Valerio Capraro@ValerioCapraro
Major preprint just out!
We compare how humans and LLMs form judgments across seven epistemological stages.
We highlight seven fault lines, points at which humans and LLMs fundamentally diverge:
The Grounding fault: Humans anchor judgment in perceptual, embodied, and social experience, whereas LLMs begin from text alone, reconstructing meaning indirectly from symbols.
The Parsing fault: Humans parse situations through integrated perceptual and conceptual processes; LLMs perform mechanical tokenization that yields a structurally convenient but semantically thin representation.
The Experience fault: Humans rely on episodic memory, intuitive physics and psychology, and learned concepts; LLMs rely solely on statistical associations encoded in embeddings.
The Motivation fault: Human judgment is guided by emotions, goals, values, and evolutionarily shaped motivations; LLMs have no intrinsic preferences, aims, or affective significance.
The Causality fault: Humans reason using causal models, counterfactuals, and principled evaluation; LLMs integrate textual context without constructing causal explanations, depending instead on surface correlations.
The Metacognitive fault: Humans monitor uncertainty, detect errors, and can suspend judgment; LLMs lack metacognition and must always produce an output, making hallucinations structurally unavoidable.
The Value fault: Human judgments reflect identity, morality, and real-world stakes; LLM "judgments" are probabilistic next-token predictions without intrinsic valuation or accountability.
Despite these fault lines, humans systematically over-believe LLM outputs, because fluent and confident language produce a credibility bias.
We argue that this creates a structural condition, Epistemia:
linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evaluation, producing the feeling of knowing without actually knowing.
To address Epistemia, we propose three complementary strategies: epistemic evaluation, epistemic governance, and epistemic literacy.
Full paper in the first reply.
Joint with @Walter4C & @matjazperc
