We can learn much about how ChatGPT works from a single question. This question was posed to ChatGPT 3.5 on February 13, 2023.
Isaac NewtonQuestion
Why didn’t Newton accept the Trinity?
ChatGPT’s Answer
Isaac Newton was a devout Christian, but he did not accept the doctrine of the Trinity as traditionally defined by the Church. He believed in a more puritanical form of Christianity and rejected many of the orthodox beliefs of his time, including the idea of the Trinity as three persons in one Godhead. Newton saw the Trinity as a pagan corruption of the early Christian Church, and he held that the doctrine was not supported by the Bible.
Newton’s rejection of the Trinity was a relatively minor aspect of his religious beliefs, and it did not prevent him from making major contributions to science. Nevertheless, his views on the Trinity were not widely accepted during his lifetime, and he was often criticized for his unorthodox beliefs. Today, Newton is remembered primarily for his scientific achievements, and his views on religion are of historical interest.
Analysis
While ChatGPT accurately describes Newton’s views on the doctrine of the Trinity, the rest of the text is misleading and in places outright absurd. Erroneous statements and implications include:
That the Puritans also rejected the Trinity
That Newton’s views on the Trinity were a minor matter
That heterodox religious views are negatively associated with scientific achievement
That Newton’s views on the Trinity were known to the public and criticized during his lifetime
That Newton’s religious views had no lasting impact
Extended Discussion
The religious views of Isaac Newton have been the subject of considerable angst for his admirers. To those who regard religion as superstition and revere Newton as a hero of the Enlightenment who helped banish God from the physical universe, his intense interest in religious questions is unseemly. To mainstream Christians who are no less eager to claim Newton as their own, his rejection of what they see as the central tenant of the faith is no less disturbing. Both groups attempt to deal with this cognitive dissonance by downplaying the significance of Newton as a theologian.
Newton’s theological activities began early in he career. At the time Newton joined Trinity College, Cambridge professors were required to study theology and accept ordination as an Anglican priest within seven years. Newton, a man who did nothing by halves, took the studying part very seriously. But when he began to suspect that the Trinity was a spurious doctrine he realized that he could not in good conscience undergo ordination as a priest of the Church of England as this would require him to endorse all its teachings. Though friends he requested and received a special royal dispensation which allowed him to continue as a professor without ordination.
Newton’s writings on the Trinity are serious scholarly work with the founding texts of Christianity including an intensive investigation of the views of the Church Fathers and what texts they cited. Most of his factual claims are accepted by mainstream scholars today. Mainstream Christianity rejects only his final conclusion that the Trinity teaching is not from God.
Newton discussed his heretical views only with trusted acquaintances which included founders of the Unitarian movement and other major Enlightenment figures. They kept Newton’s views in almost perfect confidence. Even his scholarly conclusions on the authenticity of disputed Bible verses which seem to support the Trinity, which he shared with John Locke in 1690, were not published until 1754, 28 years after his death. Acquaintances in whom he had confided his views were very guarded in their statements as were the few scholars allowed to see his papers. So nearly total was the embargo that Newton biographer Sir David Brewster defended his orthodoxy as late as 1833, only revising his views in a new Newton biography published in 1855 after more of Newton’s writings were released.
Newton’s papers give no basis to claim that his theological work was a minor matter or that he kept his faith and science compartmentalized in “non-overlapping magisteria” as some try to claim today. His theological writings go far beyond the Trinity question and exceeds his scientific output in volume. His scientific work is inextricably linked to his religious views about how God acts in the world. His success in explicating laws of motion lent tremendous support to the long-standing theological theory that God is a king and the universe is a law-governed realm in which most things are controlled not by his direct action but by natural laws which he has established. His faith influenced his science and his scientific conclusions influenced the religious thought of millions.
His denial of the Trinity creates a major problem for mainstream Christians who admire him. If someone of less stature denied the Trinity, the mainstream view would be that he is no Christian. Newton absolutely denied it, not in ignorance and not in senility, but after extensive scholarly investigation. And yet the accepted form which ChatGPT regurgitates is to call him a “devout Christian”.
ChatGPT clumsily combines these two discourses of denial into an incoherent hash. Nowhere is this more evident than in the statement that Newton was still able to do science despite denying the Trinity. It is as if a Christian starts the sentence minimizing Newton’s heterodoxy and an atheist finishes it while having heterodoxy of quite another sort in mind.
