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The problem is a good chunk of the global population is also not reasoning and thinking in any sense of the word. Logical reasoning is a higher order skill that

The problem is a good chunk of the global population is also not reasoning and thinking in any sense of the word. Logical reasoning is a higher order skill that often requires formal training. It's not a natural ability for human beings.

slashdave 2y ago
Seriously? You think individuals are incapable of reasoning without training first?
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Do you think they are? We haven't had a case of individuals without training in like 10 000 years.
  - rep_lodsb 2y ago
    And judging by some comments here, humans must have gotten dumber since then. Or we would never have invented writing, agriculture or even basic clothing. "This problem is actually not that easy, the average person couldn't solve it either, especially if the numbers were bigger", "Yet another cherrypicked clickbait study to make LLMs look bad, those people are just scared of being made obsolete", etc.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > Or we would never have invented writing, agriculture or even basic clothing. That's the thing. We had to invent those things. Along with counting, numbers, logic, arithmetic, and those stupid-ass annoying family tree riddles. We didn't get them in one step, it took a long time to build one on top of the previous. Generation by generation, each cohort of children growing up in a slightly more complex world than their parents, each generation taught how to navigate this complexity by their families and tribes. Learning a growing collection of facts and beliefs and life hacks. There were no untrained people for as long as humanity existed. The minimum reproductive unit of homo sapiens is a village.
- glitchc 2y ago
  Yes, seriously. Some examples: An individual without training cannot reliably separate cause from effect, or judge that both events A and B may have a common root cause. Similarly, people often confuse conditionals for causation. People often have difficulty reasoning about events based on statistical probabilities. Remember, the average person in North America is far more terrified of a terror attack than an accident or a heart attack, yet the latter two are much more likely to be their cause of death.
  - slashdave 2y ago
    You mean without training, people cannot frame answers in the terms you've learned from training. Well, why are you surprised? If you think reasoning is limited to the frameworks you learned from a book, you live in a small world.
    - glitchc 2y ago
      In an effort to be pejorative, you have reduced the process of learning to a basic regurgitation of facts. Rather, learning about reasoning is more about developing a framework that allows one to construct claims based on available information and then check the veracity of those claims while avoiding all, or at least typical, fallacies. Critical thinking requires a certain amount of rigor, which formal education is well-suited to impart. It can be self-taught with a hefty dose of discipline, but it cannot be intuited.
bithive123 2y ago
In "any sense" of the word? Surely anyone who adjusts their behavior when they get undesired or unexpected results is reasoning and thinking. And since most activities are mediated by thought of some kind, most people are reasoning and thinking otherwise they would never recover from even simple mistakes, like walking east when they need to go north. Saying they're "not thinking in any sense of the word" because they can't solve predicate logic problems from a college textbook is a rather odd claim. Surely those things arise from reasoning and thinking, rather than the other way around.
- hellojesus 2y ago
  This seems to me to be where these systems need to go in the future, akin to reinforcement learning. You feed an llm a prompt. It then abstracts and approximates what the result should be. It then devises a hypothesis and solves it and compares it to the approximated output. Then it can then formulate a new hypothesis and evaluate it, based off the outcome of hypothesis 1. From there it can either keep iterating or dump that path for a new one (e.g., the next best hypothesis in the original formation). At some point the answer is "good enough." But along the way it keeps playing against its thoughts to see if it can do better. A key issue may be the original approximation, so it may need to consider its adjustment when iterating. Maybe this is how cutting edge llms work now. I have no idea.
naasking 2y ago
> Logical reasoning is a higher order skill that often requires formal training. It's not a natural ability for human beings. I've read your comments here, and while I understand your point I think you have it backwards. The only reason we formed societies is because we evolved an innate a theory of mind to reason about how others might be thinking and feeling. That's reasoning. We have a natural ability to do limited arithmetic, otherwise we wouldn't be able to hunt, gather or track enough to endure winters, or keep track of our sheep or children for that matter. That's reasoning. Reasoning is a natural ability for human beings, but we also carry a lot of evolutionary impulses that add a lot of noise to the decision process, eg. observation->judgment->[set of possible decisions], judgment has "reason" as one path that adds to the set of possible decisions, but there remain other paths we inherited from our evolutionary roots. Education is training that suppresses poorly calibrated judgment paths that lead to frequent mistakes in the decision set, but reasoning remains, thus education improves the signal to noise ratio of our decision making. So I 100% disagree that an individual cannot separate cause and effect without training. They will just be worse at it than someone who is trained to filter out those impulses that lead us to jump to conclusions, eg. they will produce more noise / a larger set of possibilities than reason would allow.

slashdave 2y ago

Seriously? You think individuals are incapable of reasoning without training first?

