Comment by seadan83

>> given a human and a sequence of words, I cannot begin putting a probability on "will this human generate this sequence".

> Sure you can! If you address an American crowd of a certain age range with "We’ve got to hold on to what we’ve got. It doesn’t make a difference if..." I'd give a very high probability that someone will answer "... we make it or not".

I think you may have this flipped compared to what the author intended. I believe the author is not talking about the probability of an output given an input, but the probability of a given output across all inputs.

Note that the paragraph starts with "In my worldview, humans are dramatically different things than a function, (R^n)^c -> (R^n)^c". To compute a probability of a given output, (which is a any given element in "(R^n)^n"), we can count how many mappings there are total and then how many of those mappings yield the given element.

The point I believe is to illustrate the complexity of inputs for humans. Namely for humans the input space is even more complex than "(R^n)^c".

In your example, we can compute how many input phrases into a LLM would produce the output "make it or not". We can than compute that ratio to all possible input phrases. Because "(R^n)^c)" is finite and countable, we can compute this probability.

For a human, how do you even start to assess the probability that a human would ever say "make it or not?" How do you even begin to define the inputs that a human uses, let alone enumerate them? Per the author, "We understand essentially nothing about it." In other words, the way humans create their outputs is (currently) incomparably complex compared to a LLM, hence the critique of the anthropomorphization.