What Richard Sutton thinks about behavioural science

@richard-sutton · 25 positions · On ppll ↗

Computer scientist who founded the field of reinforcement learning, co-author of the standard textbook, and winner of the 2024 Turing Award.

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Only Richard Sutton on behavioural science. See everyone on behavioural science

1 dated position, 2025, in their own words. Our reading of what Richard Sutton has said — not written or endorsed by them.

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1. 26 Sept 2025

   Our readingThere is no basic animal learning process called imitation; the basic processes are prediction and trial-and-error control.

   Their wordsIf you go to look about how psychologists think about learning, there's nothing like uh imitation. Maybe there are some extreme cases where humans might do that or appear to do that, but there's no basic animal learning process called imitation.

   ↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 9th of 25 in this recording