The text contains other curiosities. For example it connects denial of the Trinity with the Puritan movement. This is simply false and is not the sort of error one would expect a human being to make. ChatGPT may have connected them because both are critics of the mainstream Church and use similar rhetoric. They call what they object to in the Church pagan and describing their proposed reforms as a return to an earlier form of Christianity. (It is also possible that ChatGPT has made the spurious connection through the Puritan John Newton, author of the hymn Amazing Grace.)
The statement that Newton’s views on the Trinity were not widely accepted during his lifetime and were in fact widely criticized is nonsensical considering that they were carefully concealed from the public. It would be interesting to know whether this howler is a mistake by a human author included in the training data or if ChatGPT has just picked up something commonly said of heterodox views.
The final sentence states that Newton’s views on religion, unlike his views on physics, are of only “historical interest” as if they produced no lasting effect. Even if we restrict ourselves to the Trinity question, this is dubious. Today he is almost certainly the best-known theologian representing the anti-trinitarian position. On the questions of the doctrine’s history and the Bible text his side has taken most of the scholarly ground and the passages which they identified as spurious are excluded from modern Bibles. But this is nothing compared to his influence on religious thought in general. As a figure of the Enlightenment who believed that God’s primary mode of action was through natural law rather than continuous intervention, he helped to revolutionize religious thought the world over. ChatGPT is again simply merging the expressions of those who dislike his views on the Trinity with those who would like to forget his interest in theology in general.
The only thing ChatGPT describes correctly is Newton’s views on the Trinity teaching. This is not surprising since there is now little confusion about what his views were and numerous good descriptions are no doubt to be found in the training data.
This answer gives us insight into how ChatGPT works and why it imagines plausible-sounding but false things. Lacking any understanding at all of the ideas expressed in the texts it is parodying, it connects ideas at the points where they come closest verbally rather than at the points of conceptual contact. So it erroneously traces Newton’s views on the Trinity to Puritanism because he and the Puritans use similar language to describe the Catholic Church and its doctrines. And it equates and merges the cognitive dissonance of Christians and secular thinkers with respect to Newton’s religious writing because they use similar phrases to make excuses for him.
It is obvious from the answers like this that ChatGPT is unable to recognize different perspectives and discuss them in a coherent manner. That it can produce coherent answers to other questions suggests that it was trained on coherent answers written by human authors. It is unable to produce anything new and can strive only for mediocrity.
Bad documentation says what things are. Good documentation says what they do.
The widespread contempt for grammar in society is one of my numerous hobby horses. In school I got the impression that grammar was about diagramming sentences and placing commas. They told us that certain constructs are incorrect, but these were presented as arbitrary societal rules which serve no other purpose than to demonstrate education and get into a good college. Since this was in the 1980’s and conforming to arbitrary societal rules were seen as uncool and silly, grammar was uncool and silly.
What they did not tell us was that not only do words have meaning, but gramatical constructs have meaning too and sometimes if you use the wrong one you will not be understood. This is not always a problem in the situations of daily life since most people know what you meant to say.
But computers are complicated and very flexible. The way software works can be difficult to explain and not entirely obvious. If you are writing the manual but don’t have the grammatical chops to pull it off, your readers can be left guessing. You need to explain how data moves through a system, what steps are taken in what order. You do not need to be a grammar expert, but you need to know how to express ideas clearly, so say the data “enters” something, “is collected” from some places, that it “passes through”. You need to know how to say that one thing was replaced with another without mixing up the old and the new thing.
So pay attention to grammar. Learn to use prepositions to explain where data is and where it is going. Use real verbs. Do not say that “this is the notification e-mail address”. Say “This is the e-mail address to which a warning is automatically sent when the XYZ process stops unexpectedly.” Your users will thank you and they will be more likely to stick around because they understand how your product works and how to use it.
The phrase “no rest for the wicked” is based on Isaiah chapter 48 verse 20 and chapter 57 verses 20 and 21:
20 But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. 21 There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.
The assertion at Dictionary.com that the verse refers to eternal torment is not supported by the context or by any Bible commentary of which I am aware.
