself.