[HN Gopher] Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on ...
___________________________________________________________________
Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning
motivation
Author : freddier
Score : 263 points
Date : 2025-01-21 13:47 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
| byyoung3 wrote:
| its increasing my curiosity because it allows me to run more
| experiments
| sitkack wrote:
| The paper says that LLM usage doesn't appear to move baseline
| curiosity. Thanks aithrowawaycomm for
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09315
|
| Ridiculous that academic work on the technology of education is
| behind a paywall and not open access. Stinks.
| thecupisblue wrote:
| Exactly this. While I might scratch the surface of some topics,
| it helps me cast a wider net of cognitive exploration in the
| free time I have. This in turn leads me into deeper rabbit
| holes for things that pique my interest, leading to faster
| iteration of the knowledge tree, while also providing me with a
| way to estimate my understanding of the topic.
| diggan wrote:
| > What is particularly noteworthy is that AI technologies such as
| ChatGPT may promote learners' dependence on technology and
| potentially trigger "metacognitive laziness". In conclusion,
| understanding and leveraging the respective strengths and
| weaknesses of different agents in learning is critical in the
| field of future hybrid intelligence.
|
| Maybe I'm trying to read and understand it too quickly, but I
| don't see anything in the abstract that supports that strong
| conclusion.
|
| > The results revealed that: (1) learners who received different
| learning support showed no difference in post-task intrinsic
| motivation; (2) there were significant differences in the
| frequency and sequences of the self-regulated learning processes
| among groups; (3) ChatGPT group outperformed in the essay score
| improvement but their knowledge gain and transfer were not
| significantly different. Our research found that in the absence
| of differences in motivation, learners with different supports
| still exhibited different self-regulated learning processes,
| ultimately leading to differentiated performance.
|
| The ChatGPT group performed better on essay scores, they showed
| no deficit in knowledge gain or transfer, but they showed
| different self-regulated learning processes (not worse or better,
| just different?).
|
| If anything, my own conclusion from the abstract would be that
| ChatGPT is helpful as a learning tool as it helped them improve
| essay scores without compromising knowledge learning. But again,
| I only read the abstract, maybe they go into more details in the
| paper that make the abstract make more sense.
| izend wrote:
| I have found ChatGPT is pretty good at explaining topics when
| the source documentation is poorly written or lacks examples.
| Obviously it does make mistakes so skepticism in the output is
| a good idea.
| jmann99999 wrote:
| I drew a similar conclusion from the abstract as you. The only
| negative I could think out of that is with higher essay scores,
| one might expect higher knowledge gain, and that wasn't
| present.
|
| However, I agree that that doesn't really seem to be a negative
| over other methods.
| sitkack wrote:
| I have been using LLMs for my own education since they came out
| and have watched my kid use it.
|
| Some kids might pickup a calculator and then use it to see
| geometric growth, or look for interesting repeating patterns of
| numbers.
|
| Another kid might just use it to get their homework done faster
| and then run outside and play.
|
| The second kid isn't learning more via the use of the tool.
|
| So the paper warns that the use of LLMs doesn't necessarily
| change what the student is interested in and how they are
| motivated. That we might need to put in checks for how the tool
| is being used into the tool to reduce the impact of scenario 2.
| apercu wrote:
| I don't really know what "metacongnitive laziness" is even
| after they explain it in the paper, but I use LLMs to filter
| noise and help automate the drudgery of certain tasks, allowing
| me to use my energy and peak focus time on the more complicated
| tasks. Anecdotal, obviously. But I don't see how this hinders
| me in my ability to "self-regulate". It's just a tool, like a
| hammer.
|
| From a learning perspective, it can also be a short cut to
| getting something explained in several different ways until the
| concept "clicks".
| danielbln wrote:
| I also appreciate being able to tell the LLM "look, it's
| late, I'm tired, really dumb this down for me" and it does
| it.
| felideon wrote:
| Yeah, the abstract could use a bit more work. The gist of it is
| being in a closed-loop cycle with ChatGPT only helps with the
| task at hand, and not with engaging with the full learning
| process. Instead they say "When using AI in learning, learners
| should focus on deepening their understanding of knowledge and
| actively engage in metacognitive processes such as evaluation,
| monitoring, and orientation, rather than blindly following
| ChatGPT's feedback solely to complete tasks efficiently."
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09315
| sitkack wrote:
| Thanks for the link, but clearly no one is reading it. Which is
| super ironic, they aren't even summarizing it with AI and using
| that information.
|
| Most folks are projecting what the title says into their own
| emotion space and then riffing on that.
|
| The authors even went so far as to boil the entire paper down
| into bullet points, you don't even need the pdf.
| felideon wrote:
| > Most folks are projecting what the title says into their
| own emotion space and then riffing on that.
|
| Yeah, or the abstract which is a bit vague.
| sitkack wrote:
| The bullet points below the abstract is basically the paper
| w/o reading it.
| spatalo wrote:
| same is true for google, gps, etc.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| The abstract does not define, nor contextually suggest from the
| prior statements of the results what "metacognitive laziness"
| means.
|
| Personally speaking, I find being able to ask ChatGPT continually
| more nuanced questions about an initial answer the one clear
| benefit over a Google search, where I have diminishing marginal
| returns on my inquisitiveness for the time invested over
| subsequent searches. The more precisely I am able to formulate my
| question on a traditional search engine, the harder it is for
| non-SEO optimized results to appear: it's either meant more for a
| casual reader with no new information, or is a very specialized
| resource that requires extensive professional background
| knowledge. LLMs really build that bridge to precisely the answers
| I want.
| jcims wrote:
| This is my take as well.
