In the interest of pedantry (not in defending LLMs), if a person doesn't know what time it is, and doesn't know the clock is broken, and happens to check it at the exact right time they now know what time it is, no?
@contrasocial @riley They may, but that still doesn’t make the clock correct. Truth can be derived from false premise, logically speaking, ie symbolic, but, and this is the important bit, it does not make the false premise true.
Right, the premise that the clock will be correct when looked at is false regardless of the truth of what time it is. Makes sense.
Mar 12, 2026, 12:49 AM@MissConstrue @contrasocial @riley this is something I harp on frequently. If you're right for the wrong reasons, it's worse than being wrong. You got there by coincidence, but now you believe you know how to get there. That makes you far more dangerous than someone who simply doesn't know.
@contrasocial No. You're trying to construct a stack of an even number of errors, but there's other even numbers than zero.
@contrasocial @MissConstrue @riley
He does not.
Say you roll a dice, and ask me to guess which number went up.
I say 5, and I don't KNOW it's 5. If it actually ends up being 5, that does not mean I knew that.
My guess was correct, but it was not knowledge.
Knowledge is based on the robustness of the premises and the logical path built on them.
Joyously following up on the pedantry; the definition of knowledge I like best is _justified true belief_. This person doesn’t have justification though they think they do.
Our justification is often shakier than we’d like!
@contrasocial @MissConstrue @riley Yes but only in the sense that you can pick the "right" number in a lottery. A co-incidence is not knowledge.