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Babble

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This post is an exercise in "identifying with the algorithm." I'm a big fan of the probabilistic method and randomized algorithms, so my biases will show. How do human beings produce knowledge? When we describe rational thought processes, we tend to think of them as essentially deterministic, deliberate, and algorithmic. After some self-examination, however, I've come to think that my process is closer to babbling many random strings and later filtering by a heuristic. I think verbally, and my process for generating knowledge is virtually indistinguishable from my process for generating speech, and also quite similar to my process for generating writing. Here's a simplistic model of how this works. I try to build a coherent sentence. At each step, to pick the next word, I randomly generate words in the category (correct part of speech, relevance) and sound them out one by one to see which continues the sentence most coherently. So, instead of deliberately and carefully generating sentences in one go, the algorithm is something like: 1. Babble. Use a weak and local filter to randomly generate a lot of possibilities. Is the word the right part of speech? Does it lie in the same region of thingspace? Does it fit the context? 2. Prune. Use a strong and global filter to test for the best, or at least a satisfactory, choice. With this word in the blank, do I actually believe this sentence? Does the word have the right connotations? Does the whole thought read smoothly? This is a babble about embracing randomness. BABY BABBLE Research on language development suggests that baby babble is an direct forerunner to language. You might imagine that infants learn by imitation, and that baby babble is just an imperfect imitation of words the baby hears, and progress occurs as they physiologically adapt to better produce those sounds. You would be wrong. Instead, infants are initially capable of producing all the phonemes that exist in all human language

x Babble — LessWrong Babble and Prune Babble and Prune Poetry Rationality Curated 225 Babble by alkjash 10th Jan 2018 Linkpost for radimentary.wordpress.com 6 min read 36 225 This post is an exercise in "identifying with the algorithm." I'm a big fan of the probabilistic method and randomized algorithms, so my biases will show. How do human beings produce knowledge? When we describe rational thought processes, we tend to think of them as essentially deterministic, deliberate, and algorithmic. After some self-examination, however, I've come to think that my process is closer to babbling many ra

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