I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this:
>The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure.
It's not unlike what people like PG say about writing improving thinking...it's the being forced to go from fuzzy directional notions to something you can put on paper in that will stand up to critique.
Same with rubber duck debugging. The verbal part means you need to articulate it clearly but it's not the speaking that helps. Same with writing a detailed spec/prompt for an LLM - I know if its too fuzzy ("set an appropriate timeout") the LLM will spin it's wheels so it forces clarity.
Also suspect that a big part of who we consider intelligent is linked to this. Maybe their internal monologue is just more crisp - closer to what they'd tell a rubber duck.
I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this:
>The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure.
I often construct full sentences in my head. And have conversations with my mental model of some other person. In full sentences
I'm with you there. I have to either hear the full sentences narrated by my internal voice or see the words flashing in my mind in order to "think". This is great for building and maintaining deep mental models but it is also highly susceptible to "bit rot" (such as forgetting the rationale or evidence for a specific assertion or position) days/weeks/years later. I have a friend who simply can't understand how inter-linked note systems (like the kind Obsidian enables) are helpful. It's just a bewildering mess to them and they think more linearly.
Thus, writing things down is a necessity for me: it's not for a need for structure but rather that my "context window" gets filled too quickly. I can counter my own arguments but it's more fun, and often quicker, to do with someone else. Besides, there is such a diversity of thinking out there it would be foolish to not take advantage!
What? It's never occurred to me that this isn't entirely normal, I've done it all my life. I thought people without an inner monologue were the unusual ones.
I think I've got this from growing up with a narcissist. Thoughts are constructed and seemingly endlessly whittled to try and create a sentence that can avoid getting belittled.
It's hard to talk in groups, because you have to have a sentence mentally critiqued by 3/4 people in turn, so the topic has usually changed before you can say your piece.
I think there are tradeoffs though, and this has been a thorn in my side during technical interviews where you are expected to think out loud because:
1. Sometimes you have a vague sense of the shape of the solution, and ime it can be helpful to sit with it for a while before trying to shape it into words.
2. Talking out loud forces structure but it also rate-limits how quickly you can iterate through ideas to find one that plausibly solves the problem at hand
It seems like you saying that people who can do alone what most people do alone, have an advantage. Sure but seems more like an agreement with the article than otherwise.
This proves nothing but, in my earlier days, I'd come home with something on my mind from work and tell my wife about how I couldn't get something to work the way I wanted. She had no clue what I was talking about but she'd offer up clues and suggestions to which I would try to explain to her how things actually worked.
Somewhere in that process it would lead to a solution that I would bring to work the next day!
In 2017 LLMs weren't powerful enough to generate working code on their own, but my goal was to at least create a chatbot that could help you rubber-duck-debug your way to a solution. Unfortunately the tech wasn't quite strong enough for that, and not enough engineers even knew what rubber-duck-debugging was. RIP Duckly.
Trying to train an LLM on two 1080ti's on the StackOverflow corpus in my living room was a vibe though. Good times.
Duckly deserved to actually work. There’s a small irony here: the closest study I found to this, robots specifically built to simulate attentive listening, found they performed no better than an actual inanimate rubber duck for adult engineers. The mechanical signal of listening doesn’t seem to be the active ingredient. Makes me wonder if Duckly would have needed real disagreement to close a gap a duck can’t, not just better natural language.
You're probably on to something with the value of disagreement. I think it's one reason why chatting with current models doesn't create the same stimulation as rubber-ducking used to bring. The models are typically too quick to agree and amplify what you think rather than truly break it down and push back.
And thanks for saying it should have worked, I agree. My chagrin has increased over the years as I have realized the magnitude of my ill-timing.
It's simpler than this. Explaining a question/issue to someone involves going back to basics and covering all the foundational info that a third party would not have. When thinking alone, you gloss over this, and may not realize that a foundational assumption is incorrect. When you are forced to explain every step explicitly, these errors or gaps can become apparent without any intervention by the listener.
I have my younger kid explain each math problem to me before she submits it on Khan Academy. My older kid thinks in her head how she would explain a problem before turning in a test. It's a good habit to form.
As much as people make fun of "new math", it is really neat to see my 3rd grader working through a math problem step by step in a way that makes sense to them instead of the rote memorization I had to do as a kid. While they don't like showing their work, it helps them to work through each step to make sure their assumptions are correct, like you said.
Yes, it is nice that there are more ways that are taught now. It can turn into too much, however. Some parents I know dislike that their kid is taught 8 different ways to do long division, at the expense of having sufficient time to practice any of the methods. They end up taking the kids to math tutoring so that they can actually learn how to do the mechanical steps.
But it is for sure good that there are multiple ways to do various operations, and there are plenty of youtube videos that students can turn to if what they have been taught does not resonate for them.
