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Controllable Fast and Slow Thinking by Learning with Randomized Reasoning Traces

arxiv.org

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Re: Controllable Fast and Slow Thinking by Learning with Randomized Reasoning Traces

#11

Post by nighthawk454 »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #10
grupthink wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

System 1 and 2 is a myth. There is only memory and computation. For a complex problem, retrieving from memory is fast, and performing computation is slow. Furthermore, when performing computation, there are different heuristics that you can use to think about a problem, e.g. If you want to predict the orbit of a satellite, you can use Kepler's laws which gives you the full sweeping elliptical motion. Alternatively, y…

I don't get how you can conclude it is a myth. These are observations on how people think. What is the myth part. I can clearly observe myself doing fast intuitive decisions which I might even not know the logical reasoning behind, but also I can solve problems by thinking through them using my internal monologue. Are these myths?

The error lies in thinking they're 'real' systems to be taken for granted and blindly reasoned forward from, instead of sometimes-helpful academic categorizations.

You can always factor things into groups. e.g. 'Thoughts about now vs thoughts about the future'. Extending that to say there are therefore two modes of thinking and that the brain must handle your two groups differently, at some fundamental or physiological level, and there are only these two modes and all things are either one or the other ... is perhaps quite misguided without more support.

"It's only a model"

Re: Controllable Fast and Slow Thinking by Learning with Randomized Reasoning Traces

#12

Post by atq2119 »

lukev wrote: post #5
lukev wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in one sense I agree with you. There is zero evidence that the human brain runs separate systems for separate types of cognition. On the other hand, the reason this idea is sticky is because it matches our conscious experience. In some situations, we respond intuitively. In other situations, we choose to work analytically using tools like research, deliberation, note-taking, etc. I think it's this second sense in…

Oh, and to be pedantic: > he observation that a O(n^2) problem can be broken down into n separate O(n) problems is ultimately due to system 1 reasoning: it is obviously true. As the parent of a third grader just learning this stuff, I can assure you it isn't immediately obvious to everyone.

It's also not really true.

Consider a problem like edit distance, which is solved using an n^2 dynamic program. What are the n separate problems there?

Sure, you're filling out a table with a nested loop, but that's a very mechanistic view. I don't believe that treating the n outer iterations as separate problems gives any real insight.

Re: Controllable Fast and Slow Thinking by Learning with Randomized Reasoning Traces

#13

Post by SubiculumCode »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #3

AI researchers need to read more cognitive science. It is genuinely embarrassing how often you see "Thinking Fast and Slow" + some 50-year-old paper as the only citations, because this statement: In human cognition theory, human thinking is governed by two systems: the fast and intuitive System 1 and the slower but more deliberative System 2. is intuitive, psychologically seductive, and blatantly wrong. [1] There is…

That line in the abstract made me chuckle too, as a cognitive psychologist of memory (but currently doing autism research). Its an analogy, not some well validated law of cognition. I think there are a lot of concepts in cognitive psychology that may be useful to machine learning research, but they should actually, maybe, invite some cognitive scientists to work with them on their machine learning research (or at least help them craft their abstracts lol)

Re: Controllable Fast and Slow Thinking by Learning with Randomized Reasoning Traces

#14

Post by mewpmewp2 »

nighthawk454 wrote: post #11
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how you can conclude it is a myth. These are observations on how people think. What is the myth part. I can clearly observe myself doing fast intuitive decisions which I might even not know the logical reasoning behind, but also I can solve problems by thinking through them using my internal monologue. Are these myths?

The error lies in thinking they're 'real' systems to be taken for granted and blindly reasoned forward from, instead of sometimes-helpful academic categorizations. You can always factor things into groups. e.g. 'Thoughts about now vs thoughts about the future'. Extending that to say there are therefore two modes of thinking and that the brain must handle your two groups differently, at some fundamental or physiologic…

I don't think we have conclusive evidence, but everything that I see from myself it makes sense to categorize like that. It is either a quick intuitive guess or feel or alternatively I have to hash it out. It just fits perfectly to me.

I do think they are systems in a sense that one is optimsed to be a quick system and the other one requires time, but can solve tougher problems, create something new.

It seems fundamental to me that it is how things would get organized.

Re: Controllable Fast and Slow Thinking by Learning with Randomized Reasoning Traces

#15

Post by jhanschoo »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #3

AI researchers need to read more cognitive science. It is genuinely embarrassing how often you see "Thinking Fast and Slow" + some 50-year-old paper as the only citations, because this statement: In human cognition theory, human thinking is governed by two systems: the fast and intuitive System 1 and the slower but more deliberative System 2. is intuitive, psychologically seductive, and blatantly wrong. [1] There is…

Yeah, they could call it something like retrieval-dominant information generation or computation-dominant information generation, or at least not mention cognitive sciences.

Re: Controllable Fast and Slow Thinking by Learning with Randomized Reasoning Traces

#16

Post by viraptor »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #3

AI researchers need to read more cognitive science. It is genuinely embarrassing how often you see "Thinking Fast and Slow" + some 50-year-old paper as the only citations, because this statement: In human cognition theory, human thinking is governed by two systems: the fast and intuitive System 1 and the slower but more deliberative System 2. is intuitive, psychologically seductive, and blatantly wrong. [1] There is…

> CoT in transformer LLMs helps solve O(n) problems but struggles with O(n^2).

What do you mean by `n` in this case?

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