|
| There was a story a couple days ago about a neural network
| built on a single photonic chip. I fed the paper to ChatGPT and
| was able to use it to develop a much more meaningful and
| comprehensive understanding of what the chip actually
| delivered, how it operated, the fundamental operating
| principles of core components and how it could be integrated
| into a system.
|
| The fact that I now have a tireless elucidator on tap to help
| explore a topic (hallucination caveats notwithstanding)
| actually increases my motivation to explore dense technical
| information and understanding of new concepts.
|
| The one area where I do think it is detrimental is my
| willingness to start writing content on a provebial blank sheet
| of paper. I explore the topic with ChatGPT to get a rough
| outline, maybe some basic content and then take it from there.
| squigz wrote:
| > (hallucination caveats notwithstanding)
|
| This is a pretty big caveat to the goal of
|
| > develop a much more meaningful and comprehensive
| understanding
|
| Which is still my biggest issue with LLMs. The little I use
| of them, the answers are still confidently wrong a lot of the
| time. Has this changed?
| tyzoid wrote:
| I've found them to be quite accurate when given enough
| context data. For ex, feeding it an article into it's
| context window and asking questions about it. Relying on
| the LLM's internal trained knowledge state seems to be less
| reliable.
| setsewerd wrote:
| I use ChatGPT a lot each day for writing and organizing
| tasks, and summaries/explanations of articles etc.
|
| When dealing with topics I'm familiar with, I've found the
| hallucinations have dropped substantially in the last few
| years from GPT2 to GPT3 to GPT4 to 4o, especially when web
| search is incorporated.
|
| LLMs perform best in this regard when working with existing
| text that you've fed them (whether via web search or
| uploaded text/documents). So if you paste the text of a
| study to start the conversation, it's a pretty safe bet
| you'll be fine.
|
| If you don't have web search turned on, I'd still avoid
| treating the chat as a search engine though, because 4o
| will still get little details wrong here and there,
| especially for newer or more niche topics that wouldn't be
| as well-represented in the training data.
| bloopernova wrote:
| I've found that whatever powers Kagi.com's answer seems to
| be pretty accurate. It cites articles and other sources.
|
| Trying a share link, hope it works:
|
| https://kagi.com/search?q=what+factors+affect+the+freezing+
| p...
| freediver wrote:
| What powers it is Kagi Search :) All chatbots have access
| to similar models, what distinguishes the answer quality
| is/will be the quality of search results fed to them.
| jcims wrote:
| I agree in general but the way this has worked for me in
| practice is that I approach things hierarchically up and
| down. Any specific hallucinations tend to come out in the
| wash as the same question is asked from different layers of
| abstraction.
| epolanski wrote:
| On the other hand you might be getting worse at reading those
| papers yourself.
|
| The more youngsters skip the hassle of banging their heads on
| some topic the less able they will be to learn at later age.
|
| There's more to learning than getting information, it's also
| about processing it (which we are offloading to LLMs). In
| fact I'd say that the whole point of going through school is
| to learn how to process and absorb information.
|
| That might be the cognitive laziness.
| parpfish wrote:
| What if the LLMs are teaching us that long form
| prose/technical writing is just a really bad, unnatural
| format for communication but natural dialogues are a good
| format?
| amrocha wrote:
| If that was the case every scientific paper would be
| written as socratic dialogue. But it's not. Because
| that's a good format for beginners, but not for science.
| parpfish wrote:
| the reason the current format exists and is used is
| because it's very information dense. i think scientific
| papers would be better if they were socratic dialogues.
|
| but the limitation in publishing a dialogue is that you'd
| just get to publish one of them and each reader is going
| to come in with different questions and goals for what
| they want out of the paper.
| epolanski wrote:
| The way I see it it is sort of like debugging code you're
| not well accustomed with.
|
| While you're still going to learn whether you go through
| the hassle of understanding the system, develop a method
| for debugging it and learning about it along the way...
|
| Of course a senior could point you to the issue right
| away, probably an llm too, and even provide a learning
| opportunity, but does it hold the same lasting impact of
| being able to overcome the burden yourself?
|
| Which one makes a more lasting effect on your abilities
| and skills?
|
| Again, LLMs are a tool, but if people in school/college
| start using it to offload the reasoning part they are not
| developing it themselves.
| cube2222 wrote:
| Sure, same as I'm probably pretty bad at going to the
| library and looking up information there, with the advent
| of the internet.
|
| In practice, this lets you reasonably process the knowledge
| from a lot more papers than you otherwise would, which I
| think is a win. The way we learn is evolving, as it has in
| the past, and that's a good thing.
|
| Though I agree that this will be another way for lazy
| children to avoid learning (by just letting AI do the
| exercises), and we'll need to find a good solution for
| that, whatever it may be.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Not being able to glean information from a paper is
| wildly different than being unable to use a card catalog.
| The former is basic reading comprehension; the latter is
| a technology.
|
| You AREN'T learning what that paper is saying; you're
| learning parts of what the LLM says is useful.
|
| If you read just theorems, you aren't learning math. You
| need to read the proof too, and not just a summary of the
| proof.
| jcims wrote:
| I do read the paper, but when you run into dense
| explanations like this:
|
| >To realize a programmable coherent optical activation
| function, we developed a resonant electro-optical
| nonlinearity (Fig. 1(iii)). This device directs a fraction
| of the incident optical power |b|2 into a photodiode by
| programming the phase shift th in an MZI. The photodiode is
| electrically connected to a p-n-doped resonant microring
| modulator, and the resultant photocurrent (or photovoltage)
| detunes the resonance by either injecting (or deplet-ing)
| carriers from the waveguide.
