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"lack of metacognitive insight" is interesting, because I have observed people acting this way too. I have even observed it in myself
"lack of metacognitive insight" is interesting, because I have observed people acting this way too. I have even observed it in myself
I think that lack is overwhelmingly the norm in humans. I can't tell you which neurons fired in my brain when I add two small integers.
It's not even trivial to identify what it is exactly I'm not aware of. There's just some pattern I don't like, and the factors that influence it are a mystery. I've discovered some things over the years that seem to correlate with it, but nothing that truly explains or remedies it.
If you asked me last year(2025) I would have still said LLMs are a silly toy. As of Jan 2026 I have come to accept that LLMs are at least part of the puzzle of how intelligence works. They are at this point better than the majority of humans at various intellectual tasks. It may not be or ever be a 1:1 but good enough ran the world already before llms. There is not even a formal definition of what intelligence is so…
For example, front end web app layout and basic functionality. Anyone can make a website with interactive buttons with ease now, where as before, you had to go look up examples, try stuff, figure out why its not working, e.t.c.
But in terms of organization and higher level tasks, like for example making front end that is clean, robust, easily extensible, and doesn't break, LLMs require almost as much prompting to do this as it takes to actually write the code.
This is similar to factor rotation in factor analysis (or PCA). A varimax rotation, for example, can produce an equivalent factor analysis with sparse loadings, and which is generally more interpretable. Fortunately for us the world is not just a complete mess, and sparse loadings can often be found. There seem to be "natural" concepts that we have observed rather than invented.
(Many examples in other simple machine learning methods too, I am sure.)
Biology? Anthropic really needs to stop anthropomorphizing these things so much. I'm with Dijkstra on this one.
I know they do it as a sort of marketing but still...
> Ask it "what is the capital of the state containing Dallas" and you can observe, in order: > the Dallas feature goes active, > which causes the Texas feature to light up, > which then causes Austin to light up. > It seems fairly clear that this is tracing semantic relationships between high-level concepts — and in doing so, performing a kind of pseudo-symbolic inference, similar to what some philosophers would desc…
"lack of metacognitive insight" is interesting, because I have observed people acting this way too. I have even observed it in myself
If you asked me last year(2025) I would have still said LLMs are a silly toy. As of Jan 2026 I have come to accept that LLMs are at least part of the puzzle of how intelligence works. They are at this point better than the majority of humans at various intellectual tasks. It may not be or ever be a 1:1 but good enough ran the world already before llms. There is not even a formal definition of what intelligence is so…
I think engineering and mathematical thought requires spatial reasoning, when I model problems I see them as 3D shapes. Like the economy is a series of tubes that money flows through and collect in buckets, programming state is little boxes that hold values, chemical interactions are like keys that fit into locks.
I don’t think LLMs can build models like that, but because it has so much memorized and there usually isn’t a need for a novel model custom fit for a problem, it can fake it by imitation.
If you asked me last year(2025) I would have still said LLMs are a silly toy. As of Jan 2026 I have come to accept that LLMs are at least part of the puzzle of how intelligence works. They are at this point better than the majority of humans at various intellectual tasks. It may not be or ever be a 1:1 but good enough ran the world already before llms. There is not even a formal definition of what intelligence is so…
"lack of metacognitive insight" is interesting, because I have observed people acting this way too. I have even observed it in myself
What if your theory about how you reason turns out to be different from how you actually reason?