The “ratchet effect” is named after the ratchet wrench that holds its position after being turned in the desired direction. Tomasello argues that humans are uniquely able to “ratchet” progress in linguistic, scientific, and sociological knowledge from previous generations; this enables humans to develop cumulative culture, compared to the stagnant cultural evolution of other animals.
@2024milliere use the concept of ratcheting to suggest specific capacities that large language models would need to have in order to participate in cultural knowledge transmission:
- Basic ability to generate novel solutions, which is shared by non-human animals;
- The ability to “understand and communicate the underlying principles of these solutions, thereby enabling cumulative knowledge growth”; this relates directly to the problem of out-of-distribution generalization (see also: Humans are uniquely obliged to articulate reasons, after Dennett);
- The ability to “‘lock in’ innovations by recognizing and articulating how they have advanced beyond previous solutions. … [Such a capacity] necessitates an understanding of the novelty of the solution and its implications, akin to human scientists who not only discover but also theorize, contextualize, and communicate their findings.”