> 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).
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).