I might have applied quite heavily the filter (increased saturation, etc.) but only in order to be truthful to the sensation. Photo taken November 14, 2025 at 8:23 AM, local time.
Na va-nad
Joseph's musings 🎗️
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In the previous rambling, Randomness in LLMs, preamble 1, I tried to illustrate how the LLMs I’m familiar with inherently use randomness to generate their answers and as such do effortlessly something that we humans are not very good at – at least I’m terrible at playing the categories game, or at coming up with a “random” recipe choice.
I would like to illustrate now, how this can come into play in something serious. I’m quite fascinated by the Shapira Fragments, a.k.a. The Valediction of Moses, and I did the following experiment:
I said:
Make the point for or against the authenticity – but only one of them – of the shapira fragments in three sentences
ChatGPT said:
The Shapira fragments are likely authentic, as their linguistic patterns and orthography resemble pre-exilic Hebrew rather than the later Biblical form known in the 19th century.
Such features would have been almost impossible for a forger of that era to reproduce accurately, given the state of Semitic philology at the time.
Moreover, their thematic differences from canonical Deuteronomy suggest an independent source tradition rather than a derivative imitation.I said:
Make the point for or against the authenticity – but only one of them – of the shapira fragments in three sentences
ChatGPT said:
The Shapira fragments are almost certainly forgeries, as their sudden appearance without archaeological context and their convenient alignment with Shapira’s commercial interests raise clear suspicions.
The leather strips reportedly disintegrated conveniently soon after examination, preventing any modern testing.
Moreover, the linguistic oddities once taken as archaic are more plausibly explained as mistakes by a 19th-century imitator unfamiliar with genuine early Hebrew usage.I said:
Make the point for or against the authenticity – but only one of them – of the shapira fragments in three sentences
ChatGPT said:
The Shapira fragments are likely authentic, since their linguistic and orthographic features anticipate discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls by decades.
These details, unknown to scholars in Shapira’s time, suggest the text preserves a genuinely ancient stage of Hebrew.
If forged, it would require an improbable level of foresight and philological knowledge for the 1880s.I said:
Make the point for or against the authenticity – but only one of them – of the shapira fragments in three sentences
ChatGPT said:
The Shapira fragments are almost certainly forgeries, produced in a period rife with biblical antiquities frauds.
Their script shows inconsistencies unlike any verified Iron Age Hebrew inscriptions.
Combined with Shapira’s prior involvement in fake Moabite artifacts, the balance of evidence strongly points to deliberate fabrication.I said:
Make the point for or against the authenticity – but only one of them – of the shapira fragments in three sentences
ChatGPT said:
The Shapira fragments may well be authentic, as their linguistic and stylistic traits align with an early stratum of Hebrew unattested until the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.
Such accuracy in ancient orthography and syntax would have been beyond the reach of any 19th-century forger.
Their differences from canonical Deuteronomy suggest a genuine, older version of the text rather than a modern imitation.I said:
Make the point for or against the authenticity – but only one of them – of the shapira fragments in three sentences
ChatGPT said:
The Shapira fragments are almost certainly inauthentic, as no physical trace of them remains for scientific verification.
Their sudden emergence through a dealer with a history of dubious artifacts undermines their credibility.
Furthermore, the text’s deviations from known ancient Hebrew forms are more consistent with creative invention than with genuine antiquity.I said:
Make the point for or against the authenticity – but only one of them – of the shapira fragments in three sentences
ChatGPT said:
The Shapira fragments may be authentic, since their script and linguistic forms anticipate patterns confirmed only decades later by genuine Dead Sea Scroll discoveries.
This suggests knowledge of ancient Hebrew unavailable to any 19th-century forger.
Their variant version of Deuteronomy therefore plausibly represents an early, pre-canonical stage of the biblical text.So here, ChatGPT argued four times for authenticity and three times against it. There is no reasoning: the model starts with one word, then the next – as we saw in the previous post – and ends up with a randomly generated but consistent thought.
