> four key cognitive behaviors -- verification, backtracking, subgoal setting, and backward chaining -- that both expert human problem solvers and successful language models employ.

As we make AI better, perhaps we'll inadvertently find ways to make HI (human intelligence) better too.

I had a personal experience with this when I was studying for an exam recently. As I read over practice questions, I spoke aloud, replicating the reasoning methods/personality of Deepseek R1. By spending a lot of time reading long verbose R1 outputs, I've essentially fine-tuned my brain for reasoning tasks. I believe this method contributed to my excellent score on that exam.

• jdpage

  today at 3:57 AM

  This is a well-known approach: verbalizing your thought process (either by speaking aloud, or by writing) is something that's long established as a good tactic for making sure that you're actually thinking through something, rather than glossing over it. Ironically, I've seen people bemoaning that use of AI will rob people of that.

  I agree that there's potential here, though, and do genuinely hope that we find ways to make human intelligence better as we're going about AI research. Even pessimistically, I think we'll at least surface approaches that people use without thinking about, which is on its own a good thing, because once you know you're doing something, it becomes a lot easier to train yourself to do it better.

  • crooked-v

    today at 7:21 AM

    > Ironically, I've seen people bemoaning that use of AI will rob people of that.

    There's that quote from Socrates, recorded by Plato:

    > For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

    • jbreckmckye

      today at 8:57 AM

      Classical era philosophers weren't completely wrong about this. They lived in a more oral literary culture where performers could recite entire works from memory.

      I don't think anyone today could recite Beowulf from heart. But 1500 years ago that's exactly how it was enjoyed.

    • tankenmate

      today at 7:53 AM

      And on the flipside, 廣記不如淡墨[0], lit. "a good memory is not as good as pale ink", which is these days more commonly translated as "the faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory".

      [0] "A Record of Learning about Government" [政學錄] Magistrates handbooks, Author Zheng Duan [鄭端] (compilation), Early Qing Dynasty (1644-1796)

      • rTX5CMRXIfFG

        today at 8:16 AM

        Y’all can throw pithy sayings at each other all you like but memory is not the same as understanding, and AI does offer plenty of opportunity for humans to cognitively disengage. Doesn’t necessarily mean most people will, but it’s very likely that most people will.

    • neom

      today at 7:45 AM

      Pretty much every single spiritual philosopher has said some version of that (I'm writing a book on this subject right now, heh):

      The Buddha (from the Pali Canon, Vinaya Pitaka, Cullavagga 10:4):

      “Writing is like a drug that weakens memory.”

      and: “Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor... But when you yourselves know: 'These things are good; these things are not blameable; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,' enter on and abide in them.”

      Confucius (Analects 2:15):

      “Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.”

      Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 48):

      “In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.”

      Jesus (Matthew 16:26):

      “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

      Muhammad (Hadith, Sahih Muslim):

      “The worst vessel to fill is the stomach; sufficient for the child of Adam are a few morsels to keep his back straight. If he must fill it, then one-third food, one-third drink, and one-third air.”

      (This Hadith symbolically warns against excessive reliance on external consumption diminishing spiritual clarity and internal balance.)

      Rumi (Masnavi):

      “These outward forms are but dust and air; Seek the reality beyond appearance and form.”

      Krishna (Bhagavad Gita, 2:42-43):

      “Those who are attached to pleasure and power, whose minds are drawn away by such things, have no capacity for absorption into higher states of awareness.”

      • HPsquared

        today at 9:05 AM

        Sometimes it's good to forget something, commit to written record and let it go. People can carry too much old stuff around in their heads, and it can become burdensome.

        Even things like confession, or therapy, leverage this - people letting go of bad things that are hanging around in their memory.

  • ilrwbwrkhv

    today at 5:35 AM

    This is one of the secrets of the top British universities. They do a lot of debating in small groups. Even their papers are read out loud

• vunderba

  today at 6:25 AM

  Thinking out loud is an age old practice and is the equivalent of "rubber ducking" to yourself.

  As someone who comes from a long ancestral line of people who talk to themselves while reasoning through problems - it would occasionally prove to be a minor handicap during proctored exams, as internal monologue isn't really the same thing.

  • forthac

    today at 6:41 AM

    From what I have seen from split-brain experiments, I am of the belief that by vocalizing our thoughts, we are more fully engaging both hemispheres of our brain through the auditory pathway in addition to the Corpus Callosum.

    • rzzzt

      today at 7:34 AM

      Pictures tell me that the language area is dominant in a single hemisphere, mostly the left side, with motoric stuff and thinking about words in the front (Broca's area) and hearing in the back (Wernicke's area).

      So you may have to use the SLI bridge again just to make sense of what the other side is hearing.

  • rendall

    today at 7:01 AM

    Me, working through a problem: "So, that means..."

    Girlfriend, coming in from outside: "Who are you talking to?"

    Me: "I talk to myself. You know that."

    Gf: "Oh right. You also whisper to yourself, which is scary."

    Me: "Scary?"

    Gf: "It sounds demonic."

    Which, to be fair... Evidently, my internal monologuing gets quite a bit vocal even with other people around.

    • HPsquared

      today at 9:27 AM

      It's your reasoning daemon running in the background.

