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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

I was never "taught to read", one of my earliest memories was being gifted a old trunk filled with comic books from a cousin's return from Vietnam. Several hundred comics, many of them dating back to the early 60's, the time this occurred was 1969. Everything from all the DC/Marvel, Donald Duck, European comics, the oversized and banned horror comics with nudity, and of course a shit load of underground comics like the Freak Bros, and more.

When school started, kindergarten, I knew how to read. I had a kid's novel with me I was reading, something like "Mrs Frisby & the rats of NIMN".

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I don't remember learning to read, or a time in my life where I couldn't read at least a bit. As best I can figure I began reading before my episodic memory fully developed.

I do wonder how I managed to learn anything just by reading on my own though. There were certainly words and concepts I didn't understand (I have a vivid memory of reading a childrens science book that explained the big bang, and misinterpreting it as 'the universe started when the sun exploded'. I noticed the logical inconsistency but didn't pursue it), but I can't think of any instances where those gaps in my knowledge were filled by someone else and I had an 'aha' moment of understanding. I guess we do a lot of learning without realising it.

You claim you just inferred sounds from letter shapes and started putting it together yourself, with no training data?

I remember just looking at the pictures, and for some reason I really liked Spiderman. (There was a Spiderman cartoon in the late 60's.) I noticed that Spiderman's comics when they showed him in his ghetto apartment, it was always filled with books, with the titles readable. I could not read the titles, but figured if the people making the comics were putting all these books in Peter Parker's apartment, the books are probably useful for superheros. That idiot logic is what got me to start wanting to read, to know what Peter Parker was reading. I started, slowly, and taught myself with a goal.

Are you implying that people use “training data” to learn things

I think he's implying that humans require available information from which to learn new things, and that borrowing a term from AI research is one valid (if backwards-sounding) way to describe that fact.

I am joking with the terminology, but I don't believe B.S.'s claim that they were able to do human language learning without 'labelling'.

It's a valid way to learn a second language in the same script, see Lingua Latina for example, but how can you possibly learn a first language or a new script without being told the sounds characters make? You can learn to listen/comprehend and speak by in immersion like that, but not reading & writing.

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