One thing I forgot to mention that I meant to say: My oldest can now speak English pretty fluently, using articles and adjectives, even some compound sentences; she just has first and second person pronouns mixed up.
When she says, “Go in your bed,” she’s referring to her own bed. Or when she says, “Give me the ball,” she means that she is giving it to us.
This sort of mistake makes sense when you consider that she learned English by listening to her parents narrate things from our own perspective. Every time we said, “Thank you,” she was giving us something, so now that’s what she says when she gives us something. Every time we used first person pronouns, she correctly inferred that we were referring to ourselves (i.e., not her), and every time we used second person pronouns, we were referring to her.
When she speaks, it sounds like she’s telling us what she predicts we would say, rather than what we would expect her to say as a proper conversational partner.
I’ve heard that babies start out life not just egocentric, but actually unable to distinguish the rest of the universe from themselves. Our youngest is still at that stage. When she is sad, it’s because the universe is sad. Mommy and Daddy are not individuals out there operating independently in an external world; they’re just phenomena that the universe generates to make everything better.
For our oldest, she knows that we are different people, but she seems to see language as a process of narrating everything that happens. Sentences are things we build together, rather than a way for different people to share their own perspectives with each other. “I/me/my” is always said about the other person, and “you/your” is always said about her.
For GPT-3, I feel it’s the same way. Language is something it generates and predicts, not a conversation it participates in from its own perspective.
To correct this In our daughter, we say something like, “No, say, ‘I pooped in my potty,’” if she says, “You pooped in your potty.”
For a large language model, how would we get it to understand that it is separate from us, with its own limitations in understanding, which are different from our own limitations in understanding? Is that something we even want?
Mine (3.5 yrs) says “show me” when she wants to show something to her mom or me. Usually with an exasperated sigh between trying to describe the thing and just deciding we need to come see it.
[as our oldest sees it] Sentences are things we build together, rather than a way for different people to share their own perspectives with each other.
I’ve gone through a huge growth arc as an adult in recognizing the extent to which (especially in really good conversations) sentences are things we build together. Not that we don’t have different perspectives, but when conversation is really flowing, it makes way more sense to view it as “our collective mind is thinking” and not “I am transmitting information to you, then getting information back” etc.
(When we’re more at odds with someone, whether adversarial or just conflict with a loved one, it can be more like the transmit mode, and sometimes (tho not always) it seems to work best if we can get into the co-thinking mode again. Though there’s not a hack for that—it’s a deep trust-dancing puzzle!)
One thing I forgot to mention that I meant to say: My oldest can now speak English pretty fluently, using articles and adjectives, even some compound sentences; she just has first and second person pronouns mixed up.
When she says, “Go in your bed,” she’s referring to her own bed. Or when she says, “Give me the ball,” she means that she is giving it to us.
This sort of mistake makes sense when you consider that she learned English by listening to her parents narrate things from our own perspective. Every time we said, “Thank you,” she was giving us something, so now that’s what she says when she gives us something. Every time we used first person pronouns, she correctly inferred that we were referring to ourselves (i.e., not her), and every time we used second person pronouns, we were referring to her.
When she speaks, it sounds like she’s telling us what she predicts we would say, rather than what we would expect her to say as a proper conversational partner.
I’ve heard that babies start out life not just egocentric, but actually unable to distinguish the rest of the universe from themselves. Our youngest is still at that stage. When she is sad, it’s because the universe is sad. Mommy and Daddy are not individuals out there operating independently in an external world; they’re just phenomena that the universe generates to make everything better.
For our oldest, she knows that we are different people, but she seems to see language as a process of narrating everything that happens. Sentences are things we build together, rather than a way for different people to share their own perspectives with each other. “I/me/my” is always said about the other person, and “you/your” is always said about her.
For GPT-3, I feel it’s the same way. Language is something it generates and predicts, not a conversation it participates in from its own perspective.
To correct this In our daughter, we say something like, “No, say, ‘I pooped in my potty,’” if she says, “You pooped in your potty.”
For a large language model, how would we get it to understand that it is separate from us, with its own limitations in understanding, which are different from our own limitations in understanding? Is that something we even want?
I’ve heard the pronoun-reversal mistake is common.
My child does the same thing. He says, “Pick you up?” meaning “Pick me up?”
Mine (3.5 yrs) says “show me” when she wants to show something to her mom or me. Usually with an exasperated sigh between trying to describe the thing and just deciding we need to come see it.
I’ve gone through a huge growth arc as an adult in recognizing the extent to which (especially in really good conversations) sentences are things we build together. Not that we don’t have different perspectives, but when conversation is really flowing, it makes way more sense to view it as “our collective mind is thinking” and not “I am transmitting information to you, then getting information back” etc.
(When we’re more at odds with someone, whether adversarial or just conflict with a loved one, it can be more like the transmit mode, and sometimes (tho not always) it seems to work best if we can get into the co-thinking mode again. Though there’s not a hack for that—it’s a deep trust-dancing puzzle!)
The 2nd half of this video is about this collective mind thing: https://youtu.be/G3vcXZPlsDc