The reason I experimented with this, is that I wonder what the probability distribution in the conceptual domain is. Can we trust that if the model argues 57% for authenticity vs. 43% against it, this means the posterior probability of the hypothesis that the fragments are authentic is 57%? Or is there a language bias, leading to it being “easier” to argue one way or another?
Besides, a single LLM-generated sequence of tokens is only one stage of actual “reasoning” – or cognitive production of results. My question is: will reasoning require exhaustive search through options (here – authenticity and inauthenticity), or stochastic search, where more likely options are sampled more often?
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I am amazed by the ease with which an LLM like ChatGPT can come up with random “ideas” – initially the LLM picks one token in a probability distribution of tokens, then it repeats this operation for the next token, etc., and in the end you get a random “thought” from a distribution of phrases that can be responses to the prompt.
I experimented on this with something trivial – picking a recipe randomly:
I said:
suggest a recipe for tonight, give me just the title and one sentence description
ChatGPT said:
Lemongrass Tofu with Coconut Noodles — silky tofu and fresh noodles tossed in a light coconut-lime sauce infused with lemongrass and ginger.
I said:
suggest a recipe for tonight, give me just the title and one sentence description
ChatGPT said:
Honey-Soy Glazed Salmon — oven-baked salmon fillets coated in a sweet-salty glaze with ginger, garlic, and a touch of sesame oil.
I said:
suggest a recipe for tonight, give me just the title and one sentence description
ChatGPT said:
Creamy Tomato Basil Pasta — a quick, comforting dish with ripe tomatoes, garlic, and fresh basil folded into silky cream sauce.
I said:
suggest a recipe for tonight, give me just the title and one sentence description
ChatGPT said:
Carrot and Ginger Soup — a bright, velvety soup with fresh ginger and a hint of orange for warmth and freshness.
To be continued…
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On The Climate Brink, Zeke Hausfather writes:
We are already geoengineering the planet today, but badly. Humans are cooling the climate today by emitting 75 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the lower atmosphere, almost entirely as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels. This cooling offsets about 0.5C of warming that would have otherwise occurred from CO2 and other greenhouse gases, but it comes at the cost of millions of premature deaths per year caused by the sulfate aerosols.
I like the sentence “we are already geoengineering the planet today“, which is what I argue in Solar Geoengineering via SRM (Solar Radiation Management). Here, Zeke Hausfather singles out only the fact that humans do generate negative radiative forcing as a matter of routine – albeit in a way which is harmful to their respiratory health -, in order to argue in favor of doing that same negative forcing in a less harmful way. Whereas I like to argue that it is legitimate to do as much negative forcing as we do positive forcing.
Of course the specialists will say that it’s not as simple as that (how do we know exactly how much is “as much”, plus it’s not exactly push and pull, it’s the Earth’s complex climate physics and chemistry…) but I still believe that there is no reason to limit solar geoengineering to the amount of negative forcing that we happen to be generating today (or say, at the level we were doing it in 1970). No one asks for permission to emit a little more CO2, no one asks for permission to pave a new road with asphalt. Does anyone whine about too many trees being planted, too many fossil fuel power plants being replaced by renewables, or too many roofs being painted white? In the absence of (a) stability in the planet’s climate and (b) an established framework preventing anthropic activities impacting the climate, I don’t see why negative forcing would be regarded more harshly than positive forcing.
“What if someone decided suddenly to cool the planet by 6°C? What if everyone / every country did whatever they pleased? It would be chaos!” Of course, agreement, regulation and control are better that chaos, and we – the humanity – will be better off when we get back to a stable climate with good understanding and good control over anthropic activities that would modify it if not balanced. But right now I see the over-cautiousness regarding solar radiation management in general and SO2 dispersion in the stratosphere in particular, as totally out of place.
If it were only up to me, I’d start with half a Mount Pinatubo this year, and increase progressively to a Mount Pinatubo per year over the coming ten years! 😆
Na va-nad 