Cognitive Behaviors That Enable Self-Improving Reasoners
13 comments
·March 6, 2025owenpalmer
jdpage
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.
ilrwbwrkhv
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
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
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.
rendall
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.
robocat
How much has our knowledge of AI training techniques helped to discover how to train people to think better?
vasco
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.
sanxiyn
So far, I don't think we found anything interesting, yet.
nickpsecurity
"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.
idiotsecant
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.
kla-s
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?
null
> 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.