By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 03/08/2026But *we* manage the trick by *understanding each other* (and by exploiting the fact of repetition). When my wife says something surprising - because she is angry or delighted, sad or happy - I can make a reliable guess about what caused my prediction to misfire. 16/ 2782
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 03/08/2026Our "sentence completion" trick doesn't emerge from a rough, automatically generated mental table of the statistical likelihood that word A will follow word B. We also *understand why* those combinations appear in each other's speech and writing. 17/ 1571
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 03/08/2026"Understanding" and "statistical extrapolation" *can* often lead to the same place, but when they *don't*, "understanding" provides a way forward, while "extrapolation" founders. 18/ 1798