I’ve noticed that people are really innately good at sentiment classification, and, by comparison, crap at natural language inference. In a typical conversation with ordinary educated people, people will do a lot of the former relative to the latter.
My theory of this is that, with sentiment classification and generation, we’re usually talking in order to credibly signal and countersignal our competence, virtuous features, and/or group membership, and that humanity has been fine tuned to succeed at this social maneuvering task. At this point, it comes naturally. Success at the object-level-reasoning task was less crucial for individuals in the ancestral environment, and so people, typically, aren’t naturally expert at it. What a bad situation to be in, when our species’ survival hinges on our competence at object-level reasoning.
I’ve noticed that people are really innately good at sentiment classification, and, by comparison, crap at natural language inference. In a typical conversation with ordinary educated people, people will do a lot of the former relative to the latter.
My theory of this is that, with sentiment classification and generation, we’re usually talking in order to credibly signal and countersignal our competence, virtuous features, and/or group membership, and that humanity has been fine tuned to succeed at this social maneuvering task. At this point, it comes naturally. Success at the object-level-reasoning task was less crucial for individuals in the ancestral environment, and so people, typically, aren’t naturally expert at it. What a bad situation to be in, when our species’ survival hinges on our competence at object-level reasoning.