I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this:
>The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure.
It's not unlike what people like PG say about writing improving thinking...it's the being forced to go from fuzzy directional notions to something you can put on paper in that will stand up to critique.
Same with rubber duck debugging. The verbal part means you need to articulate it clearly but it's not the speaking that helps. Same with writing a detailed spec/prompt for an LLM - I know if its too fuzzy ("set an appropriate timeout") the LLM will spin it's wheels so it forces clarity.
Also suspect that a big part of who we consider intelligent is linked to this. Maybe their internal monologue is just more crisp - closer to what they'd tell a rubber duck.
- genuine dialog between 2 peers with overlapping knowledge on the topic, both being kind, patient, open-minded yet critical, able to point flaws in reasoning or provenance without being hurtful
- genuine dialog between 2 peers with overlapping knowledge on the topic
- genuine dialog between 2 peers
- genuine dialog between 2 persons
- thinking out loud in front of someone listening
- thinking out loud alone thinking of someone listening
- thinking out loud alone
The "trick" here, and that's why I wanted to write it down, is that having an actual person, real or imaginary, does force one to actually explain. A typical fallacy is the "proof left out to the student" which actually happens to be terribly complex or even infeasible.
I believe trying to explain to someone forces you to identify the gap into their knowledge and your point. It's precisely mapping where knowledge does NOT overlap. So instead of making a lot of assumptions they have to be laid out, at the very least made in part explicit. Doing so forces you to stop skimming parts that are challenging for you. The part that you might not feel so sure.
Obviously the whole problem is that this peer, who is both knowledgeable and kind is good in their field and popular, thus busy. Consequently their time is very VERY precious. Hopefully you yourself at that peer. That means that often we have to go down the list and find the next best person.
So... I do think duck debugging is better if you genuinely trust in the kindness of the duck, not see it as a piece of plastic ;)
I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this:
>The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure.
I often construct full sentences in my head. And have conversations with my mental model of some other person. In full sentences
There has been many a time where the process of thinking through in my head how I was going to describe the problem to someone else on the way over to them, that a testable idea pops up.
Could probably have gone for a walk around the block instead, but the formulation of the problem to be able to explain it to someone else seems to be key.
I was reading the parent and thinking the same thing - I can't do that. There's no "voice" in my head like some people describe. If I want to model speaking like a mock conversation, I have to write it or ... speak it, even silently, to convert from the visuals that are my thought.
As an aside, I end up having to organize certain types of thoughts through speaking, which requires some adaptations and limiting functions :-)
I'm with you there. I have to either hear the full sentences narrated by my internal voice or see the words flashing in my mind in order to "think". This is great for building and maintaining deep mental models but it is also highly susceptible to "bit rot" (such as forgetting the rationale or evidence for a specific assertion or position) days/weeks/years later. I have a friend who simply can't understand how inter-linked note systems (like the kind Obsidian enables) are helpful. It's just a bewildering mess to them and they think more linearly.
Thus, writing things down is a necessity for me: it's not for a need for structure but rather that my "context window" gets filled too quickly. I can counter my own arguments but it's more fun, and often quicker, to do with someone else. Besides, there is such a diversity of thinking out there it would be foolish to not take advantage!
Haha, I found this genuinely funny. It’s called an internal monologue. Google tells me that it’s the majority position with 30 to 50 percent not having one.
Personally, I find it very difficult to understand how people could not think in words, like you were speaking to another person. Obviously you also have mental imagery and sound etc, so not everything is just words. Internal speech is one channel of thought, but for anything complex I would have thought it was mandatory.
I personally don't since I suffer from aphantasia. Perhaps I also suffer from not having an internal monologue?! I do think in words but not in complete sentences, it kind of happens much faster.
It might be correlated with neurodivergence. But it’s also just correlated with high verbal ability in general, presumably. I find it quite natural to think in complete structured sentences, and it’s often perplexed me why other people seem to find this concept so alien. And no I’m not schizophrenic.
