[ryanklee]

We don't only reason from facts. We also reason from value.

Further, reasoning that rests on facts that does not cite facts still has massive utility. (See people, all day long.)

Citations are useful, but not required.

[js8]

I think you just identified another problem with LLMs - we don't know their values, either.

Of course when you listen to human experts you're using the shortcut (and you do it based on trust), as I already argued. You have an option (in most cases, in free societies) to dig beyond just experts judgement, you can study their reasoning, and understand their sources of both values and facts.

Anyway, I disagree with citations not being required. If Wikipedia had no citations it would be less useful (and more prone to contain misinformation). Same goes for Google. So the next best things we have to "artificial brain that contains all the human knowledge" have citations, and for a good reason.

[ryanklee]

What are the citations actually required for though?

Another way to ask this is: what value remains without them?

I'll add this as well: humans produced valuable knowledge for thousands of years without the use or standard of citations.

To be clear, I think citations are highly valuable and desirable and I very much want LLMs to cite when appropriate. However, I think the necessity of this is overstated.

Edit: what you said of experts can be said of LLMs as well.

[js8]

> What are the citations actually required for though?

For me, yes! I do often reference (cite) myself when thinking, by making and reading notes, or materials that other people wrote. If I relied only on my own memory, I would be unable to think more deeply.

And this is, interestingly, where the current LLMs seem to break down - they can reason short proofs but cannot scale their reasoning to longer chains of thoughts correctly (were they capable of doing that, they would have no issue producing citations to back up their claims). They operate intuitively (Kahneman's system 1) and not rationally (Kahneman's system 2).

And thus lot of that "valuable knowledge" that humans produced over the years have been hopelessly wrong, precisely until somebody actually sat down and wrote things up (or communicated things out, people working together can sort of expand the working memory as well).

[ryanklee]

Again, I acknowledge that citations have value and are important and desirable as a feature of how we communicate.

But citations did not begin their rise a standard until the 1900s. The idea that knowledge production was not valuable until that point is absurd.

Further, citations do not prevent statements from being incorrect. They are sometimes used to lend credence to bullshit.

We live all at once in a world full of citations and of epistemic chaos.

Do I want LLMs to cite sources? Absolutely. But it's not the fundamental path to value people seem to sometimes think.