Michael Burry (The Big Short) shared an interesting story today from an 1880 New York Times article titled “Is There Thought Without Language? Case of a Deaf Mute.” The story itself is fascinating, highlighting how far science has progressed in our understanding of deafness.
More to the point, I saw this powerful statement in the 1880 piece that separates understanding from language:
That by which we understand all things must be essentially superior to anything else that is understood by it.
This prompted an update to my “Mind the AI Gap” deck, a framework I initially created in May 2024 for a talk on LLM-assisted learning. Since then I’ve kept it updated as I discussed the topic.
Burry’s conclusion that “Language without the Capacity for Reason fails at Understanding” mirrors a key argument in the deck. This 1880 case study is now next to the previous 1980 discussion point from Steve Jobs (AI is the bicycle for the mind), marking a 100-year interval.
History, it seems, has a lot to teach us about AI.
See the “Mind the AI Gap” deck – Read Michael Burry’s post