|
| It becomes very difficult to pick apart each thing, find a
| suitable explanation of what the thing (eg. MZI splitter,
| microring modulator, how a charge detunes the resonance of
| the modulator) is or how it contributes to the whole.
|
| Picking these apart and recombining them with the help of
| something like ChatGPT has given me a very rapid drill-down
| capability into documents like this. Then re-reading it
| allows me to intake the information in the way its
| presented.
|
| If this type of content was material to my day job it would
| be another matter, but this is just hobby interest. I'm
| just not going to invest hours trying to figure it out.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > LLMs really build that bridge to precisely the answers I
| want.
|
| It is interesting that you describe this as "the answers you
| want" and not "the correct answer to the question I have"
|
| Not criticising you in particular, but this does sound to me
| like this approach has a good possibility of just reinforcing
| existing biases
|
| In fact the approach sounds very similar to "find a wikipedia
| article and then go dig through the sources to find the
| original place that the answers I want were published"
| pragmar wrote:
| Agreeable LLMs and embedded bias are surely a risk, but I
| don't think this a helpful frame. Most questions don't have
| correct answers, so it would follow that you'd want practical
| answers for those, and correct answers for the remainder.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Though I think you're reading more into my phrasing than I
| meant, the overall skepticism is fair.
|
| One thing I do have to be mindful of is asking the AI to
| check for alternatives, for dissenting or hypothetical
| answers, and sometimes I just ask it to rephrase to check for
| consistency.
|
| But doing all of that still takes way less time than
| searching for needles buried by SEO optimized garbage and
| well meaning but repetitious summaries.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Though I think you're reading more into my phrasing than
| I meant, the overall skepticism is fair
|
| I do want to re-iterate that I didn't intend to accuse you
| of only seeking to reinforce your biases
|
| I read into your phrasing not to needle you, but because it
| set off some thoughts in my head, that's all
|
| Thanks for being charitable with your reply, and I
| appreciate your thoughts
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > It is interesting that you describe this as "the answers
| you want" and not "the correct answer to the question I have"
|
| "Verify that" and then ChatGPT will do a real time search and
| I can read web pages. Occasionally, it will "correct itself"
| once it does a web search
| jprete wrote:
| In the absence of a definition I'd read it straightforwardly -
| it means that someone stops making an effort to learn better
| ways to learn. I.e. if they start using chatbots to learn, they
| stop practicing other methods and just rely on the chatbot.
| (EDIT: I realize now that this probably isn't news to the
| parent!)
|
| I've heard stories of junior engineers falling into this trap.
| They asked the chatbot everything rather than exposing their
| lack of knowledge to their coworkers. And if the chatbot avoids
| blatant mistakes, junior engineers won't recognize when the bot
| makes a subtle one.
| sitkack wrote:
| That is why the last step should always be how do I know what
| I know? What are my blind spots?
|
| If I am not motivated to find them and test my own knowledge,
| how do I change that motivation?
| apercu wrote:
| Even though ChatGPT "invents" its own reality sometimes, I also
| find it superior to Google search results (or Duck Duck Go). In
| some cases LLM results even provide specific strings to search
| for in the search engines to verify the content. Search is
| terribly broken and has been since around 2014 (arbitrary date)
| where Google search results pages started displaying more ads
| than results.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Paid ChatGPT has had web search capabilities for two years at
| least
| Davidbrcz wrote:
| In that context metacognitive process are the processes used to
| plan, monitor, and assess one's understanding and performances.
|
| So metacognitive lazyness would be the lack of such processes
| miltonlost wrote:
| >The abstract does not define, nor contextually suggest from
| the prior statements of the results what "metacognitive
| laziness" means.
|
| Your comment seems like a good example of metacognitive
| laziness: not bothering to formulate your own definition from
| the examples in the abstract and the meaning of the words
| themselves. Slothful about the the process of thinking for
| yourself.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I reread the abstract 3 times. The results stated prior to
| that definition simply don't follow consistently with the
| component meaning of those two words as I understand them.
|
| The writer has the responsibility to be clear.
| layer8 wrote:
| Further down they write (emphasis mine):
|
| > When using AI in learning, learners should focus on deepening
| their understanding of knowledge and actively engage in
| _metacognitive processes such as evaluation, monitoring, and
| orientation_ , rather than blindly following ChatGPT's feedback
| solely to complete tasks efficiently.
| iambateman wrote:
| "The kids these days are too lazy to be bothered to learn" is a
| psychological trap that people often fall into.
|
| It's not to say we shouldn't do our best to understand and
| provide guardrails, but the kids will be fine.
| jerf wrote:
| Can you point me to the generation that had ready access to AI
| on their hands, answering all their questions?
|
| "People have been complaining about this for thousands of
| years" is a potent counterargument to a lot of things, but it
| can't be applied to things that really didn't exist even a
| decade ago.
|
| Moreover, the thing that people miss about "people have been
| complaining about this for thousands of years" is that the
| complaints have often been valid, too. Cultures have fallen.
| Civilizations have collapsed. Empires have disintegrated. The
| complaints were not all wrong!
|
| And that's on a civilization-scale. On a more mundane day-to-
| day scale, people have been individually failing for precisely
| the same reasons people were complaining about for a long time.
| There have been lazy people who have done poorly or died
| because of it. There have been people who refused to learn who
| have done poorly or died because of it.
|
| This really isn't an all-purpose "just shrug about it and move
| on, everything's been fine before and it'll be fine again". It
| hasn't always been fine before, at any scale, and we don't know
| what impact unknown things will have.