    • vijucat

      today at 7:35 AM

      Maybe demons were those who learned to cogitate better and ended up being the Ted Kacynzkis of their ilk :)

• yapyap

  today at 7:40 AM

  … some of yall

How much has our knowledge of AI training techniques helped to discover how to train people to think better?

• atwrk

  today at 9:07 AM

  As someone with an educational background I actually often ask myself the opposite: Why don't AI techniques almost never seem to use the knowledge we have about human learning to train better AI?

  • HPsquared

    today at 9:28 AM

    Maybe an area worth exploring, if you think there's something to it!

• vasco

  today at 7:17 AM

  We've had knowledge of how to eat better to not get extreme scenarios like obesity and look at the effectiveness of that. Until you have a pill that makes you think better only the motivated will do it, and in this case the motivated could already do it.

  • PeterStuer

    today at 8:38 AM

    You seem to imply the 'motivated' can not improve.

    I'd say the motivated often reap the rewards of innovations more so than the average, as they were pushing the boundaries in the first place.

    Having a dishwasher or a robot vacuum does not make me lazy. It allows me to do more productive things.

• sanxiyn

  today at 5:27 AM

  So far, I don't think we found anything interesting, yet.

I sometimes see these reddit threads of people talking about the experience of having an internal monologue. I have no such monologue, at least not one that is accessible to the part of my mind that calls itself 'me', but I have often wondered if that monologue is something like a 'chain of thought'. I feel like maybe without access to that 'idea feed' maybe my planning and executive functioning is less effective than some other people. I do find myself quite more effective with those sort of tasks when I do a little 'chain of thought' notepad.

I also suspect I spend less time ruminating and second-guessing myself and other anxious behaviours that I imagine would come with having someone talking in your ear all day, but that's probably off topic.

• kennysoona

  today at 8:16 AM

  You never form thoughts in your mind in a linguistic way? Can you read a sentence and be aware of it as a sentence in your mind, or are you unable to do that?

  I don't doubt you or anything like that, just very curious. As someone with a very strong internal monologue, it's hard for me to imagine not having one.

  • PeterStuer

    today at 8:49 AM

    For me it has linguistics components for sure, but it is many in parallel and a lot less 'linear'.

    Where inner language most certainly comes into play is in the 'output' phase, be it spoken or written, as serialization is required there, but to be honest that often feels like a projection or even a reconstruction with an inherrent sense of loss as the inner is so much richer and nuanced.

    That is not to say linearization has no merits. Even if it loses so much it forces consistency and rigor in the lower dimensional reasoning.

    • kennysoona

      today at 8:54 AM

      If you were in a debate, and had to think through your reasoning and arguments, refining your argument, not the words you want to say but the substance of what you will say, would there be an inner voice in that situation?

      • HPsquared

        today at 9:08 AM

        Non-chain of thought models just "come up with" words to say. It's probably a bit like that.

• kla-s

  today at 6:42 AM

  Genuine question, how does multi step reasoning work for you then? Like eg if you have some math problem that's trivially to solve individually but needs multiple steps, lets say 16 * 3 + 5? How does 16 * 3 = 48 land in some 'register' of your brain (short term memory), so that you can then add 5 to get to 53? Maybe 16 * 3 + 5 is to easy for you and you'll just 'see' it but the question still stands, just choose a more complex problem.

  Isn't the same meta process at play when thinking about more fuzzy topics?

  • atwrk

    today at 9:04 AM

    It's also very probable that the verbalization the majority does internally is just that - a verbalization of the actual underlying thought process. That is what much of current cognitive linguistics points to as far as I have understood.

    (Also a reason why I'm very sceptical that the current LLM approach will eventually lead to AGI, BTW)

  • crooked-v

    today at 7:25 AM

    Not that poster, but for me it's directly manipulating numbers (for example, "16×3 + 5" turns into "10×3 + 6×3 + 5" into "30 + 18 + 5" into "30 + 10 + 8 + 5" into "40 + 13" into "53"). There's no language involved, though in some cases I might use some spatial reasoning by doing something like associating given chunks of an equation with different fingers.

    • leroyrandolph

      today at 8:00 AM

      I don't really follow. Say, during the in-between step "10×3 + 6×3 + 5", how do you store and cognize the individual numeric and operator elements?

      Surely, even if the arithmetics can be simplified and "lookup-table'd", you are still aware of the numbers in Arabic form or whatever equivalent you're using, right? Or do you somehow have 53 individual blobs swirling inside your consciousness?

  • cgriswald

    today at 7:24 AM

    I believe I have an internal narrator but I’m not certain exactly what others mean by that so I don’t know for sure.

    However the way I think about math is different than the way I plan my day or other things. In my case, it is very much like I have registers that would hold the result of 16 x 3 in it so I can add the 5 to it later. I have a certain number of registers and with effort like repeating what Ive already solved I could temporarily create more.

    It also feels somewhat physical, as if the register is an actual box or has a “location” or like I’ve put the answer down on the desk like a part of something I’m building. Perhaps not coincidentally I am one of the many people who have a “calendar shape” for the months.

  • t-3

    today at 8:51 AM

    I speak out loud or write on paper, or just do it a tiny bit slower and sometimes have to redo steps when I forget a result.

• RGamma

  today at 7:22 AM

  So you cannot think in language? Sounds kinda scary to be honest.

"models primed with incorrect solutions containing proper reasoning patterns achieve comparable performance to those trained on correct solutions"

One of the parts most worth a replication study.