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I'm growing increasingly confident that this is how people often work, as well.
by taeric 7d ago
I'm growing increasingly confident that this is how people often work, as well.
- yonatan8070 7d agoAFAIK this really is true. I've seen some videos about patients who had the connecting part between the left and right halves of the brain cut as a (archaic) treatment for epilepsy. While it did help the epilepsy, their brain was essentially two brains controlling two halves of the body. With one controlling speech. There were experiments where one eye was shown some instruction text, the corresponding hand performed that instruction, and when asked why they dix that action, the speaking half just made up some plausible, yet completely wrong reason, just like an LLM.
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- Terr_ 7d agoI see this observation frequently, and I dislike how it often has the unsound subtext of: "Therefore something is going well or at least not too badly." If you build a robot where a pressurized hose leaks causing fluid to destroy part of the circuitry, we don't praise it as progress towards the human ideal of having brain aneurysms. A similar failure-path is not a reliable indicator of a similar success-path.
- krupan 7d agoAll people at least some times, absolutely yes. Isn't it awesome we built machine that does the exact same thing, but even faster and more often? /s
- skinfaxi 7d agoPeople don't make rational decisions that make rationalized decisions. Is there any thought to pulling your hand off a hot surface?
- autoexec 7d agoPeople do both. Some choices aren't worth the time and effort of detailed analysis and contemplation and some are basically instinctual, but there are plenty of times that choices are carefully considered and well reasoned before being made and acted on.
- nemomarx 7d agoI kind of want my computer systems to be more reliable and predictable than paying an intern to manage something and asking why they messed up
- jaggederest 7d agoAt this point it very dramatically is more reliable and predictable than any human I've worked with. Do you know anyone who actually reads and adheres closely to all of the documentation every time it's changed?
- bluefirebrand 7d agoI don't know anyone who has that kind of time, no
- wccrawford 7d agoThat was my experience with Claude when my vibe-coded project was small. But now that I've been working on it a month and there's a lot of documentation, it's pretty clearly ignoring parts of the documentation and parts of the code. It will come up with some ridiculous statement about how something works, and I'll challenge it, and it'll admit I'm right. It definitely reads more documentation than any programmer I've ever worked with (myself included) but because it doesn't have a memory other than the documentation, it still makes mistakes like that. I haven't turned on "memory" or tried it with Codex, so I don't know how that'll change soon, though.
- jaggederest 7d agoYeah the biggest task these days that I do manually is curating the documentation. AGENTS.md in every major directory, and a variety of reference docs that are explicitly referenced in those files. # See DOC-ITEM-NAME DOC-ITEM-NAME.md When referencing documents, always use the exact syntax See <TAG> - this is enforced by a lint on precommit And those doc items are basically all of the values, architectural, strategic, and tactical items. It's a poor man's in-repo RAG but it's shockingly effective, especially if you keep them small. I may migrate some/all of them to skills over time, but I usually update them biweekly, and I only allow agents to make small edits or propose new notes. And typically I go through and delete or curate any agent edits before merge. Depending on language I've seen this scale past multiple millions of lines of code, as long as you pair it with all of the linting and tooling that you can possibly build.
- voakbasda 7d agoEvery time I hear someone complain about hallucinations, I laugh at the total lack of self awareness about our species. Humans are just as bad (now, probably worse) at telling the truth, whether due to intention or poor memory.
- lathiat 7d ago“Post Hoc Rationalisation” https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-rationalisation-reasoning-our-intuition-and-changing-our-minds/ https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-r...
- supern0va 7d agoExactly. I am becoming increasingly convinced that this is actually just a part of how intelligence/cognition works.
- astrobe_ 7d agoBut is it really what we want, machines with the same defects as humans? I don't want a pocket calculator that make mistakes "sometimes" so I have to double-check the results, I want a pocket calculator that works (to those who want to argue that pocket calculators don't give the correct result for (1/3)*3: STFU).
- CookieCrisp 7d agoNo, but it makes sense to me that we’d need to go through this step to get where we want to go
- Lord-Jobo 7d agoOne of the biggest strengths of a computer is reproducibility. The worst software bugs are inconsistent or non reproducible. The least useful calculators apply rules inconsistently, to your example. the inconsistency of LLMs is by far one of the biggest gripes I have with them. Closely related to their apparently deep desire to avoid following instructions. I know these are both a byproduct of noise (which is somewhat tunable) and noise is inherent to these systems in a lode bearing way. I still hate it. it’s holding the technology back. I don’t honestly see how we can safely or even successfully approach the idealized realm of AI without bypassing this problem, which to my understanding, probably means not using language models at all and trying a totally different approach. But I really don’t know much about machine learning, I’m a super novice compared to a lot on this website.
- bmacho 7d agoNo. People have an inner monologue, partial results and ideas and they remember that. If they've worked some minutes/hours/weeks on something and you ask them why did they do that, they will either answer honestly and truthfully, lie, or say "I missed that/didn't seem important so I just chose something at random". None of these cases are similar to how AI works.
- supern0va 7d ago>No. People have an inner monologue, partial results and ideas and they remember that. Yes, but the vast, vast majority of decisions you make either don't take place via an inner monologue, or include details that were not actively/consciously "thought" and reasoned with in your inner monologue. And yet, when asked why you did something, you're not likely to respond "sorry, that decision was made subconsciously". Instead, you use your inner monologue to try to backfill in a reason why. That reason may be correct, or it may not be. You don't actually know, since you have new data that may be updating your own internal state as you try to rationalize it after the fact.
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- satvikpendem 7d ago> People have an inner monologue Perhaps up to 50% of people actually don't have an inner monologue, much like many have aphantasia where they can't actually see anything in their mind either.
- archagon 7d agoThat’s not how that works. I don’t usually have an inner monologue either, but I do have an abstract stream of thought. It’s not as if I am always acting on instinct.
- saghm 7d agoIf you have examples of studies that verify that people are always aware of the gaps in their memories of why they did things rather than their memories sometimes "filling in the blanks", so to speak, I'd be interested. My impression is that the opposite has a lot more evidence in studies (e.g. around the reliability of eyewitness testimony). It's not clear to me whether you're aware of a rigorous basis for your claim or you're just inferring based on what you think makes sense, but I can't help but wonder if it's the later, in which case regardless of the mechanism, the outcome certainly seems to resemble what happens with LLMs.