After eighteen years of being a professor, I’ve graded many student essays. And while I usually try to teach a deep structure of concepts, what the median student actually learns seems to mostly be a set of low order correlations. They know what words to use, which words tend to go together, which combinations tend to have positive associations, and so on. But if you ask an exam question where the deep structure answer differs from answer you’d guess looking at low order correlations, most students usually give the wrong answer.
Simple correlations also seem sufficient to capture most polite conversation talk, such as the weather is nice, how is your mother’s illness, and damn that other political party. Simple correlations are also most of what I see in inspirational TED talks, and when public intellectuals and talk show guests pontificate on topics they really don’t understand, such as quantum mechanics, consciousness, postmodernism, or the need always for more regulation everywhere. After all, media entertainers don’t need to understand deep structures any better than do their audiences.
Let me call styles of talking (or music, etc.) that rely mostly on low order correlations “babbling”. Babbling isn’t meaningless, but to ignorant audiences it often appears to be based on a deeper understanding than is actually the case. When done well, babbling can be entertaining, comforting, titillating, or exciting. It just isn’t usually a good place to learn deep insight.
It’s unclear to me how much economically-relevant activity is generated by low order correlation-type reasoning, or whatever the right generalisation of “babbling” is here.
Just signal-boosting the obvious references to the second: Sarah Constantin’s Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences and Robin Hanson’s Better Babblers.
It’s unclear to me how much economically-relevant activity is generated by low order correlation-type reasoning, or whatever the right generalisation of “babbling” is here.
Thank you, definitely agree about linking those as relevant.
I think one useful question is whether babbling can work to prune, and it seems the answer from reasoning models is yes.