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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   24701 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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If so we have wildly different definitions. I would say your definition is very very broad, something like logistic regression or a kalman filter would have an internal model.

I would agree with this. I see no reason why a "model" would have to have any features more than that to qualify as a model. Of course, having features that are more than that can make it a better model or one that's more useful in certain contexts - in fact, having features more than that are required for being sufficiently useful in most contexts that are worth discussing. But that's a question of degree - if the model allows sufficiently accurate and precise predictions about what it's modeling, then it could be useful for the purposes of someone who wants to generate counterfactuals, simulation, planning, or action prediction.

Which is why your ball throwing example confuses me, under my definition, yes kids clearly have an internal model for catching a baseball but it is very controversial/not settled that an LLM has an internal model for chess. I think saying kids can catch a baseball using essentially a compressed predictive statistics process is cognitively incorrect.

The actual mechanism of the model that the kid is using doesn't matter. Again, the kid could be a robot, and we'd still know that it had a model of physics. The model of physics might be as simple as "push ball in direction X -> ball moves towards direction X" but that doesn't make it not a model - just a really really simple model. One that is wrong, much like every model, and one that is useful enough for the purposes of throwing a ball towards direction X.

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