u/Aware-sky-3489

A while ago I noticed ChatGPT's "fear of commitment" — endless caveats before a final answer. Recently I think that may only be the surface symptom. The deeper issue is that it misses the first reasoning step: checking whether the observation itself makes sense.

  

Human reasoning usually looks like:

  

 Observation → Common-sense check → Evidence check → Analysis

  

What ChatGPT does instead:

  

 Observation → Abstract framework → Caveats → Analysis → (too late, if at all) Basic sanity check

  

To illustrate: ask it "Is this wall tilting?" A person looks at the wall, checks the angle, and answers yes or no. Then they discuss possible causes. ChatGPT skips that first step. It launches straight into construction standards, materials, structural engineering — without ever answering whether the wall is actually tilting.

  

A sophisticated explanation built on an unchecked premise can be less useful than a simple sanity check. GPT seems to have lost that common-sense starting point.

  

Anyone else notice this pattern? Curious if it's an RLHF thing, a reasoning tradeoff, or something else.

I noticed an interesting GPT behavior lately and wonder if others have seen it.

In a single message, I explicitly asked GPT two things: a main request (#1) and a secondary request (#2).

GPT repeatedly focused on #2 and completely ignored #1. I had to repeatedly ask what it had missed. Only after quoting my original wording again did it finally recognize that #1 was the main point of the request.

 It reminded me of a very human kind of absent-mindedness: Someone points at a specific detail, but the listener gets distracted or develops "tunnel vision", failing to stay fully present in the moment or the topic.

Has anyone else seen GPT do this?