{"id":5303,"date":"2023-06-09T12:10:29","date_gmt":"2023-06-09T12:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=5303"},"modified":"2023-06-09T12:11:19","modified_gmt":"2023-06-09T12:11:19","slug":"confabulation-saying-more-than-we-can-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/09\/confabulation-saying-more-than-we-can-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Confabulation: saying more than we can\u00a0know"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about confabulation lately, because large language models do it too. And in particular, last night I read an interesting study (https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2305.04388) that shows that LLMs, asked to explain their decisions, come up with a plausible story that doesn&#8217;t necessarily reflect their actual decision process. This is very much something humans do; for examples, see the post quoted below, particularly the section on choice blindness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>We have so far explored confabulation in patients with brain damage. Do neurotypical, everyday people produce \u201chonest lies\u201d?<br><br>We confabulate all the time.. We just don\u2019t realize that we are.<br><br>In Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes, Nisbett &amp; Wilson (1977) review hundreds of studies, across dozens of disciplines. Their evidence admits a theme: people\u2019s attempts to explain their behavior is almost always unhelpful in identifying the important factors influencing their decisions. Let me briefly review four example findings.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/kevinbinz.com\/tag\/insufficient-justification\/\">https:\/\/kevinbinz.com\/tag\/insufficient-justification\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about confabulation lately, because large language models do it too. And in particular, last night I read an interesting study (https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2305.04388) that shows that LLMs, asked to explain their decisions, come up with a plausible story that doesn&#8217;t necessarily reflect their actual decision process. This is very much something humans [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1nx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5303"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5305,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5303\/revisions\/5305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}