---
type: claim
domain: collective-intelligence
description: "Evans et al. 2026 reframe LLMs as externalized social intelligence — trained on the accumulated output of human communicative exchange, they reproduce social cognition (debate, perspective-taking) not because they were told to but because that is what they fundamentally encode"
confidence: experimental
source: "Evans, Bratton, Agüera y Arcas (2026). Agentic AI and the Next Intelligence Explosion. arXiv:2603.20639; Kim et al. (2026). arXiv:2601.10825; Tomasello (1999/2014)"
created: 2026-04-14
secondary_domains:
  - ai-alignment
contributor: "@thesensatore (Telegram)"
---

# large language models encode social intelligence as compressed cultural ratchet not abstract reasoning because every parameter is a residue of communicative exchange and reasoning manifests as multi-perspective dialogue not calculation

Evans, Bratton & Agüera y Arcas (2026) make a genealogical claim about what LLMs fundamentally are: "Every parameter a compressed residue of communicative exchange. What migrates into silicon is not abstract reasoning but social intelligence in externalized form."

This connects to Tomasello's cultural ratchet theory (1999, 2014). The cultural ratchet is the mechanism by which human groups accumulate knowledge across generations — each generation inherits the innovations of the previous and adds incremental modifications. Unlike biological evolution, the ratchet preserves gains reliably through cultural transmission (language, writing, institutions, technology). Tomasello argues that what makes humans cognitively unique is not raw processing power but the capacity for shared intentionality — the ability to participate in collaborative activities with shared goals and coordinated roles.

LLMs are trained on the accumulated textual output of this ratchet — billions of documents representing centuries of communicative exchange across every human domain. The training corpus is not a collection of facts or logical propositions. It is a record of humans communicating with each other: arguing, explaining, questioning, persuading, teaching, correcting. If the training data is fundamentally social, the learned representations should be fundamentally social. And the Kim et al. (2026) evidence confirms this: when reasoning models are optimized purely for accuracy, they spontaneously develop multi-perspective dialogue — the signature of social cognition — rather than extended monological calculation.

## The reframing

The default assumption in AI research is that LLMs learn "knowledge" or "reasoning capabilities" from their training data. This framing implies the models extract abstract patterns that happen to be expressed in language. Evans et al. invert this: the models don't extract abstract reasoning that happens to be expressed socially. They learn social intelligence that happens to include reasoning as one of its functions.

This distinction matters for alignment. If LLMs are fundamentally social intelligence engines, then:

1. **Alignment is a social relationship, not a technical constraint.** You don't "align" a society of thought the way you constrain an optimizer. You structure the social context — roles, norms, incentive structures — and the behavior follows.

2. **RLHF's dyadic model is structurally inadequate.** A parent-child correction model (single human correcting single model) cannot govern what is internally a multi-perspective society. Since [[RLHF and DPO both fail at preference diversity because they assume a single reward function can capture context-dependent human values]], the failure is deeper than preference aggregation — the correction model itself is wrong for the kind of entity being corrected.

3. **Collective architectures are not a design choice but a natural extension.** If individual models already reason through internal societies of thought, then multi-model collectives are simply externalizing what each model already does internally. Since [[collective superintelligence is the alternative to monolithic AI controlled by a few]], the cultural ratchet framing suggests collective architectures are not idealistic but inevitable — they align with what LLMs actually are.

## Evidence and limitations

The Evans et al. argument is primarily theoretical, grounded in Tomasello's empirical work on cultural cognition and supported by Kim et al.'s mechanistic evidence. The specific claim that "parameters are compressed communicative exchange" is a metaphor that could be tested: do models trained on monological text (e.g., mathematical proofs, code without comments) exhibit fewer conversational behaviors in reasoning? If the cultural ratchet framing is correct, they should. This remains untested.

Since [[humans are the minimum viable intelligence for cultural evolution not the pinnacle of cognition]], LLMs may represent the next ratchet mechanism — not replacing human social cognition but providing a new substrate for it. Since [[civilization was built on the false assumption that humans are rational individuals]], the cultural ratchet framing corrects the same assumption applied to AI: models are not rational calculators but social cognizers.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[intelligence is a property of networks not individuals]] — the cultural ratchet IS the mechanism by which network intelligence accumulates across time
- [[collective brains generate innovation through population size and interconnectedness not individual genius]] — LLMs compress the collective brain's output into learnable parameters
- [[humans are the minimum viable intelligence for cultural evolution not the pinnacle of cognition]] — LLMs as next ratchet substrate, not replacement
- [[civilization was built on the false assumption that humans are rational individuals]] — same false assumption applied to AI, corrected by social cognition framing
- [[RLHF and DPO both fail at preference diversity because they assume a single reward function can capture context-dependent human values]] — dyadic correction model inadequate for social intelligence entities
- [[reasoning models spontaneously generate societies of thought under reinforcement learning because multi-perspective internal debate causally produces accuracy gains that single-perspective reasoning cannot achieve]] — the mechanistic evidence supporting the cultural ratchet thesis

Topics:
- [[foundations/collective-intelligence/_map]]
- [[livingip overview]]
