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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17532 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4AHXDwcGab5PhKhHT/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general

Some interesting commentary on this point, from the GPT-2 era.

Robin Hanson’s post Better Babblers is very relevant here. He claims, and I don’t think he’s exaggerating, that a lot of human speech is simply generated by “low order correlations”, that is, generating sentences or paragraphs that are statistically likely to come after previous sentences or paragraphs:

After eighteen years of being a professor, I’ve graded many student essays. And while I usually try to teach a deep structure of concepts, what the median student actually learns seems to mostly be a set of low order correlations. They know what words to use, which words tend to go together, which combinations tend to have positive associations, and so on. But if you ask an exam question where the deep structure answer differs from answer you’d guess looking at low order correlations, most students usually give the wrong answer.

Sometimes when you are in a conversation you are bored in and your mind is elsewhere you start responding to only the last few words in the previous sentence from the other person that represent the only part of their last three minutes of monologuing that you actually remember. You extrapolate theme, topic, tone, narrative from them and then immediately respond. At least I do this. This is pretty simply next token prediction.

And again, not to call Hanson unoriginal, but various people - albeit a minority - predicted for decades or even centuries that the brain was essentially just a complex statistical modelling tool and that intelligence, language, consciousness etc were really all pretty basic probability/statistics functions. It’s not a new thought, it’s just one that’s been proven correct.

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