>Although it's a no no to anthropomorphize on HN, it's worth noting that some folks think humans are post-hoc rationalizers as well:

There's enough behavioural research to show that it is the case. For ex:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain...

Thanks, that's a much better example of what I was trying to explain. Again, I'm projecting humanity onto a machine, but it's not a big stretch to imagine that the interaction of attention heads over high-dimensional vectors produces "decisions" that can't be articulated in the moment, only described after the fact in text form.

As I naively understand it, that's when we do or say something then narrate ourselves why we decided to do so. We think non-verbally, then verbalize a plausible rationale for it, post hoc.

I'm not sure that applies to discursive writing, when we essentially use rules of logic to decide on the course of the narrative. Non-verbal heuristics still applies, of course, but we constrain it, so it's probably not entirely post hoc.