|
| To give a historical example... nay, a _class_ of historical
| examples... there are several instances of a new drug being
| introduced to a society, and it ripping through that society
| that had no defenses against it. Even when the society survived
| it, it did so at great individual costs, and "eh, we've had
| drugs before" would not have been a good heuristic to
| understand the results with. I do not know that AIs just
| answering everything is similar, but at the moment I certainly
| can't prove it isn't either.
| helboi4 wrote:
| I mean sometimes it's true. Like even in the past. I could very
| clearly see amongst my generation (older gen z) that there were
| plenty of people literally at university who were barely
| willing or able to learn. Comparing that to the generation of
| my much older half siblings (genx, older millennial), they
| don't even seem to grasp the concept of not being quite
| involved in your university degree.
|
| Most people my age will tell you that they stopped reading as a
| teenager because of the effect of smartphones. I was a
| veracious reader and only relearnt to read last year after 10
| years since I got my first smartphone as an older teenager.
| These things are impactful and have affected a lot of people's
| potential. And also made our generation very prone to mental
| health issues - something that is really incredibly palpable if
| you are within gen z social circles like I am. It's disastrous
| and cannot be overstated. I can be very sure I would be smarter
| and happier if technology had stagnated at the level it was at
| when I was a younger child/teen. The old internet and personal
| computers, for example, only helped me explore my curiosity.
| Social media and smartphones have only destroyed it. There are
| qualitative differences between some technological
| advancements.
|
| Not to mention the fact that gen alpha are shown to have
| terrible computer literacy because of the ease of use,
| discouragement of customisation and corporate monopoly over
| smartphones. This bucks the trend that happened from gen x to
| gen z of generations become more and more computer native.
| Clearly, upwards trends in learning due to advancements in
| technology can be reversed. They do not always go up.
|
| If kids do not learn independent reasoning because of reliance
| on LLMs, yes, that will make people stupider. Not all
| technology improves things. I watched a really great video
| recently where someone explained the change in the nature of
| presidential debates through the ages. In the Victorian times,
| they consisted of hours-long oratory on each side, with
| listeners following attentively. In the 20th century the
| speeches gradually became a little shorter and more questions
| were added to break things up. In most recent times, every
| question has started to come with a less than a minute answer,
| simpler vocabulary, little hard facts or statistics etc. These
| changes map very well to changes in the depth at which people
| were able to think due to the primary information source they
| were using. There is a good reason why reading is still seen as
| the most effective form of deep learning despite technological
| advancement. Because it is.
| agentultra wrote:
| So humans are supposed to review all of the code that GenAI
| creates. We're supposed to ensure that it doesn't generate
| (obvious?) errors and that it's building the "right thing" in a
| manner prescribed by our requirements.
|
| The anecdotes from practitioners using GenAI in this way suggest
| it's a good tool for experienced developers because they know
| what to look out for.
|
| Now we admit folks who don't know what they're doing and are in
| the process of learning. They don't know what to look out for.
| How does this tech help them? Do they know to ask what a use-
| after-free is or how cache memory works? Do they know the names
| of the algorithms and data structures? Do they know when the
| GenAI is bullshitting them?
|
| Studies such as this are hard but important. Interesting one here
| even though the sample is small. I wonder if anyone can repeat
| it.
| diggan wrote:
| > Now we admit folks who don't know what they're doing and are
| in the process of learning. They don't know what to look out
| for. How does this tech help them? Do they know to ask what a
| use-after-free is or how cache memory works? Do they know the
| names of the algorithms and data structures? Do they know when
| the GenAI is bullshitting them?
|
| You can know enough in X to allow you to do Y together with X,
| which you might not have been able to before.
|
| For example, I'm a programmer, but horrible at math. I want to
| develop games, and I technically could, but all the math stuff
| makes it a lot harder sometimes to make progress. I've still
| managed to make and release games, but math always gets in the
| way. I know exactly how I want it to behave and work, but I
| cannot always figure out how to get there. LLMs help me a lot
| with this, where I can isolate those parts into small black
| boxes that I know they give me the right thing, but not 100%
| sure about how. I know when the LLM gives me the incorrect
| code, because I know what I'm looking for and why, only missing
| the "how" part.
|
| Basically like having 3rd party libraries you don't fully
| understand the internals of, but can still use granted you
| understand the public API, except you keep in your code base
| and pepper it with unit tests.
| squigz wrote:
| > Do they know to ask what a use-after-free is or how cache
| memory works? Do they know the names of the algorithms and data
| structures? Do they know when the GenAI is bullshitting them?
|
| No, which is why people who don't pick up on the nuances of
| programming - no matter how often they use LLMs - will never be
| capable programmers.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _Do they know when the GenAI is bullshitting them?_
|
| Anecdote from a friend who teaches CS: this year a large number
| of students started adding unnecessary `break` instructions to
| their C code, like so: while (condition) {
| do_stuff(); if (!condition) { break;
| } }
|
| They asked around and realized that the common thread was
| ChatGPT - everyone who asked how loops work got a variation of
| "use break() to exit the loop", so they did.
|
| Given that this is not how you do it in CS (not only it's
| unnecessary, but it also makes your formal proofs more complex)
| they had to make a general one-time exception and add
| disclaimers in exams reminding them to do it "the way you were
| taught in class".
| elpocko wrote:
| >use break() to exit the loop
|
| Well - they know that break is not a function and you don't.
| Thanks ChatGPT.
| agentultra wrote:
| A colleague of mine once taught a formal methods course for
| students working on their masters -- not beginners by any
| stretch.
|
| The exercise was to implement binary search given the
| textbook specification without any errors. An algorithm they
| had probably implemented in their first-year algorithms
| course at the very least. The students could write any tests
| they liked and add any assertions they thought would be
| useful. My colleague verified each submission against a
| formal specification. The majority of submission contained
| errors.