I think I've got this from growing up with a narcissist. Thoughts are constructed and seemingly endlessly whittled to try and create a sentence that can avoid getting belittled.
It's hard to talk in groups, because you have to have a sentence mentally critiqued by 3/4 people in turn, so the topic has usually changed before you can say your piece.
What? It's never occurred to me that this isn't entirely normal, I've done it all my life. I thought people without an inner monologue were the unusual ones.
I'm not wading into the schizophrenia part, but inner monologue doesn't necessarily imply constructing a fully formed sentence you then repeat to yourself.
Created a throwaway for this, but is this not what people do?
Not so much imagining a conversation in your head, but playing through a conversation with "the other side" of the coin (be it an idea, plan, problem, solution etc) which are both yourself if that makes sense.
Is this not what the inner monologue to yourself is? Your inner is conversing with your outer monologue. Hard to explain.
Would consider myself to be both physically and mentally stable, no conditions etc.
I can only speak for myself... but my inner monologue is just a runaway train of thoughts that I vocalize in my head as I work through them. There is no other person in there, abstract or otherwise. Have you ever seen the Death Note anime? Similar to that.
I do what the person you're replying to and for me its just one voice or a faint imagination of them speaking. Its me roleplaying as the other person, not like there is a different entity in my brain.
Same here. When I was younger I liked imagining having conversations with people from the past like Plato or something, thinking about their reactions to The Future. (Though I guess I only really imagined my own side of the conversation.)
I think there are tradeoffs though, and this has been a thorn in my side during technical interviews where you are expected to think out loud because:
1. Sometimes you have a vague sense of the shape of the solution, and ime it can be helpful to sit with it for a while before trying to shape it into words.
2. Talking out loud forces structure but it also rate-limits how quickly you can iterate through ideas to find one that plausibly solves the problem at hand
I find this whole concept very interesting, because unless I'm translating it for external reception, my thinking is largely non-verbal - generally more spatial-visual, proprioceptive, or purely tacit than auditory, and I find words to be, at least by that standard, frustratingly limited.
I think that’s part of the point. Execution at its core is mastering the art of projection onto a lower dimensional space.
Taking anything from up in the mind out into the real world, be it a physical action, a speech, an artwork, requires you to make decisions about what’s load bearing and what’s not.
So the more practice you get translating your thoughts into words (or another medium), the better you get at executing.
The "another medium" is doing a lot there, I think the translation between my understanding and expressing it in words is the weakest aspect of software development at the moment, in addition to the entire physical world. Dancing about architecture, if you like.
"When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it."
This was my first thought too. Thought, I will say that even though I think in speech for basically everything conceptual, and find it difficult to imagine even being able to not do this, I do often have these… ill defined ideas. Notions of something or other. I have a few words to describe them and they just sort of point in a direction rather than being fleshed out. It’s this sort of thing, like a thought-stub, that benefits the most from inspection and being forced into a better defined form. These are also often the more difficult things, and the reason they’re fuzzy is that it takes a lot of effort to make them sharp.
From my own experience chatting with LLMs: reading the responses definitely does help with thinking, even when you can see obvious flaws or hallucinations. It gives you something to think about, which a rubber duck can't do.
It seems like you saying that people who can do alone what most people do alone, have an advantage. Sure but seems more like an agreement with the article than otherwise.
The post you're replying to didn't say that, but regardless, I would say 'thinking aloud' is a pretty good descriptor for the word-by-word narration kind of thinking where you sort of both say and hear it in your head. I have heard that some people who who experience 'inner monologue' experience their thoughts nearly exclusively like this.
I find it very useful to talk to my dog. When I have a problem I'm banging my head against, just explaining it to him from first principles makes my head "click". When that works, his dog treats are billed as "consulting".
