User:Gebble
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I'm Gebble.
Long-time user, first-time editor.
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What's a Gebble?
I'm a big fan of Douglas Hofstadter and Gödel, Escher, Bach a.k.a. GEB. I'm a pebble. Pebble + GEB = Gebble.
Who's a Gebble?
I have a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, and I'm interested in sociology, economics, social and political theory, philosophy and language. I have studied these topics academically in addition to journalism, computer science, and cognitive science.
I enjoy tabletop roleplaying games and especially enjoy GMing and worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is something of a creative outlet, and lets me explore ideas with others in a speculative non-deterministic way, if that makes any sense.
I work in K-12 Education.
I'm Making a Conlang
For my D&D-inspired world, I'm working on a conlang for one of the species. It's a slow but steady process. My dilemma is whether to hit the brakes and design a crummy amateur first conlang before moving on to my conlang for the Kalé.
The Kalé are my world's equivalent of goblins, and they originated as the indigenous caretakers of the cosmic turtle, named Theogon, on which most of my worldbuilding is centered. While the "evolution" of this species is inevitably unrealistic, I feel compelled to start their language in the albumen of Theogon's egg, which raises the question: what would it sound like to have a land-dwelling language whose roots sound more like dolphin vocalizations? I am tempted to put off answering this question until I have a more confident grasp of phonetics. As of now I am tinkering constantly with phonotactics.
Musings
My thoughts on LLMs for finding sources
This was written in response to a high school student asking in the Teahouse if it was against policy to locate sources with LLMs. Another user wrote that using an LLM is the equivalent of asking a very stupid person to find sources, except the LLM will hide its stupidity.
As an educator, I can assure you that even an idiot can sometimes find a decent source. But what I stress to students like yourself is that the process of searching for sources often reveals context, and for this reason they should "map" their research process. In searching a topic, one may find that scholars and journalists hold different views than what one imagined. This is especially rewarding on Wikipedia. Using a LLM search engine can skip a lot of that process and filter out the conversations and debates that made a topic worth writing about in the first place, in favor of strictly answering your prompt. It would be like walking through a forest and looking only at the dirt trail you're hiking. One may not always need that context, but my point is that the risk is greater than just verifiability. As a high school student who obviously cares about their intellectual development, I think you can do yourself a disservice relying on LLMs. You wouldn't ask a robot to lift weights for you; you shouldn't ask a LLM to do your thinking for you (because research is thinking!)