A person who is never taught to read will never be able to respond to written text. So the renaissance-era man is working "solely" based on their lived experience with text, which compared to GPT(n) is tiny.
Ah! you cry. Don't humans have some sort of hard-wiring for speech and language? Perhaps. But it is clearly completely incapable of enabling an untrained human to deal with written text. Does it give the human a head start in learning to deal with written text? Perhaps (maybe even probably). It demonstrably takes much less training than GPT(n) does.
But that is sort of the point of the comment at the top of this chain.
Ah! you cry. Don't humans have some sort of hard-wiring for speech and language? Perhaps. But it is clearly completely incapable of enabling an untrained human to deal with written text. Does it give the human a head start in learning to deal with written text? Perhaps (maybe even probably). It demonstrably takes much less training than GPT(n) does.
But that is sort of the point of the comment at the top of this chain.