Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…How old are these kids? What about the first six months? I think they’re imitating things. They’re trying to make their mouth sound the way they see their mother’s mouth sound. Then they’ll say the same words without understanding what they mean. As they get older, the complexity of the imitation they do increases. You’re imitating maybe the skills that people in your band are using to hunt down the deer or something. Then you go into the learning from experience RL regime. But I think there’s a lot of imitation learning happening with humans. It’s surprising you can have such a different point of view. When I see kids, I see kids just trying things and waving their hands around and moving their eyes around. There’s no imitation for how they move their eyes around or even the sounds they make. They may want to create the same sounds, but the actions, the thing that the infant actually does, there’s no targets for that. There are no examples for that.…

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