In 2017 LLMs weren't powerful enough to generate working code on their own, but my goal was to at least create a chatbot that could help you rubber-duck-debug your way to a solution. Unfortunately the tech wasn't quite strong enough for that, and not enough engineers even knew what rubber-duck-debugging was. RIP Duckly.
Trying to train an LLM on two 1080ti's on the StackOverflow corpus in my living room was a vibe though. Good times.
Duckly deserved to actually work. There’s a small irony here: the closest study I found to this, robots specifically built to simulate attentive listening, found they performed no better than an actual inanimate rubber duck for adult engineers. The mechanical signal of listening doesn’t seem to be the active ingredient. Makes me wonder if Duckly would have needed real disagreement to close a gap a duck can’t, not just better natural language.
You're probably on to something with the value of disagreement. I think it's one reason why chatting with current models doesn't create the same stimulation as rubber-ducking used to bring. The models are typically too quick to agree and amplify what you think rather than truly break it down and push back.
And thanks for saying it should have worked, I agree. My chagrin has increased over the years as I have realized the magnitude of my ill-timing.
Has anyone seen a good set of prompts for that disagreement? For the "skeptical eyebrow-raise" or "confused/doubtful head tilt" aspect of rubber ducks?
Agentic uses adversarial expert, steel-man opponent, risk-mitigation and failure-mode analysis. But what about almost brainstorming, but with thought-provoking nudge questions? Or on the other hand, arm-waving fight-club style discussion? Or... It's a big design space. I used to go to lots of research talks at MIT, in assorted departments. The post-talk Q&A question cultures varied a lot. Like encompassing both "leaves the speaker in tears", and "nudge so subtle, you won't quickly get it if you've not already spotted the fatal flaw in the work".
So aside from dialing down the "transformative insight!" silliness, there seems a rich multi-agent multi-persona space to explore.
I think agreement has value here too. An LLM that's starting to get a bit sycophantic will rephrase your ideas in a few different ways, and seeing the different presentations is helpful for reconsideration.
2017 is a bit early to refer to them as LLMs. I'm not sure when exactly we started to refer to LMs as 'large', but I don't think it was before GPT2 (2019). That said, from the NLP work I've done, it was much more interesting working on small specialized models.
OMG - strong vibes to Einstein crediting Michele Besso, his colleague at the Swiss Patent Office, with helping him discussing some concepts in the special relativity paper: see at the end of the paper https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf
I was wondering about the question of whether people who made very deep discoveries (Einstein and Godel come to mind) had others to talk things through with beforehand.
I know Andrew Wiles kept all of his work on Fermat's Last Theorem secret and by that I assume he never talked it through with anyone.
I saw a Facebook copypasta piece that claimed that Einstein's first wife came up with many or most of his ideas, and never got credit because of sexism. No proof whatsoever, other than she was a mathematician and physicist.
But "it could have happened!" is more important than even a microshred of evidence for highly emotional, online topics.
This anecdote nicely pokes a hole in that conspiracy theory: he was thoughtful enough to share credit with a layman work associate, but (supposedly) not the most important woman in his life - that seems even less likely.
This proves nothing but, in my earlier days, I'd come home with something on my mind from work and tell my wife about how I couldn't get something to work the way I wanted. She had no clue what I was talking about but she'd offer up clues and suggestions to which I would try to explain to her how things actually worked.
Somewhere in that process it would lead to a solution that I would bring to work the next day!
Tangentially, Regarding pair programming (as a special case of thinking together):
Programming is serializing ideas into the computer language. Communicating them with someone else first serializes them into human language, which is already much less abstract compared to the thought cloud in your head.
In the case of an effective pair programming collaboration, you also get to debate approaches, discuss details, alternate between coding and watching.
It also helps that the presence of someone else helps avoid many common distractions. Reading non-urgent private messages and checking out HN (I'm no longer so addicted to any other platform to check it out at work).
Thank you for sharing this. Growing up Asian American many teachers disciplined me and made assumptions about my intelligence for not being as vocal as the other kids. Culture shapes cognition and vice versa.
