People Can't Read And What's More They Don't Want To

I’ve noticed a pattern. Someone mentions that they read the Sequences or some other book, and complained about how it said that you should rely less on intuitions or some other ridiculous claim and I think “that doesn’t match my interpretation”. What’s going on here? Did I misremember? Did the other person? Was the text just poorly written, misleading us both? I mean, writing is hard, so it’s not that surprising if that’s what happened, right? Maybe they never read the original text and they’re just making it up? That happens a lot, too.

Wrong! What happened in this case is because of one little known fact: people can’t read. Or to put it less provocatively: they can’t understand what the words they sound out in their heads. Not in general. Not automatically, and not easily.

Think about it like this. Humans have a lot of LLM nature in them. And as we all know, LLMs kinda suck at reading. Give them a bit of text mildly OOD and ask them to summarize it. They’ll confabulate all sorts of nonsense. Or give them the slightest impression you’re biased in some way and they’ll bend over backwards to come up with an interpretation that suits you. By default, humans are like that.

Humans run on autopilot most of the time, shallowly pattern matching inputs to cached behavior. So if you get them to read some work, what happens inside them is that they round it off to the semantically closest thing they’ve seen in the past. People can chain a couple of these together on the fly to come up with some picture that matches what they’re reading pretty closely, no sweat. And the minor twinges of discomfort people feel when that picture doesn’t exactly match what they’re reading? Who has the time to deal with that! Why, you’d be constantly confused if you attended to all that.

And that works OK, until you meet a text that’s actually out of distribution. Then you have to think novel thoughts. And obviously reading requires you sometimes think novel thoughts! A text can encode arbitrary computations, for Pete’s sake.

Now, I don’t propose we set the bar for reading so high that you need to be a Halting Oracle to be literate. In fact, I don’t suggest we shift the bar at all. But I do suggest we recognize that most people do not know when they have formed a successful interpretation of a piece of text i.e. whether they’ve actually read the dang thing.

Too many arguments wind up getting resolved when it is revealed someone hadn’t actually read some dang text correctly. I’ve been on both sides of that debate. If people were a bit more aware they’d liable to make reading errors, we could avoid these sorts of debates.

Alas, that brings us to the second issue. People don’t want to read. They want to believe they read something crazy and loudly proclaim that’s what the author said. They fool barely need to fool themselves in order to do so.

They do this for the same reason LLMs are sycophantic. They pick up on the tiniest hints that someone is on or against their side and let that tilt what they hear. Sadly, there’s not much one can do about other people, but at least we can do something about ourselves and learn how to read.