Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

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.

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.

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.

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.