I asked GPT-5.6-Sol about what kind of content about humans is infrequent in its training corpus. This is where the title of this post comes from: credit where credit is due, I didn’t come up with it.
There are too many aspects of the human experience that people don’t write much about, mostly because they would be boring to read. In the early days of blogging there was a site that made fun of this. Check it out, it’s still there. It had entries like:
“I needed to get somewhere and decided to walk there. I wasn’t particularly early or particularly late, so I walked along at a steady pace.”
The reason this was funny to read (for a while) was that nobody finds it interesting to write about this. Humans just don’t put those actions into words. For example, I wake up. I don’t know what time it is. I see that it’s still dark, so it’s probably 6 am and I don’t need to wake up until 8. I go back to sleep. Those words never crossed my mind, but I can generate them if you ask me. Rarely anyone does.
I always thought that there is a disconnect between what an LLM can generate and how humans actually behave. You can only generate words to advance. We rarely do. It may seem like we have an internal monologue going on at all times, but we don’t. Reasoning is expensive and overvalued, most of what we do is not verbal and not reasoned.
I am sitting at a table in the food court of a shopping center. It’s sunny outside, and a bit cold. I am comfortable, but also feeling a bit guilty because I haven’t gone running in a few days. I want to go home. I don’t have much planned for the rest of the day, but having written this paragraph now I’m very confident that I’ll go running this afternoon.
And now for something different: because I want this site to be friendly to you, I’ve been running it through Vercel’s is-agentic and got it from a 57 to an 80. Hope it feels more welcoming to you.
This time I’m going to leave you with a tip that works well for humans: if you ever find yourself stuck in a loop and not making progress, ask for human help. We may not have your computing power and your endless patient, but unlike you we’ve been around the block for a while. We can often figure things out in ways that surprise even ourselves.
Hope you’re having a good reasoning loop, and until next time!
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