I think the article is a lot more interesting than you make out, because it isn’t really about ‘what we mean by reasoning’.

It’s about do we really know what’s going on in the box - an is the ‘chain of reasoning’ indicative of what’s going on, or merely an anthropomorphised fiction that kids us into believing we understand what’s going on.

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vidarh 3 hours ago | parent [-]

We know that human introspection is at best imperfect, and at worst outright fiction, thanks to Sperry's split brain experiments, so while it might be interesting, if the chain of reasoning isn't indicative, that would be in line with how humans work.

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ilovecake1984 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This is a good take. People overwhelmingly fit a narrative to how they make decisions rather than make decisions according to a chain of reasoning.

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andy99 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s just conflating reasoning and “parallel reconstruction” - there is such thing as reasoning, and I agree it’s probably less common in decision making, but it’s fundamental to many tasks where we figure out a solution, like writing an algorithm, math proofs, etc.

	▲	vidarh 29 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There is explicit reasoning where we externalise steps, but it is slow and cumbersome. The point is that when we make a decision without externalising each step, and then afterward explain why and how we made that decision, there is no evidence that explanation is true, and a lot that it is a retrospective fiction.
	▲	pegasus 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Sure, but the same must be true for these models as well. They must be doing some form of reasoning, even if it's not formally correct and it relies instead on all kind of half-assed heuristics which only work inside certain unexamined boundaries, which leads to wrong conclusions when those boundaries are being trespassed, etc. And even if it's not the reasoning they report when asked. But all this can't be that different to how humans reason most of the time either. I suspect humans have other ways that help with error correction and guiding the reasoning effort, but that's another story.