to me this suggests that language strongly influences behavior

mitthrowaway2 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My interpretation is that it's the other way around. The language model trainer's job is to find the network weights that make the model best at compressing the data in the training set. So what this means is that, say, professional work-speak text samples and hacker l33t-speak text samples are different enough that they end up being predicted by different sparse sub-networks; it was apparently too hard to find a smaller solution in which the same sub-network weights predict both outputs.

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yorwba 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All LLM behavior is mediated through language by construction. That doesn't mean the same applies to humans.

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soulofmischief 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think specifically, certain psychological modes require different levels of articulation, and language is one way to get there in a bandwidth-limited system.

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PaulHoule 4 hours ago | parent [-]

People are fascinated by controlling the vocabulary for political purposes but I think it mostly doesn't work. "Illegal Alien" is the exception that proves the rule.

Usually it results in an "equal and opposite backlash". Once they started calling children "Special" in school, "Special" became the ultimate insult.

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D-Machine 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It is a wordcel problem, i.e. the belief that language is all there is for modeling reality, even though this is obviously false and has been clearly disproven by decades of research in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. At best we can say that sometimes language has a strong influence on our perceptions of reality.

EDIT: For a neuroscience reference that also argues why the general perspective is obviously false: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4874898/. But really, these things ought to be obvious from introspection.

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PaulHoule 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Also in my dealing with birds and animals of all sorts I've come to believe that they are very capable in many forms of cognition without the use of language.

There was a fad called "structuralism" that liked to imagine that such and such is "structured like a language" but then when we got a paradigm for language it was one of those "normal science" paradigms that Kuhn warned you about, like you could write papers grounded in the Chomsky theory for a lifetime but it wouldn't help you learn to read Chinese more quickly or speak German without an accent or program a computer to parse tweets. That is, the structure of language is absolutely useless except for writing papers about linguistics -- and the "language instinct" becomes some peripheral that grafts onto an animal but you need the rest of the animal for it to work.

Now LLMs may not be a model for how we do it but they are certainly going to bring back structuralist and "wordcel" positions because they do seem to show, somehow, that "language is all you need" to accomplish whatever it is LLMs accomplish.

	▲	D-Machine 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Now LLMs may not be a model for how we do it but they are certainly going to bring back structuralist and "wordcel" positions because they do seem to show, somehow, that "language is all you need" to accomplish whatever it is LLMs accomplish. People will try to bring back these obviously false models of cognition, but, so far, the dismal performance of LLMs on e.g. SpatialBench [1], and, almost certainly ARC-AGI-3, or e.g. the kind of data and effort required to get something like V-JEPA-2 [2], will be strong counter-examples to this. And, yeah, obviously animal cognition, esp. smart animals like birds, or the crazy stuff we see in chimp and gorilla ethology (border patrols, genocides, humor, theory of mind, bla bla bla). [1] https://spicylemonade.github.io/spatialbench/ [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09985

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uoaei 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Language constrains your perception of reality to only the set of concepts conceivable within that language.

Agents who only speak Rust have no conception of what runtime errors are, for instance. Fascists won't understand concepts like "universal human rights" as in their worldview there is nothing universal about humanity as a whole.

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PurpleRamen 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Language constrains your perception of reality to only the set of concepts conceivable within that language.

It's the opposite. People make up new concepts all the time for which they have no words, to then give it a name. Language is composable, words and names are just a mean to improve communication, make it faster, more efficient.

> Agents who only speak Rust have no conception of what runtime errors are, for instance.

Agents don't really learn. They have a fixed set of data and everything new has to be pressed into the prompt. This is unrelated to language.

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D-Machine 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is IMO largely false, and empirically things like Sapir-Worf and strong linguistic relativism, or that language == thought are widely considered disproven [1-3].

This is also sort of a wordcel take, in that it neglects that there are plenty of mental structures that are not solely linguistic. I.e. visuo-spatial models, auditory models, kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, emotional, gustatory, or even maybe intuitive models, and symbolic models (which have both linguistic and visuo-spatial aspects). Yes, your models constrain your perception of reality, but it is not clear how important language really is to many of those models (and there is strong evidence it may not matter at all to a lot of cognition [3]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/relativi...

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4874898/

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paganel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Disproven by whom and under which context?

> evidence from neuroimaging and neurological patients

Has "neuroimaging" successfully modelled those "universal human rights" the OP was mentioning? If yes, how did it look?

More generally, positing that all languages are, in the end, interchangeable (because that's what the opponents of something similar to Sapir-Worf are saying) is very reactionary and limited in itself, and its telling them me calling those anti-Sapir-Worf people "reactionaries" will for sure tickle in them something that wouldn't have happened had I used a different "neuoroimaged" concept which, supposedly, should have meant the same thing for them (but it doesn't).

	▲	D-Machine 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Disproven by whom and under which context? See any of my links, but especially the third. Animal cognition and human neuroscience studies strongly disprove the importance of language to cognition. Conflating language and thought is so obviously false in 2026 it is extraordinary that people still think like this. I was ignoring the comment about fascists because it is simplistic and low-quality, and will similarly not be responding to whatever you (incorrectly) think I was claiming about universal human rights. I only wanted to correct the extremely false (or at least hugely overstated) assumptions about language and perception of reality.

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PaulHoule 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd argue that people can put words together to make new meanings or coin new words when they have to. The real magic of language is not "we have words for everything" but we have grammar.