OMG - strong vibes to Einstein crediting Michele Besso, his colleague at the Swiss Patent Office, with helping him discussing some concepts in the special relativity paper: see at the end of the paper https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf
I was wondering about the question of whether people who made very deep discoveries (Einstein and Godel come to mind) had others to talk things through with beforehand.
I know Andrew Wiles kept all of his work on Fermat's Last Theorem secret and by that I assume he never talked it through with anyone.
I saw a Facebook copypasta piece that claimed that Einstein's first wife came up with many or most of his ideas, and never got credit because of sexism. No proof whatsoever, other than she was a mathematician and physicist.
But "it could have happened!" is more important than even a microshred of evidence for highly emotional, online topics.
This anecdote nicely pokes a hole in that conspiracy theory: he was thoughtful enough to share credit with a layman work associate, but (supposedly) not the most important woman in his life - that seems even less likely.
I started my web dev career in 1999 so my main code references were a combination of O’reilly and “for dummies” books. As a wet behind the ears engineer I’d find myself regularly walking over to my more senior friend Dan’s cubicle for help.
Half the time on the walk over, trying to frame the question in my mind I’d figure out the answer or at least next step. It got to the point where Dan would see me heading towards him and suddenly turn around and he’d as “Figure it out?” And I’d throw him a thumbs up on the way back to my desk.
Thank you for sharing this. Growing up Asian American many teachers disciplined me and made assumptions about my intelligence for not being as vocal as the other kids. Culture shapes cognition and vice versa.
This makes sense when you think about the divided state of the USA today. People were isolated during COVID and had no feedback on opinions formed then. When they started creating bubbles after lockdown, they wanted validation for the opinions they formed without that feedback. Now, people constantly argue online because that feedback they needed while cementing those ideas wasn't there and we aren't willing to take that communication feedback to tweak our opinions based on common sense because we all believe we are right. This article makes a lot of sense.
Everyone inherently knows this, that's why they reach out to others when stuck on a bug (see also rubber-ducking). But why is it so hard to convince individuals and organizations of the benefits of pair programming?
I wonder if there's a difference between people who have a strong inner voice and those with no inner voice (Anendophasia). I.e. do people w Anendophasia do better on their own than those with a strong inner voice?
> The Enigma of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017): their argumentative theory holds that reasoning evolved for social rather than individual epistemic purposes, to produce and evaluate arguments in group contexts.
Yes! I love that someone wrote this down!
This seems so obvious to me now. I often ask LLMs to cite their sources (they do hallucinate from time to time), and they often give me sources that don't say what is claimed. "How would the LLM know not to give this to me?" I wonder. They're trained to explain but not to convince, so they don't know what's convincing, and they should.
I think humans hallucinate at least as much as LLMs—arguments of any complexity are impossible to formulate without leaping at least a bit—but other humans ground us. That's why when people become socially isolated, they join cults or adopt conspiracy theories or the like.
Conversely, "this is convincing to an expert" converges on “this is true" as our collective expertise grows over time. This is the foundation of the scientific method, of progress in all engineering disciplines, etc.
The move from thinking to semantic conversion is important for investigation/introspection.
Arguing with yourself also seems to engage your brains "theory of mind" centers, so different pathways get activated to examine the problem space.
The problem with Ai is the fact that it hallucinates and if you're doing anything truly novel in an integration or framing sense it bottoms out very quickly and can't engage. A human operator can decompose the problem and get accuracy checks for known areas in the training data of course.
Now to be I'm not saying Ai can't produce novel work on the edge but in my experience it is antagonistic towards those goals.
Case in point, CRDTs, many don't use tombstones but they are the minority, and if you try iterate a new CRDT off of one that doesn't use tombstones, let's say diamond-types, it will keep pulling you back to tombstones.
The problem is that the number of humans who understand dynamic investigation and the push pull of exploring an idea you don't hold with someone has always been very small, and now with reflexive internet argument culture driving how we view "debate" and "discussion".
I don't know if we've reduced the leisure to think or what but things are not great for finding speculative thinking partners.
I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this:
>The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure.
It's not unlike what people like PG say about writing improving thinking...it's the being forced to go from fuzzy directional notions to something you can put on paper in that will stand up to critique.
Same with rubber duck debugging. The verbal part means you need to articulate it clearly but it's not the speaking that helps. Same with writing a detailed spec/prompt for an LLM - I know if its too fuzzy ("set an appropriate timeout") the LLM will spin it's wheels so it forces clarity.
Also suspect that a big part of who we consider intelligent is linked to this. Maybe their internal monologue is just more crisp - closer to what they'd tell a rubber duck.
I'm with you there. I have to either hear the full sentences narrated by my internal voice or see the words flashing in my mind in order to "think". This is great for building and maintaining deep mental models but it is also highly susceptible to "bit rot" (such as forgetting the rationale or evidence for a specific assertion or position) days/weeks/years later. I have a friend who simply can't understand how inter-linked note systems (like the kind Obsidian enables) are helpful. It's just a bewildering mess to them and they think more linearly.