|
| For a simple algorithm that a student at that level could be
| reasonably expected to know well!
|
| Now... ChatGPT and other LLM-based systems, as far as I
| understand, cannot do formal reasoning on their own. It
| cannot tell you, with certainty, that your code is correct
| with regards to a specification. And it can't tell you if
| your specification contains errors. So what are students
| learning using these tools?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Given that most binary searches have an overflow error
| built in, I think it's harder than a first year problem to
| do binary searches without the classical overflow error...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You take a few points from the students that posted inane
| code by following the LLM, and those students will learn to
| never blindly follow an LLM again.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| If you take the generated code snippets and ask something
| like "There may or may not be something syntactically or
| stylistically wrong with the following code. Try to identify
| any errors or unusual structures that might come up in a
| technical code review.", then it usually finds any problems
| or at least, differences of opinion on what the best approach
| is.
|
| (This might work best if you have one LLM critique the code
| generated by another LLM, eg bouncing back and forth between
| Claude and ChatGPT)
| danielbln wrote:
| Some tools have also started to support a one-two punch of
| asking a reasoning model (o1 or R1 etc) for planning the
| solution, and a chat model to build it. Works quite well.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| I feel this, because it's like I don't need to know about
| something, I just need to know how to know about something. Like,
| the initial contact with a mystery subject is overcome by knowing
| how to describe the mystery in a way that AI understands what I
| don't understand, and seeks to fill in the understanding.
|
| An example, I have no clue about React. I do know why I don't
| like to use React and why I have avoided it over the years. I
| describe to some ML tool the difficulties I've had learning React
| and using it productively .. and voila, it plots a chart through
| the knowledge that, kinda, makes me want to learn React and use
| it.
|
| It's like, the human ability to form an ontology in the face of
| mystery even if it is in accurate or faulty, allows the AI to
| take over and plot an ontological route through the mystery into
| understanding.
|
| Another thing I realized lately, as ML has taken over my critical
| faculties, is that it's really only useful for things that are
| already known by others. I can't ask ML to give me some new,
| groundbreaking idea about something - everything it suggests has
| already been thought, somewhere, by a real human - and this its
| not new or groundbreaking. It's just contextually - in my own
| local ontological universe - filling in a mystery gap.
|
| Pretty fun times we're having, but I do fear for the generations
| that will know and understand no other way than to have ML
| explain things for them. I don't think we have the ethics tools,
| as cultures and societies, to prevent this from becoming a
| catastrophe of glib, knowledge-less folks, collapsing all
| knowledge into a raging dumpster fire of collective reactivity,
| but I hope someone is training a model, somewhere, to rescue us
| from this, somehow ..
| llm_trw wrote:
| > But when they came to writing, Theuth said: "O King, here is
| something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and
| will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for
| memory and for wisdom." Thamus, however, replied: "O most
| expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an
| art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm
| those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of
| writing, your affection for it has made you describe its
| effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it
| will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn
| it: they will not practice using their memory because they will
| put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on
| signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from
| the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a
| potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your
| students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality.
| Your invention will enable them to hear many things without
| being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have
| come to know much while for the most part they will know
| nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since
| they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.
|
| --Socrates on writing
| diggan wrote:
| That's a interesting and very fitting quote. Basically saying
| that since we can now write down information, people will get
| lazier about remembering things. Basically the exact same
| claim as the submission article.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| I think there is some validity to the nature of
| generational knowledge loss through differing information
| systems. At one end of the scale, you've got 80,000 year
| old stories, still being told - at the other end of the
| scale, you've got App Of The Day(tm) style social media,
| and kids who can't write an email, use a dictionary, or
| read a book.
|
| This is no hyperbole - humans have to constantly fight the
| degeneracy of our knowledge systems, which is to say that
| knowledge has to be generated and communicated - it can't
| just "exist" and be useful, it has to be applied to be
| useful. Technology of knowledge which doesn't get applied,
| does not persist, or if it does (COBOL), what once was
| common becomes arcane.
|
| So, if there is hope, it lays with the proles: the way
| every-day people use ML, is probably the key to all of
| this. It's one thing to know how to prompt an LLM to give
| you a buildable source tree; its another thing entirely to
| use it somehow to figure out what to make out of the
| leftover ingredients in the fridge.
|
| Those recipes and indeed the applications of the
| ingredients, are based on human input and mores.
|
| So the question for me, still really unanswered, is: How
| long will it take until those fridge-ingredient recipes
| become bland, tasteless and grey?
|
| I think this belies the imperative that AL and ML must
| _never_ become so pervasive that we don't, also, write
| things down for ourselves. Oh, and read a lot, of course.
|
| It seems, we need to stop throwing books away. Oh, and
| encourage kids to cook, and create their own recipes...
| hopefully they'll have time and resources for that kind of
| lifestyle...
| barrenko wrote:
| Socrates is just the next monkey in line. As human monkeys,
| we have already traded (short-term) memory for abstract
| thinking and who knows what else.
|
| I guess that is the curse of evolution/specialization.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| No doubt, this curse (which is also missing generalization,
| i.e. evolution/generalization/specialization) is all for
| the sake of self-awareness, or at least, awareness, of some
| particular thing.
|
| As long as humans remain aware that they are engaging with
| an AI/ML, we might still have a chance. Computers
| definitely need to be identifiable as such.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| How's this any different than someone 5+ years ago blindly going
| by whatever a Google result said about anything? I've run into
| conflicting answers to things off Google's first page of results,
| some things aren't 100% certain and require more research.
|
| I'm not surprised if this will make some lazier since you don't
| need to do the legwork of reading, but how many don't read only
| the headlines of articles before they share articles?
