I think the comparison is that both fields are often misunderstood through oversimplified descriptions. “Astrology is just Sun signs” and “LLMs are just stochastic parrots” are both reductionist summaries that leave out a lot of the interesting discussion. Whether either ultimately succeeds at what it claims is a separate question.
As for astrology itself, I became interested through Carl Jung, who viewed astrology as a symbolic system that reflected recurring psychological patterns and wrote about it in relation to archetypes and synchronicity ( Man and his symbols .) Astrology provides a symbolic language for thinking about cycles, temperament, motivation, and meaning.
I think you misunderstood. I don’t believe calling LLMs “stochastic parrots” is accurate, but I think that dismissing them as such puts them at the same level as astrology, in the sense that both would be useless in order to predict an outcome based purely on their inputs.
In other words, I do think that LLMs have some value to them, even when issues like “hallucinations” will never be resolved.
On the other hand, I don’t think astrology is valuable at all. There hasn’t been a single accurate prediction made by astrologers that could be replicated within the same conditions at a different time. Descriptions of phenomena in astrology are also deliberately vague, so they could be “massaged” to fit the outcomes. Astrology is, at its core and necessarily, post hoc, so suggesting that it is a misunderstood discipline based on actual science is just naive.
And to add, we know modern astrology isn’t astronomically accurate (though people practice sidreal rather than tropical.) Ptolemy (2nd century) knew the equinoxes precessed relative to the stars, but he argued that the zodiac should remain anchored to the equinoxes and solstices because the meanings of the signs derive from the seasonal cycle rather than the constellations.
I think the comparison is that both fields are often misunderstood through oversimplified descriptions. “Astrology is just Sun signs” and “LLMs are just stochastic parrots” are both reductionist summaries that leave out a lot of the interesting discussion. Whether either ultimately succeeds at what it claims is a separate question.
As for astrology itself, I became interested through Carl Jung, who viewed astrology as a symbolic system that reflected recurring psychological patterns and wrote about it in relation to archetypes and synchronicity ( Man and his symbols .) Astrology provides a symbolic language for thinking about cycles, temperament, motivation, and meaning.
I think you misunderstood. I don’t believe calling LLMs “stochastic parrots” is accurate, but I think that dismissing them as such puts them at the same level as astrology, in the sense that both would be useless in order to predict an outcome based purely on their inputs.
In other words, I do think that LLMs have some value to them, even when issues like “hallucinations” will never be resolved.
On the other hand, I don’t think astrology is valuable at all. There hasn’t been a single accurate prediction made by astrologers that could be replicated within the same conditions at a different time. Descriptions of phenomena in astrology are also deliberately vague, so they could be “massaged” to fit the outcomes. Astrology is, at its core and necessarily, post hoc, so suggesting that it is a misunderstood discipline based on actual science is just naive.
And to add, we know modern astrology isn’t astronomically accurate (though people practice sidreal rather than tropical.) Ptolemy (2nd century) knew the equinoxes precessed relative to the stars, but he argued that the zodiac should remain anchored to the equinoxes and solstices because the meanings of the signs derive from the seasonal cycle rather than the constellations.