{"id":3077,"date":"2026-03-01T16:31:22","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T21:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/?p=3077"},"modified":"2026-03-02T07:52:40","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T12:52:40","slug":"language-w-o-reasoning-not-understanding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/2026\/03\/01\/language-w-o-reasoning-not-understanding\/","title":{"rendered":"Language w\/o reasoning \u2260 understanding"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Burry (The Big Short) shared an interesting story today from an 1880 New York Times article titled <em>&#8220;Is There Thought Without Language? Case of a Deaf Mute.&#8221;<\/em> The story itself is fascinating, highlighting how far science has progressed in our understanding of deafness.<\/p>\n<p>More to the point, I saw this powerful statement in the 1880 piece that separates understanding from language:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>That by which we understand all things must be essentially superior to anything else that is understood by it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This prompted an update to my &#8220;Mind the AI Gap&#8221; deck, a framework I initially created in May 2024 for a talk on LLM-assisted learning. Since then I&#8217;ve kept it updated as I discussed the topic.<\/p>\n<p>Burry&#8217;s conclusion that <em>&#8220;Language without the Capacity for Reason fails at Understanding&#8221;<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>History, it seems, has a lot to teach us about AI.<\/p>\n<p>See <a href=\"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/talks\/mind-the-ai-gap.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the &#8220;Mind the AI Gap&#8221; deck<\/a> \u2013 Read <a href=\"https:\/\/michaeljburry.substack.com\/p\/history-rhymes-large-language-models\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Michael Burry&#8217;s post<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Burry (The Big Short) shared an interesting story today from an 1880 New York Times article titled &#8220;Is There Thought Without Language? Case of a Deaf Mute.&#8221; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3077"}],"version-history":[{"count":45,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3122,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3077\/revisions\/3122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}