The actual idea Isaiah expresses in his book is that humans will have a better life if they allow God to guide them. To illustrate, here are verses 17 through 19 of chapter 48:
This is what the Lord says—
your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel:
“I am the Lord your God,
who teaches you what is best for you,
who directs you in the way you should go.
If only you had paid attention to my commands,
your peace would have been like a river,
your well-being like the waves of the sea.
Your descendants would have been like the sand,
your children like its numberless grains;
their name would never be blotted out
nor destroyed from before me.”
So those who follow God’s advice for life as conveyed through prophets such as Isaiah will prosper. In contrast, the “wicked” (defined as those who sin by doing such things as worshiping idols or engaging in dishonest business practices) will experience unnecessary troubles in life. It is in this sense that there is no peace for them.
Within Christianity the view is that all humans are sinners, just some more than others. As the Apostle Paul says “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23). So even a believer could experience self-inflicted troubles due to failure to apply Biblical advice for stress-free living. Until well into the 20th century the average person would have been familiar with these ideas whether they were a believing Christian or not.
So the phrase “no rest for the wicked” is a self deprecating suggestion that whatever new difficulty has arisen is a consequence of the speaker’s own failure to organize and conduct their life in the best way.
A version of this article was posted at https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/255570/what-do-sam-and-die-hardman-mean-by-no-rest-for-the-wicked-and-idle-hands-and#255661
The review as it appeared in the Literary Gazette. Caption under photograph of storm trooper: This is what one of the “heroes” of the film War of the Stars looks like.
This is the first review of Star Wars published in the Soviet Union. It appeared in the Literary Gazette, a Moscow weekly, on September 7, 1977.
It is unlikely the reviewer had had an opportunity to see the film, nor would most of her readers be able to see it anytime soon. All we learn about the plot is that the main characters engage some kind of formidable tyrants in light-saber battles. The emphasis on the physical appearance of the characters suggests that posters and production stills are the primary source. Over half the text is devoted to portraying the film as a crass commercial endeavor aimed at undiscerning viewers.
The name of the film is translated as War of the Stars, a misunderstanding which was corrected in later reviews. The first month’s box office receipts appear to be overstated. The statement that a sequel will be out in a few weeks is puzzling seeing as The Empire Strikes Back was not released until May of 1980.
Mass Culture 77 Space Horror Films By Yu. Varshavskaya
This summer American movie theaters were hit with a new wave of “movie madness”. According to the press, the film War of the Stars by American cinematographer George Lucas is breaking all box office records: $60 million profit from the first month of showings. From morning until midnight War of the Stars is shown in overflowing theaters. In order to get into the film one must either stand in line for several hours or pay a scalper a fabulous sum – 50 dollars.
And so “evil spirits”, huge disasters, and giant sharks have been replaced on the American screen by horrors of truly cosmic proportion – monstrous tyrants who terrorize our Galaxy. The battle against them is waged by the heroes of the film – a certain round-faced princess, a village youth, an elderly knight of the Round Table, an ape-man, and two robots. One of them, the enormous gilded robot Threepio, is endowed with human speech. The other, Artoo-Detoo, resembles an automobile and expresses himself in “star” beeps.
The plot of the movie, as the French weekly Express writes, is rather simplistic.
But to really frighten the locals the makers of the film have employed the most modern of weapons – a laser ray with which the heroes of the film do battle as with rapiers. Nightmarish monsters are constantly appearing on the screen: a lizard-man, gnomes without faces, a living mummy with a head with rubber tubes sticking out, fantastical animals…
At the same time as shooting of this blood curdling “masterpiece” which the cinematographer George Lucas calls “the western of the future” was going on, a number of related commercial schemes were undertaken. The publisher Ballantine released a novel under the same name. Then Marvel Comic Book [sic], a publisher which specializes in comics, signed a contract with the movie studio Fox and, having divided the script into six parts, began issuing a monthly War of the Stars comic book. The press run is a million copies. Right after that the classic accouterments of “mass culture” appeared: buttons, tee-shirts, movie posters, and soundtrack records. And the children’s toys should be in the stores in time for Christmas [literally “New Year’s”, the holiday to which the Soviets had transfered the Christmas tree and gift-giving tradition]: a miniature Artoo-Detoo which makes the very same sounds as the original, and the gilded Threepio. The biggest “find” of the film, the toy laser rapier, is not invented yet, but work has already begun.
