4 ms·

I see deeply ominous connections between generations of American children who have been educated in a manner which produces alarming rates of functional illiter

I see deeply ominous connections between generations of American children who have been educated in a manner which produces alarming rates of functional illiteracy[0] and the widespread popularity of machine learning models that produce nonsense which resembles plausible text if you skim or don't actually read it. [0] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

treyd 2y ago
> The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading. > The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City. > In the paper,5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues: > graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?) > syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?) > semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?) This is interesting because this is fairly similar to how LLMs do next-token prediction, but using exclusively backwards-facing clues from the text (although perhaps also the graphic cues if you are talking about multimodal models).
pixelatedindex 2y ago
Super fascinating article, thanks for sharing!
philipswood 2y ago
Thanks, I think the linked article is worthy of its own submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344613

treyd 2y ago

> The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading. > The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City. > In the paper,5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues: > graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?) > syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?) > semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?) This is interesting because this is fairly similar to how LLMs do next-token prediction, but using exclusively backwards-facing clues from the text (although perhaps also the graphic cues if you are talking about multimodal models).

pixelatedindex 2y ago

Super fascinating article, thanks for sharing!

philipswood 2y ago

Thanks, I think the linked article is worthy of its own submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344613