Thus, writing things down is a necessity for me: it's not for a need for structure but rather that my "context window" gets filled too quickly. I can counter my own arguments but it's more fun, and often quicker, to do with someone else. Besides, there is such a diversity of thinking out there it would be foolish to not take advantage!
> I often construct full sentences in my head
I've only ever heard that associated with schizophrenia, but I don't even know if that's true or not.
What? It's never occurred to me that this isn't entirely normal, I've done it all my life. I thought people without an inner monologue were the unusual ones.
I think I've got this from growing up with a narcissist. Thoughts are constructed and seemingly endlessly whittled to try and create a sentence that can avoid getting belittled.
It's hard to talk in groups, because you have to have a sentence mentally critiqued by 3/4 people in turn, so the topic has usually changed before you can say your piece.
I assume your anecdotal experience is rare.
I think there are tradeoffs though, and this has been a thorn in my side during technical interviews where you are expected to think out loud because:
1. Sometimes you have a vague sense of the shape of the solution, and ime it can be helpful to sit with it for a while before trying to shape it into words.
2. Talking out loud forces structure but it also rate-limits how quickly you can iterate through ideas to find one that plausibly solves the problem at hand
It seems like you saying that people who can do alone what most people do alone, have an advantage. Sure but seems more like an agreement with the article than otherwise.
This proves nothing but, in my earlier days, I'd come home with something on my mind from work and tell my wife about how I couldn't get something to work the way I wanted. She had no clue what I was talking about but she'd offer up clues and suggestions to which I would try to explain to her how things actually worked.
Somewhere in that process it would lead to a solution that I would bring to work the next day!
In 2017 LLMs weren't powerful enough to generate working code on their own, but my goal was to at least create a chatbot that could help you rubber-duck-debug your way to a solution. Unfortunately the tech wasn't quite strong enough for that, and not enough engineers even knew what rubber-duck-debugging was. RIP Duckly.
Trying to train an LLM on two 1080ti's on the StackOverflow corpus in my living room was a vibe though. Good times.
Duckly deserved to actually work. There’s a small irony here: the closest study I found to this, robots specifically built to simulate attentive listening, found they performed no better than an actual inanimate rubber duck for adult engineers. The mechanical signal of listening doesn’t seem to be the active ingredient. Makes me wonder if Duckly would have needed real disagreement to close a gap a duck can’t, not just better natural language.
You're probably on to something with the value of disagreement. I think it's one reason why chatting with current models doesn't create the same stimulation as rubber-ducking used to bring. The models are typically too quick to agree and amplify what you think rather than truly break it down and push back.
And thanks for saying it should have worked, I agree. My chagrin has increased over the years as I have realized the magnitude of my ill-timing.
perhaps it is time to resurrect Duckly queue Frankenstein music and thunder in background
It's simpler than this. Explaining a question/issue to someone involves going back to basics and covering all the foundational info that a third party would not have. When thinking alone, you gloss over this, and may not realize that a foundational assumption is incorrect. When you are forced to explain every step explicitly, these errors or gaps can become apparent without any intervention by the listener.
I have my younger kid explain each math problem to me before she submits it on Khan Academy. My older kid thinks in her head how she would explain a problem before turning in a test. It's a good habit to form.
As much as people make fun of "new math", it is really neat to see my 3rd grader working through a math problem step by step in a way that makes sense to them instead of the rote memorization I had to do as a kid. While they don't like showing their work, it helps them to work through each step to make sure their assumptions are correct, like you said.
Yes, it is nice that there are more ways that are taught now. It can turn into too much, however. Some parents I know dislike that their kid is taught 8 different ways to do long division, at the expense of having sufficient time to practice any of the methods. They end up taking the kids to math tutoring so that they can actually learn how to do the mechanical steps.
But it is for sure good that there are multiple ways to do various operations, and there are plenty of youtube videos that students can turn to if what they have been taught does not resonate for them.
OMG - strong vibes to Einstein crediting Michele Besso, his colleague at the Swiss Patent Office, with helping him discussing some concepts in the special relativity paper: see at the end of the paper https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf
Thanks,
I was wondering about the question of whether people who made very deep discoveries (Einstein and Godel come to mind) had others to talk things through with beforehand.
I know Andrew Wiles kept all of his work on Fermat's Last Theorem secret and by that I assume he never talked it through with anyone.
Interesting.
I saw a Facebook copypasta piece that claimed that Einstein's first wife came up with many or most of his ideas, and never got credit because of sexism. No proof whatsoever, other than she was a mathematician and physicist.
But "it could have happened!" is more important than even a microshred of evidence for highly emotional, online topics.
