3 ms·

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

by slashdave 2y ago

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.

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.