| diggan wrote:
| > How's this any different than someone 5+ years ago blindly
| going by whatever a Google result said about anything
|
| You can interrogate it at least. "Are you sure that's the
| correct answer? Re-think from the beginning without any
| assumptions" and you'll get a checklist you can
| mentally/practically go through yourself to validate.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| True, so I guess what needs to happen is people using AI need
| to be informed on how to use it more accurately so they're
| actually learning source material and not just taking garbage
| / cheating on coursework.
| sitkack wrote:
| So we need to train inquisitive curious thinkers that look
| at things from all angles and understand why they know
| something.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| A friend and myself were talking not too long ago that
| people these days don't practice critical thinking. It
| might be worthwhile for not just schools but parents
| everywhere to teach their kids to think more critically,
| ask the right questions when presented with new
| information.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Differences of degree, not of kind
| baal80spam wrote:
| > How's this any different than someone 5+ years ago blindly
| going by whatever a Google result said about anything?
|
| It has "AI" in the title, so it's a hot take.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Part of it I think is the confidence with which LLMs return
| answers
| StefanBatory wrote:
| For code; at least you would have to copy and paste it, and
| then modify, even if ever so slightly, to make it fit your
| code.
|
| Now, "Claude, fix that for me".
| readyplayernull wrote:
| > Our research found that in the absence of differences in
| motivation, learners with different supports still exhibited
| different self-regulated learning processes, ultimately leading
| to differentiated performance.
|
| That's the most convoluted conclusion I've ever seen.
|
| > What is particularly noteworthy is that AI technologies such as
| ChatGPT may promote learners' dependence on technology and
| potentially trigger "metacognitive laziness".
|
| Calculator laziness is long known. It doesn't cause meta- but
| specific- laziness.
| empathy_m wrote:
| Cell phones and laptops in general have changed a couple of
| things for me, as someone who grew up without them:
|
| - I realized about 20y-25y ago that I could run a Web search and
| find out nearly any fact, probably one-shot but maybe with 2-3
| searches' worth of research
|
| - About 10-15y ago I began to have a connected device in my
| pocket that could do this on request at any time
|
| - About 5y ago I explicitly *stopped* doing it, most of the time,
| socially. If I'm in the middle of a conversation and a question
| comes up about a minor fact, I'm not gonna break the flow to pull
| out my screen and stare at it and answer the question, I'm gonna
| keep hanging out with the person.
|
| There was this "pub trivia" thing that used to happen in the 80s
| and 90s where you would see a spirited discussion between people
| arguing about a small fact which neither of them immediately had
| at hand. We don't get that much anymore because it's so easy to
| answer the question -- we've just totally lost it.
|
| I don't miss it, but I have become keenly aware of how tethered
| my consciousness is to facts available via Web search, and I
| don't know that I love outsourcing that much of my brain to
| places beyond my control.
| jprete wrote:
| A long time ago I had the idea that maybe Guinness started a
| "book of world records" precisely because it answers exactly
| the kind of question that will routinely pop up at the pub.
| dwater wrote:
| Yes.
|
| https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/about-us/our-story
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Wow I had no idea the name literally came from Guinness
| beer. Brilliant!
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| I'm just old enough to remember pub trivia before it was
| possible to look things up with a phone. I firmly maintain that
| phones ruined pub trivia.
| wussboy wrote:
| I agree but I think we shouldn't limit this answer to pub
| trivia. What other aspect of human society and civil
| discourse did we lose because we never argue or discuss any
| more?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It turns out the internet has created more things to argue
| about than it destroyed.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Well it certainly sucks in cases where someone "fact
| checks" you but they do so before a broader discussion has
| given them enough context to even know what to google or
| ask the bot.
| cezart wrote:
| Depends on the pub. Where we play there is a gentlemen's
| agreement that no one uses phones to help them answer
| questions
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Sure, but that ruins the ability to just pop into a pub and
| play with people you don't know (let alone trust).
|
| I have this business idea for a pub in a faraday cage that
| would make cheating impossible for pub trivia (added bonus:
| also removes any other reason for anyone to be on their
| phones!)
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > There was this "pub trivia" thing that used to happen in the
| 80s and 90s where you would see a spirited discussion between
| people arguing about a small fact which neither of them
| immediately had at hand. We don't get that much anymore because
| it's so easy to answer the question -- we've just totally lost
| it.
|
| A good example, but imagine the days of our ancestors:
|
| _Remember that game we used to play, where we 'd find out who
| could see birds from the farthest distance? Yeah, glasses
| ruined that._
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Take a small notebook, Anki flashcards, or even small notes.
|
| And work on learning some trivia purely to help you out with
| memory.
| roydivision wrote:
| This stands to reason. If you need the answer to a question, and
| you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the
| answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter approach
| than the former. You may be disciplined enough to do more
| research if the answer is directly presented to you, but most
| people will not do that, and most companies are not interested in
| that, they want quick 'efficient', 'competitive' solutions. They
| aren't considering the long term downside to this.
| portaouflop wrote:
| What is the long term downside in your opinion?