This anecdote nicely pokes a hole in that conspiracy theory: he was thoughtful enough to share credit with a layman work associate, but (supposedly) not the most important woman in his life - that seems even less likely.
This is so true!
1. Talking or writing requires thoughts to be sequenced so they come out in a way someone can follow
Thinking in your head won’t organize your thought.
2. Talking or writing to someone invites feedback and forces you to make sense, fit in socially etc.
Chatting with an AI or writing in your diary won’t refine or improve your thoughts.
I started my web dev career in 1999 so my main code references were a combination of O’reilly and “for dummies” books. As a wet behind the ears engineer I’d find myself regularly walking over to my more senior friend Dan’s cubicle for help.
Half the time on the walk over, trying to frame the question in my mind I’d figure out the answer or at least next step. It got to the point where Dan would see me heading towards him and suddenly turn around and he’d as “Figure it out?” And I’d throw him a thumbs up on the way back to my desk.
Some of the value I get coding with LLMs is like that. Like I am working on some code that I 80% understand and going back and forth I get to 100%.
Communicating ideas helps, but thinking out loud may not work better to some people.
Thinking silently fits Asian Americans better than Euro Americans*.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-murder-and-the-m...
Thank you for sharing this. Growing up Asian American many teachers disciplined me and made assumptions about my intelligence for not being as vocal as the other kids. Culture shapes cognition and vice versa.
This makes sense when you think about the divided state of the USA today. People were isolated during COVID and had no feedback on opinions formed then. When they started creating bubbles after lockdown, they wanted validation for the opinions they formed without that feedback. Now, people constantly argue online because that feedback they needed while cementing those ideas wasn't there and we aren't willing to take that communication feedback to tweak our opinions based on common sense because we all believe we are right. This article makes a lot of sense.
Furthermore, it helps to talk with people who think differently from you.
Maybe they studied the same subject but at a different school, or maybe they specialize in something else entirely.
Maybe their first language is different from yours, since language idioms can affect the way we frame problems.
Maybe they want to get into the field you're working on, and your thinking can also be teaching.
For me, this is a big part of the value of a hackerspace/makerspace. The tools are nice, but the intellectual environment is amazing.
Everyone inherently knows this, that's why they reach out to others when stuck on a bug (see also rubber-ducking). But why is it so hard to convince individuals and organizations of the benefits of pair programming?
rubber-ducking and pair programming have wildly different investment costs
I wonder if there's a difference between people who have a strong inner voice and those with no inner voice (Anendophasia). I.e. do people w Anendophasia do better on their own than those with a strong inner voice?
Writing is as good, or even better https://www.paulgraham.com/words.html
You can tell you didn't read the article before jumping into commenting, as this point is addressed.
Only as
> the act of writing out a problem to a model still forces the same sentence-level precision described earlier
(model referring to LLM here)
but not as writing for writing's sake
> The Enigma of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017): their argumentative theory holds that reasoning evolved for social rather than individual epistemic purposes, to produce and evaluate arguments in group contexts.
Yes! I love that someone wrote this down!
This seems so obvious to me now. I often ask LLMs to cite their sources (they do hallucinate from time to time), and they often give me sources that don't say what is claimed. "How would the LLM know not to give this to me?" I wonder. They're trained to explain but not to convince, so they don't know what's convincing, and they should.
I think humans hallucinate at least as much as LLMs—arguments of any complexity are impossible to formulate without leaping at least a bit—but other humans ground us. That's why when people become socially isolated, they join cults or adopt conspiracy theories or the like.
Conversely, "this is convincing to an expert" converges on “this is true" as our collective expertise grows over time. This is the foundation of the scientific method, of progress in all engineering disciplines, etc.
LLMs are really good rubber ducks.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
I keep a rubber duck on my desk and have for at least 10 years, because of this. Great conversation starter.
A collection of thoughts on this.
Pierces Firstness is exactly what drives this.
The move from thinking to semantic conversion is important for investigation/introspection.
Arguing with yourself also seems to engage your brains "theory of mind" centers, so different pathways get activated to examine the problem space.
The problem with Ai is the fact that it hallucinates and if you're doing anything truly novel in an integration or framing sense it bottoms out very quickly and can't engage. A human operator can decompose the problem and get accuracy checks for known areas in the training data of course.
Now to be I'm not saying Ai can't produce novel work on the edge but in my experience it is antagonistic towards those goals.
Case in point, CRDTs, many don't use tombstones but they are the minority, and if you try iterate a new CRDT off of one that doesn't use tombstones, let's say diamond-types, it will keep pulling you back to tombstones.
The problem is that the number of humans who understand dynamic investigation and the push pull of exploring an idea you don't hold with someone has always been very small, and now with reflexive internet argument culture driving how we view "debate" and "discussion".
I don't know if we've reduced the leisure to think or what but things are not great for finding speculative thinking partners.