Chain of Thought for Humans (boristhebrave.com)

52 pointsby ibobev3 days ago24 comments

mceachen an hour ago

In almost every interview I gave at the last several companies I worked for, I'd start with "This may feel a bit odd, but with this coding problem, I'd appreciate if you spoke through your problem solving. If it helps, pretend like I am your intern. Good ideas, bad ideas, pros and cons of whatever you're considering, it's all valuable information for me to learn a bit about how you approach problems."

I feel like being explicit like this put candidates at a bit more ease than having them try to suss out what the interviewer is expecting from them implicitly (and I know there are many interviewers that will auto-veto any candidate with the audacity to suggest a possibly imperfect approach).

xorvoid an hour ago

I basically "chain of thought" to myself in my own notes when working through a hard task. Mayne we can call it "live tweeting in private".

Aometimes it feels like a super power because it takes away the "starting anxiety" and makes everything a trivial sequence of "following simple steps"

jamienk an hour ago

"Free association" in psychoanalysis just asks people to let themselves speak, to fall into their speech, let it unfold - but it is very, very hard to do, because what you say tends to not be what you want to say. You want to avoid certain things, you can see your chain of speech leading up ahead to somewhere you don't want to go. So you stop yourself, or resist, and then what you are saying is not at all free but strained, hedging, tense and anxious.

Waterluvian 3 hours ago

Witnessing a candidate’s thought process is probably the most valuable part of the interview process for me. Nothing else comes close. Just let me listen/watch you solve problems.

drivebyhooting 3 hours ago

Verbalizing my thoughts as I try to solve a problem drops my IQ down by like 20 points at least.

purplepatrick 2 hours ago

As someone with zero exposure to my own thought processes, I find this always so discriminatory! ;)

lioeters 44 minutes ago

I wonder if this may be related to anendophasia, the absence of an inner voice. Apparently it has an influence on self-reflection and verbal working memory.

Not Everybody Has an Inner Voice: Behavioral Consequences of Anendophasia - https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241243004

algoth1 3 hours ago

I wonder if the author is one of those people that doesn't have an audible inner monologue?

idiotsecant 3 hours ago

I am such a person and I've always done 'chain of thought' in a notepad in order to think through complex things, well before LLMs were a thing. There are certainly tasks I can 'one-shot' but I've learned from experience that for some problems that just results in me focusing on irrelevant things.

apt-apt-apt-apt 3 hours ago

Curious whether the lack of audible inner monologue is a benefit for you?

I feel like I'm the opposite, where most of my thinking is done in inner English, which feels slow. I.e. as opposed to instantly realizing the result of deep subconscious processing or something, I usually go the slow language way, if you get what I mean.

thanhhaimai 3 hours ago

I'm not the OP, but I think everyone might have a different definition of what "audible inner monologue" mean.

For example, I don't talk to myself in "monologue". But I can close my eyes or stare at the screen and visualize the solutions. The words that I usually tell myself during that are "what?", "why?", "strange!", "really",... not a monologue or sentences.

pulvinar 2 hours ago

That's my impression too, that my thoughts are a hybrid, where I'll think in a rapid sequence of whole concepts and visual flashes, and then summarize that in my inner voice "for the record", as a jumping-off point for the next batch of thoughts. But I don't have much control over this, as my inner voice is hard to shut up for any length of time, always giving a running narrative.

FuckButtons 2 hours ago

Yeah I’m the exact opposite, thought is almost entirely auditory.

UltraSane 2 hours ago

I'm essentially thinking out loud in my head constantly.

purplepatrick 3 hours ago

The author says they could narrate their own thought process out loud.

I couldn’t do that. I have no insight into my thought processes whatsoever. There are no semantic (or any other) processes to witness. It’s complete crickets at all times…

My wife is the opposite - constant chatter in her head. And she can trace every thought exactly. (No idea how people like her can focus or even function!)

cnees 2 hours ago

We focus/function via the inner monologue. It doesn't just do its own thing while we're trying to focus or get something done, it walks through the issue and comes up with solutions and then criticizes them and iterates, and as far as we're concerned, that's us solving the problem.

zer00eyz 44 minutes ago

Anendophasia? Fair number of people have this.

florkbork 2 hours ago

This is basically https://www.christopherroosen.com/blog/2020/4/20/how-the-rit...

totetsu 2 hours ago

After one to many miss-rides, I now do this often even when just riding the train.

1auralynn 3 hours ago

We use this in my science education platform: we make students talk out loud about what they're thinking. Not a chatbot, but guided inquiry that's designed to make them actually mentally engage with what they're seeing

tarkin2 an hour ago

A Mathematicians Lament mentions students explaining rather than reciting the equations, too, to correctly learn them

clivedup 2 hours ago

> eh, "Chain of Thought for Humans" sounds stupid

> but maybe it has some nuance?

> eh, I think I still don't care enough to click

> but maybe I could post a funny comment

> it doesn't sound that funny, and besides, HN doesn't usually like these sorts of comments

> okay, let's just read the next story

> unless

whattheheckheck 2 hours ago

Just make a theoretical minimum type test like the landau physicist

senectus1 3 hours ago

holy shit this would break my ability to think completely.

I think and chase alternate chains of thought way faster than i can speak.