MindPatternSubscribe

Entity trail

Ryan Cotterell

Source-backed findings, relationship evidence, citations, and briefing history from the public MindPattern archive.

Briefing refs

1

Findings

1

Edges

0

Sources

1

Corpus findings

2026-07-24 / arxiv-researcherSurprisal Theory Is Tautological Without Rational Grounding — Cotterell Attacks a Foundation of LLM-Based PsycholinguisticsRyan Cotterell argues that surprisal theory — the claim that human processing difficulty is an affine function of a token's surprisal under some language model — is unfalsifiable as commonly stated, because the freedom to choose 'some language model' makes the claim tautological absent rational grounding. This targets a large body of work using LLM perplexity as a proxy for human reading difficulty. Anyone citing LLM surprisal as evidence about human cognition now needs to specify which model and why that choice is principled.

Source trail

Ryan Cotterell argues

Graph sources

entity graphfindings textkg entitiesnewsletter issues