Archive - The Counterfactual

We should be cautious about LLM-generated benchmarks

Synthetic data has its place, but stimuli are at the heart of how we probe and assess LLMs (and humans)—and that calls for special care.

Jul 1 •

June 2025

How I use (and don't use) ChatGPT

An update on when and how I use LLM-equipped software tools, and when (and why) I don't.

Jun 24 •

Why isn't language more iconic?

If non-arbitrariness helps with word leaning, why are languages still mostly arbitrary?

Jun 5 •

May 2025

When words sound (or look) like what they mean

Not all form-meaning mappings are arbitrary.

May 14 •

Informed consent is central to research ethics

On the unauthorized experiment conducted on a subreddit community.

May 8 •

April 2025

Identifying signatures of LLM-generated text

What metrics from open-source LLMs can tell us about the differences between human essays and those written by ChatGPT-3 and ChatGPT-4.

Apr 18 •

March 2025

February 2025

Learning across timescales

Knowledge distillation happens in many forms.

Feb 24 •

On reading the "classics"

The value of academic archaeology

Feb 4 •

January 2025

Did cooking make us human?

A review of Richard Wrangham's "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human".

Jan 18 •

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