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Do you think they are? We haven't had a case of individuals without training in like 10 000 years.
- rep_lodsb 2y ago
  And judging by some comments here, humans must have gotten dumber since then. Or we would never have invented writing, agriculture or even basic clothing. "This problem is actually not that easy, the average person couldn't solve it either, especially if the numbers were bigger", "Yet another cherrypicked clickbait study to make LLMs look bad, those people are just scared of being made obsolete", etc.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > Or we would never have invented writing, agriculture or even basic clothing. That's the thing. We had to invent those things. Along with counting, numbers, logic, arithmetic, and those stupid-ass annoying family tree riddles. We didn't get them in one step, it took a long time to build one on top of the previous. Generation by generation, each cohort of children growing up in a slightly more complex world than their parents, each generation taught how to navigate this complexity by their families and tribes. Learning a growing collection of facts and beliefs and life hacks. There were no untrained people for as long as humanity existed. The minimum reproductive unit of homo sapiens is a village.
glitchc 2y ago
Yes, seriously. Some examples: An individual without training cannot reliably separate cause from effect, or judge that both events A and B may have a common root cause. Similarly, people often confuse conditionals for causation. People often have difficulty reasoning about events based on statistical probabilities. Remember, the average person in North America is far more terrified of a terror attack than an accident or a heart attack, yet the latter two are much more likely to be their cause of death.
- slashdave 2y ago
  You mean without training, people cannot frame answers in the terms you've learned from training. Well, why are you surprised? If you think reasoning is limited to the frameworks you learned from a book, you live in a small world.
  - glitchc 2y ago
    In an effort to be pejorative, you have reduced the process of learning to a basic regurgitation of facts. Rather, learning about reasoning is more about developing a framework that allows one to construct claims based on available information and then check the veracity of those claims while avoiding all, or at least typical, fallacies. Critical thinking requires a certain amount of rigor, which formal education is well-suited to impart. It can be self-taught with a hefty dose of discipline, but it cannot be intuited.

bithive123 2y ago

In "any sense" of the word? Surely anyone who adjusts their behavior when they get undesired or unexpected results is reasoning and thinking. And since most activities are mediated by thought of some kind, most people are reasoning and thinking otherwise they would never recover from even simple mistakes, like walking east when they need to go north. Saying they're "not thinking in any sense of the word" because they can't solve predicate logic problems from a college textbook is a rather odd claim. Surely those things arise from reasoning and thinking, rather than the other way around.

hellojesus 2y ago
This seems to me to be where these systems need to go in the future, akin to reinforcement learning. You feed an llm a prompt. It then abstracts and approximates what the result should be. It then devises a hypothesis and solves it and compares it to the approximated output. Then it can then formulate a new hypothesis and evaluate it, based off the outcome of hypothesis 1. From there it can either keep iterating or dump that path for a new one (e.g., the next best hypothesis in the original formation). At some point the answer is "good enough." But along the way it keeps playing against its thoughts to see if it can do better. A key issue may be the original approximation, so it may need to consider its adjustment when iterating. Maybe this is how cutting edge llms work now. I have no idea.

naasking 2y ago

> Logical reasoning is a higher order skill that often requires formal training. It's not a natural ability for human beings. I've read your comments here, and while I understand your point I think you have it backwards. The only reason we formed societies is because we evolved an innate a theory of mind to reason about how others might be thinking and feeling. That's reasoning. We have a natural ability to do limited arithmetic, otherwise we wouldn't be able to hunt, gather or track enough to endure winters, or keep track of our sheep or children for that matter. That's reasoning. Reasoning is a natural ability for human beings, but we also carry a lot of evolutionary impulses that add a lot of noise to the decision process, eg. observation->judgment->[set of possible decisions], judgment has "reason" as one path that adds to the set of possible decisions, but there remain other paths we inherited from our evolutionary roots. Education is training that suppresses poorly calibrated judgment paths that lead to frequent mistakes in the decision set, but reasoning remains, thus education improves the signal to noise ratio of our decision making. So I 100% disagree that an individual cannot separate cause and effect without training. They will just be worse at it than someone who is trained to filter out those impulses that lead us to jump to conclusions, eg. they will produce more noise / a larger set of possibilities than reason would allow.