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I believe he implied by saying:
|
| > you're going to learn much more with the latter approach
| than the former
|
| that the downside is a lack of deep knowledge that would
| enable better solutions in the long term
| roydivision wrote:
| Yes, the downside is that we aren't really learning
| anything, just solving problems supported by machines that
| tell us the solutions. Any schmuck can do that.
| reginald78 wrote:
| I think it is worse. Information will dry up (in a
| variety of ways) making it much harder to even learn the
| traditional way as we could in the past.
| agumonkey wrote:
| that's why I mostly use chatgpt with platonic questions like
|
| - given context c, i tried idea a, b and c. where there other
| options that I miss ?
|
| - based on this plan, do you see missing efficiency ?
|
| etc etc
|
| i'm not seeking answers, i'm trying to avoid costly dead ends
| roydivision wrote:
| I think you are in a minority, you WANT to learn.
| agumonkey wrote:
| probably, or should I say, I don't want to rot.. It's true
| that I love the feeling of learning mostly on my own, but i
| can be lazy too, it's just that I see a parallel with
| abusing chatgpt and never doing any physical activity.
| hb-robo wrote:
| Same here. I never really consciously saw it as "defiance"
| against cognitive decline or anything. More to the point, the
| answers are much better on average
| engineer_22 wrote:
| We have accounts from the ancient Greeks of the old-school's
| attitude towards writing. In the deep past, they maintained an
| oral tradition, and scholars were expected to memorize
| everything. They saw writing/reading as a crutch that was
| ruining the youth's memory.
|
| We stand now at the edge of a new epoch, reading now being
| replaced by AI retrieval. There is concern that AI is a crutch,
| the youth will be weakened.
|
| My opinion: valid concern. No way to know how it turns out. No
| indication yet that use of AI is harming business outcomes. The
| meta argument "AGI will cause massive social change" is
| probably true.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > No way to know how it turns out.
|
| But one can speculate.
|
| > No indication yet that use of AI is harming business
| outcomes.
|
| Length scales to measure harm when it comes to
| policy/technology will typically require more time than we've
| had since LLMs really became prominent.
|
| > The meta argument "AGI will cause massive social change" is
| probably true.
|
| Agreed.
|
| Basically, in the absence of knowing how something will play
| out, it is prudent to talk through the expected outcomes and
| their likelihoods of happening. From there, we can start to
| build out a risk-adjusted return model to the societal
| impacts of LLM/AI integration if it continues down the
| current trajectory.
|
| IMO, I don't see the ROI for society of widespread LLM
| adoption unless we see serious policy shifts on how they are
| used and how young people are taught to learn. To the
| downside, we really run the risk of the next generation
| having fundamental learning deficiencies/gaps relative to
| their prior gen. A close anecdote might be how 80s/90s kids
| are better with troubleshooting technology than the
| generations that came both before and after them.
| anileated wrote:
| It is much more recent than the Greeks. McLuhan, for example,
| had some good points* about how writing/reading is different
| (and indeed in some ways worse?) than oral tradition, and how
| it influences even our social interactions and mindset. Film
| is different yet again (partially has to do with its
| linearity IIRC).
|
| So it's not like "kids these days", no. To be honest, I don't
| know how generative AI tools, which arguably _take away_ most
| of the "create" and "learn" parts, are relevant to the
| question of differences between different mediums and how
| those mediums influence how we create and learn. (There are
| ML-based tools that can empower creativity, but they don't
| tend to be advertised as "AI" because they are a mostly
| invisible part of some creative tool.)
|
| What is potentially relevant is how interacting with a
| particular kind of generative ML tool (the chatbot) for the
| purposes of understanding the world can be bringing some
| parts of human oral tradition (though lacking communication
| with actual humans, of course) and associated mental states.
|
| * See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Movable_type
| and his most famous work
| delusional wrote:
| > No indication yet that use of AI is harming business
| outcome
|
| What a sad sentence to read in a discussion about cognitive
| lazyness. I think people should think, not because it
| improves business outcomes, but because it's a beautiful
| activity.
| doitLP wrote:
| A well made buggy whip was probably beautiful too. But if
| economic forces incentivize something else, the skill goes
| away
| sarchertech wrote:
| Woe be to us all if the skill of _thinking_ goes away.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| We're racing to the dopamine drip feed pod people life
| aylmao wrote:
| I remember when I was younger, learning about economic
| models, including free market liberalism. I thought
| surely human desire left to their own devices can't
| possibly lead to meaningful progress. It can lead to
| movement alright, and new technology, but I had my doubts
| it could lead to meaningful progress.
|
| The longer I see things play out, especially in
| neoliberal economies, the further I seem to confirm this.
| Devoid of policy with ideals and intention, fully
| liberalized markets seem to just lead to whatever
| produces the most dopamine for humans.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| What's sad about it? Parent made claim that businesses will
| experience long term downsides.
| tkellogg wrote:
| Right, there's already some very encouraging trends (this
| study out of Nigeria). Clearly AI can lead to laziness, but
| it can also increase our intelligence. So it's not a simple
| "better" or "worse", it's a new thing that we have to
| navigate.
|
| https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/From-chalkboards-
| to...
| agumonkey wrote:
| Am I the only one to expect a S curve regarding progress and
| not an eternal exponential ?
|
| People moving away from prideful principle to leverage new
| tech in the past doesn't guarantee that the same idea in the
| current context will pan out.
|
| But as you say.. we'll see.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Oh, you mean an S curve on the progress of the AI?
|
| Most of the discussion on the thread is about LLMs as they
| are right now. There's only one odd answer that throws an
| "AGI" around as if those things could think.
|
| Anyway, IMO, it's all way overblown. People will learn to
| second-guess the LLMs as soon as they are hit by a couple
| of bad answers.
| agumonkey wrote:
| hmm yeah sorry, I meant the benefits of humans using
| current AI.
|
| by that I mean, leveraging writing was a benefit for
| humans to store data and think over longer term using a
| passive technique (stones, tablets, papyrus).. but an
| active tool might not have a positive effect on usage and
| brains.
|
| if you give me shoes, i might run further to find food,
| if you give me a car i mostly stop running and there
| might be no better fruit 100 miles away than what I had
| on my hill. (weak metaphor)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. Those things have a much smaller benefit
| over hypertext and search engines than hypertext and
| search engines had over libraries.
