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I think the rise of LLMs has revealed that we have at least two distinct ways of thinking. Next token prediction is the most common, and what I’m engaged in now that I’m trying to communicate an original thought. Given the germ of an idea, we can almost unconsciously generate a stream of words to describe it. iOS is even suggesting many of the words I’m composing now.
I think anyone who has been in a conversational flow state can intuit that there’s something like an LLM in their heads.
When I see Kamala seemingly surprised at where her sentences end up, I see next token prediction.
I think its obvious that some political consultant told her to work certain key words into all her answers. "Doing the work" and variations of it is a common one. I know other politicians have followed strategies like this. But good god does Kamala give the game away with how artlessly she strings these vocab snippets together. It's only barely grammatically correct English, nakedly void of any informational value. A good politician at least creates the successful illusion of having said something, or evoking in you a belief that you heard what you wanted to hear.
It's so bad because she's so bad.
Body language is a pseudo-science, but tells do exist. Harris looks to the side when she's try to fetch and retrieve talking points. That's a novice move. The really good politicians can maintain eye contact even when they're doing the memory recall of talking points. The really good ones can smile, emote, gesture non-robotically when they do it. Harris is just overmatched.
Trump doesn't face these challenges because he will not be constrained by your plebe confines of sentence structure and grammar. His words are impressionistic-abstract devices that can be deployed and rearranged dynamically. If you're too dumb to follow his 9th order logic, that's on you pal.
Serious: Trump's tell is that he just starts a new sentence. It's obvious and horrible. More recently, he's been getting stuck in doom-loop repeats of the same anecdotes and basic sentence themes. They aren't even fully fleshed out talking points. He'll get stuck on individual words. Listen to him talk about his alcoholic brother on the Theo Von podcast. This is, funnily enough to @NewCharlesInCharge point, this is a failure mode of less sophisticated LLMs - they can get into latent spaces that are impossible to exit, so they just end up repeating the same output again and again even if you try to coach them away from it.
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And yet there are many (or at least some) who weep at her speaking in breathless praise. I feel the same about them as I feel when I see people in not only MAGA hats, but Trump (or, formerly FJB) t-shirts, holding Trump mugs and posters and talking about how great a man he is. It's really a potentially fantastic dark comedy film, if one could avoid camp and cynicism. Which probably one couldn't.
I would love to see a work of fiction where each side conspires among themselves in hushed tones about how, even though their candidate is garbage, they have to pretend to be strong enthusiastic unqualified supporters, lest they express any honest reservations and thereby let the even-worse candidate win instead. In the climax of the story, everybody discovers that this is what everybody is doing, and for once they break the hysteresis of plurality voting and elect a decent third-party candidate instead.
But back to non-fiction, obviously that's not what's consciously happening, because people just aren't that good at deliberately lying to each other and keeping it a secret; we have to do it unconsciously. That's probably why we evolved half of our cognitive biases: to help us accomplish useful deception of others via the intermediate step of lying to ourselves first. "Gosh, it's a good thing my candidate is so great, because otherwise we'd be mostly screwed either way", is the sort of thing people actually come to believe. In the climax of reality, we all just keep lobotomizing ourselves in such fashion to a greater and greater extent, because to reverse course would require reducing our present persuasiveness and admitting the magnitude of our past mistakes, and none of that is something we can easily do when we've evolved to try to impress others.
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