this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
750 points (95.8% liked)
Technology
71136 readers
2955 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don’t want to be critical, but I think if you step back a bit and look and what you’re saying, you’re asking why we would bother to experiment and prove what we think we know.
That’s a perfectly normal and reasonable scientific pursuit. Yes, in a rational society the burden of proof would be on the grifters, but that’s never how it actually works. It’s always the doctors disproving the cure-all, not the snake oil salesmen failing to prove their own prove their own product.
There is value in this research, even if it fits what you already believe on the subject. I would think you would be thrilled to have your hypothesis confirmed.
The sticky wicket is the proof that humans (functioning 'normally') do more than pattern.
I think if you look at child development research, you'll see that kids can learn to do crazy shit with very little input, waaay less than you'd need to train a neural net to do the same. So either kids are the luckiest neural nets and always make the correct adjustment after failing, or they have some innate knowledge that isn't pattern-based at all.
There's even some examples in linguistics specifically, where children tend towards certain grammar rules despite all evidence in their language pointing to another rule. Pure pattern-matching would find the real-world rule without first modelling a different (universally common) rule.