It's simpler than this. Explaining a question/issue to someone involves going back to basics and covering all the foundational info that a third party would not have. When thinking alone, you gloss over this, and may not realize that a foundational assumption is incorrect. When you are forced to explain every step explicitly, these errors or gaps can become apparent without any intervention by the listener.
I have my younger kid explain each math problem to me before she submits it on Khan Academy. My older kid thinks in her head how she would explain a problem before turning in a test. It's a good habit to form.
As much as people make fun of "new math", it is really neat to see my 3rd grader working through a math problem step by step in a way that makes sense to them instead of the rote memorization I had to do as a kid. While they don't like showing their work, it helps them to work through each step to make sure their assumptions are correct, like you said.
Yes, it is nice that there are more ways that are taught now. It can turn into too much, however. Some parents I know dislike that their kid is taught 8 different ways to do long division, at the expense of having sufficient time to practice any of the methods. They end up taking the kids to math tutoring so that they can actually learn how to do the mechanical steps.
But it is for sure good that there are multiple ways to do various operations, and there are plenty of youtube videos that students can turn to if what they have been taught does not resonate for them.
In computer science, we have classes on memorizing/implementing various algorithms so that we may understand their behavior. Could anyone name the reason why grade school students memorize and execute the long division algorithm? I certainly hadn't used long division since grade school.
Grade school is years long, so a skill you're supposed to know in 3rd grade is one that you need to be able to faithfully execute for the next 3 years. The fact that you'll get a calculator in middle school doesn't help you if you're struggling through 4th and 5th grade.
Something funny i discover: i had thoughts or tried to explain something decades ago and made a drawing. Some of these are just a circle with some arrows. Turns out it is really hard to make a drawing bad enough that you dont know what it is. It sometimes works better than even a written description.
So you can just doodle in a notebook and tell yourself you've written it down. If you look at it regularly im sure recall will be even more perfect.
If you dont write anything down you wont be alle to access an orderly array of thoughs.
A different funny that should be archived here with the above.
Assuming you can type well.
Take a sentence, put your hands on the keyboard with the intend to type it but dont do it.
Some time later dont try to remember the sentence but just put the hands on the keys and let them type. Its really funny seeing the text come out of your keyboard buffer muscle memory.
Some japanese guy said he played with the concept and reported that he could fit a whole paragraph or a list of things big enough that he couldnt recall it without using his hands. He could do an invisible abacus to recall it.
I draw a lot to figure out engineering details. I used to make beautiful drawings in diagramming software (draw.io and the lil). But man, it took a lot of time. Now I scribble on printer paper unless it’s something I plan to share.
Fellows devs at my company think I'm strange, but I always have a cheap coil-notebook. It has diagrams, notes, doodles, minutes, checklists, mostly not even in order. I try to remember to write the date at the top of each page.
I just counted, 11 notebooks (b5, 60 pages) in two years, so just about a new notebook every 2 months.
Funny thing is, coworkers will now ask to use my pen and paper to flesh-out something together, as I'm certain it's the only paper and writing utensil in the building.
And yeah, draw.io or even an ipad with a whiteboard app aren't good replacements for me.
I started my web dev career in 1999 so my main code references were a combination of O’reilly and “for dummies” books. As a wet behind the ears engineer I’d find myself regularly walking over to my more senior friend Dan’s cubicle for help.
Half the time on the walk over, trying to frame the question in my mind I’d figure out the answer or at least next step. It got to the point where Dan would see me heading towards him and suddenly turn around and he’d as “Figure it out?” And I’d throw him a thumbs up on the way back to my desk.
Sometimes you might sit and stare at the same text, grappling with it in silence.
For technical problems, I find the act of writing out a request for help, even just into a text editor, is often sufficient for me to solve the problem at hand. Writing things out is a way of organizing and structuring your thinking, and is itself a powerful troubleshooting tool. Things will become obvious that, unwritten, you might not even notice. I think this is very similar to thinking out loud; when you listen to what you say, or read what you have written, your mind is somehow keyed to react in a useful way.