In the next few weeks there is due to appear on the movie screens of the USA a new episode of War of the Stars which is likely to be as mediocre as it will be profitable. This is not to be wondered at. The mass audience is ready to bite at such pieces of “art” in order to, when leaving the movie theater, see that things outside are fairly quiet…
A few years ago a user on Stack Exchange asked why the construction used in this English sentence is not considered a double negative.
If I don’t use the microphone, nobody will hear me.
This question was presumably prompted by the familiar admonition not to use a double negative. This warning refers to dialect constructions such as in this sentence:
If I don’t use no microphone, no one will hear me.
Notice that in the first clause both the verb and its direct object are negated. This is negative concord because the two negatives are intended to reinforce one another. They are in concord or agreement.
In standard English we would instead say:
If I don’t use the microphone, no one will hear me.
Leaving asside the question of whether non-standard forms of English should be used, the caution should not be understood literally. It does not mean that all uses of double negation violate the rules of formal English. A more precise statement of the rule would be: Standard English does not recognize negative concord as a valid construction.
In standard English double negatives cancel one another out to produce a positive as in mathematics. To illustrate this a teacher might ask the children to interpret the dialect sentence above as if it were standard English. The teacher guides them to this interpretation:
I must not use a microphone if I want to be heard.
This is nonsense, but it serves to illustrate an important point: double negatives are not forbidden in standard English, they simple cancel one another out. It is only an error if negative concord was intended. For example, this use of a double negative is good literary English:
Your complaints have not gone unheard.
The “not” and “un-” cancel one another out, so the sentence means:
Your complaints have been heard.
Though the emphasis is a little different. One negation serves to describe what the interlocutor fears while the second serves to indicate that it has not in fact taken place.
Now let us return to the question from Stack Exchange:
If I don’t use the microphone, nobody will hear me.
This sentence has two negations, but it does not display netagive concord. Nor do the negations cancel one another out (as in our example from literary English) since they are not in the same clause. Instead the two negations are in separate clauses joined in an if-then construct. We can simplify the sentence to this:
If no microphone, then no hearers.
We must use two negations in this sentence because the message is about two negations: negating the microphone negates the hearers.
A version of this post was originally published as an answer on Stack Exchange:
My attention was recently drawn to an article in the Provincetown Independent entitled The Marconi Mythology. This makes the claim that “His ideas were derived from spiritualism, a pseudo-religious movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries by which people sought to commune with the spirit world.” It also claims that Marconi believed that “sound never disappears from Earth” and that one could potentially construct a device to recover the sound of the angels singing in Bethlehem!
This last claim is the more extrordinary. But I can find no evidence that it is true. Not only can I find nothing to connect Marconi with these ideas, I can find nothing online to suggest that the possiblility of recovering “lost sounds” is even a known belief.
The idea that he might have been interested in spiritualism is at least plausible. A number of well-known figures of the day were receptive to the idea of communicating with the dead including Sir Arthur Conan Doyl, biologist Alfred Russell Wallace, and English physicist and radio pioneer Oliver Lodge. But Marconi does not seem to have been one of them.
For a long time now Zoom has been sending release notes to the e-mail account I used to register. I didn’t want this and so I scrolled to the bottom looking for a way to unsubscribe, but found nothing. I also searched the web where I found information on unsubscribing from meeting notifications, but nothing about the release note e-mails. Today I finally figured out how to unsubscribe.
A Teletype Model 15 teleprinter Attribution: John Nagle at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Q: Why do some users complete forms all in capital letters?
This is because early teleprinters and computer systems had no provision for lower case. Mixed case teleprinters came on the market in the 1930’s, but the standard US military teleprinter of World War II was the Teletype Model 15 (produced from 1928 to 1963) which only printed in upper case. This exposed an entire generation to official communications and reports typed in all upper case. This ‘official’ style was then duplicated by users of typewriters by engaging the Caps Lock toggle key.
On September 1st a number of news outlets published stories about the discovery of the skeleton of a whale with four legs. If true, this would lend support to the popular theory that whales evolved from a four-footed land animal which gradually adopted an aquatic way of life.
