# Hegel vs. GPT-3

> *The good is the idea, or unity of the conception of the will with the particular will. Abstract right, well-being, the subjectivity of consciousness, and the contingency of external reality, are in their independent and separate existences superseded in this unity, although in their real essence they are contained in it and preserved. This unity is realized freedom, the absolute final cause of the world. Every stage is properly the idea, but the earlier steps contain the idea only in more abstract form. The I, as person, is already the idea, although in its most abstract guise. The good is the idea more completely determined; it is the unity of the conception of will with the particular will. It is not something abstractly right, but has a real content, whose substance constitutes both right and well-being.*

> *— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel*

I bet this quote will sound vaguely familiar to most readers. I'll help you: it was used by Scott Alexander in his [Nonfiction Writing Advice](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/) as an example of entirely ~~unreadable~~ abstract paragraph.

Like Scott, I won't advice any human to end up sounding like Hegel. But GPT-3 isn't human, so I prompted it with the above excerpt (using the [Eleuther UI](https://6b.eleuther.ai/)). I will remark that that *there was no cherrypicking*. I genuinely ran the prompt just twice with default parameters on the same input, and reported here the generated gibberish.

Two of the following paragraphs are GPT-3 output. The other one is the actual following paragraph from the *Philosophy of Right*. Now you can play this little game:

***Easy mode:*** Carefully re-read the initial paragraph, check it against each one of the following, and guess which one is from actual Hegel.

***Hard mode:*** You can't re-read the initial paragraph (if you didn't read it at all, read it now, then go for a 5-minutes walk and return). Trust your short-term memory, examine each of the following and guess which one is from Hegel.

**I**
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> *It is a will, whose unity is the idea, which has become actual, but not as a power of some abstract thing in itself, but as the idea in itself. To be the good means to be the idea, that is, freedom. It means to be at home in one's right, and, in this sense, it is to be at home everywhere. And in this sense, it is a power.*

**II**
------

> *In this idea well-being has value, not independently as the realization of the separate particular will, but only as universal well-being, as universal, that is, in its essence, intrinsically or in accordance with freedom. Hence, well-being is not a good, if separated from right; nor is right a good, if separated from well-being.*

**III**
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> *What is properly the idea here is not the universal but the particular; but the latter in turn is already contained in the former as a more abstract expression, since the concept of will is already contained in the concept of being able to will. The Idea is the absolute final cause of the world. It is an abstract possibility, which has no determinate existence in the world and can be realized only in an individual.*

Did you spot the original? If not, you can read it directly from [here](https://archive.org/details/cu31924014578979/page/n161/mode/2up?view=theater).

**Update after 3 days:** This exercise turned out to be simpler than I expected. On one hand, this community seems to include a disproportionately large number of people who've actually read some Hegel. On the other hand, it was possible to spot the correct paragraph without even taking into account the meaning of the text. Nice catch, Richard_Kennaway!

Until now, [we](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/67QdHTkNxAZvakR9a/hegel-vs-gpt-3?commentId=gezyqLoBnHbKu4s4F) [have](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/67QdHTkNxAZvakR9a/hegel-vs-gpt-3?commentId=TyEopD4ZkZjeZeF5b) [four](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/67QdHTkNxAZvakR9a/hegel-vs-gpt-3?commentId=bThGkRugDs5ywCQA3) [comments](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/67QdHTkNxAZvakR9a/hegel-vs-gpt-3?commentId=kx7suuJBpaD5ibBae) explaining their methodology, and I am happy to see that the correct paragraph was found through many different considerations I hadn't thought of. I am now wondering if the absence of wrong guess is due to real ease of this exercise for the average LW user, or at least partially to selection bias (eg people who guessed wrong didn't leave a comment).