That response might not be what you want or need for problems that need to be wrestled with, chewed, and pondered on deeply, though.
This makes sense when you think about the divided state of the USA today. People were isolated during COVID and had no feedback on opinions formed then. When they started creating bubbles after lockdown, they wanted validation for the opinions they formed without that feedback. Now, people constantly argue online because that feedback they needed while cementing those ideas wasn't there and we aren't willing to take that communication feedback to tweak our opinions based on common sense because we all believe we are right. This article makes a lot of sense.
Everyone inherently knows this, that's why they reach out to others when stuck on a bug (see also rubber-ducking). But why is it so hard to convince individuals and organizations of the benefits of pair programming?
I wonder if there's a difference between people who have a strong inner voice and those with no inner voice (Anendophasia). I.e. do people w Anendophasia do better on their own than those with a strong inner voice?
> The Enigma of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017): their argumentative theory holds that reasoning evolved for social rather than individual epistemic purposes, to produce and evaluate arguments in group contexts.
Yes! I love that someone wrote this down!
This seems so obvious to me now. I often ask LLMs to cite their sources (they do hallucinate from time to time), and they often give me sources that don't say what is claimed. "How would the LLM know not to give this to me?" I wonder. They're trained to explain but not to convince, so they don't know what's convincing, and they should.
I think humans hallucinate at least as much as LLMs—arguments of any complexity are impossible to formulate without leaping at least a bit—but other humans ground us. That's why when people become socially isolated, they join cults or adopt conspiracy theories or the like.
Conversely, "this is convincing to an expert" converges on “this is true" as our collective expertise grows over time. This is the foundation of the scientific method, of progress in all engineering disciplines, etc.
Speaking out loud makes you translate your weird personal brain logic into structured instruction meant to inform others. And taking that other person's view, in order to explain what they don't know, gives you an alternative perspective.
I feel like trying to explain it to yourself as if you were ignorant of the problem may give similar insights.
I don't really buy any explanation here. The reason why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone is because when I'm alone I'll loop a lot more.
My reactions to thoughts that I myself have had are stereotyped and repetitive (every reaction is typical of me.) Reactions to me that come from another person are going to be different than those, and in turn stimulate me differently. Thinking tends to be an enumeration (then elimination) of possibilities, and that random input helps with the enumeration part by keeping me out of local minima.
The move from thinking to semantic conversion is important for investigation/introspection.
Arguing with yourself also seems to engage your brains "theory of mind" centers, so different pathways get activated to examine the problem space.
The problem with Ai is the fact that it hallucinates and if you're doing anything truly novel in an integration or framing sense it bottoms out very quickly and can't engage. A human operator can decompose the problem and get accuracy checks for known areas in the training data of course.
Now to be I'm not saying Ai can't produce novel work on the edge but in my experience it is antagonistic towards those goals.
Case in point, CRDTs, many don't use tombstones but they are the minority, and if you try iterate a new CRDT off of one that doesn't use tombstones, let's say diamond-types, it will keep pulling you back to tombstones.
The problem is that the number of humans who understand dynamic investigation and the push pull of exploring an idea you don't hold with someone has always been very small, and now with reflexive internet argument culture driving how we view "debate" and "discussion".
I don't know if we've reduced the leisure to think or what but things are not great for finding speculative thinking partners.
Harvard's cs50 had a "Rubber Duck debugger" which was an LLM trained on all their educational content with specific guardrails in place to not give any answers. It would chat back with you planting little ideas to help push your understanding just a little bit.
I loved it so much, because I was learning programming completely by myself usually after midnight while taking care of a new-born. I had nobody to pair-program with, no lead dev nor teacher to speak with.
It was years ago, but such an amazing implementation of an LLM for education.