|
| But I don't know if it fits an S-curve or if they are
| just bellow the trend.
| mlyle wrote:
| Even if progress stops:
|
| 1. Current reasoning models can do a -lot- more than
| skeptics give them credit for. Typical human performance
| even among people who do something for employment is not
| always that high.
|
| 2. In areas where AI has mediocre performance, it may not
| appear that way to a novice. It often looks more like
| expert level performance, which robs novices of the desire
| to practice associated skills.
|
| Lest you think I contradict myself: I can get good output
| for many tasks from GPT4 because I know what to ask for and
| I know what good output looks like. But someone who thinks
| the first, poorly prompted dreck is great will never
| develop the critical skills to do this.
| svachalek wrote:
| This is a good point, forums are full of junior
| developers bemoaning that LLMs are inhumanly good at
| writing code -- not that they _will be_ , but that they
| _are_. I 've yet to see even the best produce something
| that makes me worry I might lose my job today, they're
| still very mediocre without a lot of handholding. But for
| someone who's still learning and thinks writing a loop is
| a challenge, they seem magical and unstoppable already.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Am I the only one to expect a S curve regarding progress
| and not an eternal exponential ?_
|
| To LLMs specifically as they're now? Sure.
|
| To LLMs in general, or generative AI in general?
| _Eventually_ , in some distant future, yes.
|
| Sure, progress can't ride the exponent forever - observable
| universe is finite, as far as we can tell right now, we're
| fundamentally limited by the size of our light cone. And
| while in any field narrow enough, progress too follows an
| S-curve, new discoveries spin off new avenues with their
| own S-curves. If you zoom out a little those S-curves
| neatly add up to an exponential function.
|
| So no, for the time being, I don't expect LLMs or
| generative AIs to slow down - there's plenty of tangential
| improvements that people are barely beginning to explore.
| There's more than enough to sustain exponential advancement
| for some time.
| btilly wrote:
| If the constraint is computation in a light cone, the
| theoretical bound is time cubed, not exponential. With a
| major decrease in scaling as we hit the bounds of our
| galaxy.
|
| Intergalactic travel is, of course, rather slow.
| cj wrote:
| I think the parent's main point is that even if LLMs
| sustain exponential advancement, that doesn't guarantee
| that humanity's advancement will mimic technology's
| growth curve.
|
| In other words, it's possible to have rapid technological
| advancement without significant improvement/benefit to
| society.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _In other words, it's possible to have rapid
| technological advancement without significant improvement
| /benefit to society._
|
| This is certainly true in many ways already.
|
| On the other hand, it's also complicated, because
| society/culture seems to be _downstream of_ technology;
| we might not be able to advance humanity in lock step or
| ahead of technology, simply because advancing humanity is
| a _consequence_ of advancing technology.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Information technology has grown exponentially since the
| first life form created a self-sustaining, growing loop.
|
| You can see evolution speeding up rapidly, the jumbled
| information inherent in chemical metabolisms evolved to
| centralize their information in DNA, and then as DNA
| evolved to componentize body plans.
|
| RATE: over billions of years.
|
| Nerves, nervous systems, brains, all exponentially drove
| individual information capabilities forward.
|
| RATE: over hundreds of millions, tens of millions,
| millions, 100s of thousands.
|
| Then the human brains enabled information to be
| externalized. Language allowed whole cultures to "think",
| and writing allowed cultures ability to share, and its
| ability to remember to explode.
|
| RATE: over tens of thousands, thousands.
|
| Then we developed writing. A massive improvement in
| recording and sharing of information. Progress sped up
| again.
|
| RATE: over hundreds of years.
|
| We learned to understand information itself, as math. We
| learned to print. We learned how to understand and use
| nature so much more effectively to progress, i.e. science,
| and science informed engineering.
|
| RATE: over decades
|
| Then the processing of information got externalized, in
| transistors, computers, the Internet, the web.
|
| RATE: every few years
|
| At every point, useful information accumulated and spread
| faster. And enabled both general technology and information
| technology to progress faster.
|
| Now we have primitive AI.
|
| We are in the process of finally externalizing the
| processing of all information. Getting to this point was
| easier than expected, even for people who were very
| knowledgable and positive about the field.
|
| RATE: every year, every few months
|
| We are rapidly approaching complete externalization of
| information processing. Into machines that can understand
| the purpose of their every line of code, every transistor,
| and the manufacturing and resource extraction processes
| supporting all that.
|
| And can redesign themselves, across all those levels.
|
| RATE: It will take logistical time for machine centric
| design to takeover from humans. For the economy to adapt.
| For the need for humans as intermediaries and cheap
| physical labor to fade. But progress will accelerate many
| more times this century. From years, to time scales much
| smaller.
|
| Because today we are seeing the first sparks of a Cambrian
| explosion of self-designed self-scalable intelligence.
|
| Will it eventually hit the top of an "S" curve? Will
| machines get so smart that getting smarter no longer helps
| them survive better, use our solar systems or the stars
| resources, create new materials, or advance and leverage
| science any further?
|
| Maybe? But if so, that would be an unprecedented end to
| life's run. To the acceleration of the information loop,
| from some self-reinforcing chemical metabolism, to the
| compounding progress of completely self-designed life, far
| smarter than us.
|
| But back to today's forecast: no, no the current advances
| in AI we are seeing are not going to slow down, they are
| going to speed up, and continue accelerating in timescales
| we can watch.
|
| First because humans have insatiable needs and desires, and
| every advance will raise the bar of our needs, and provide
| more money for more advancement. Then second, because their
| general capability advances will also accelerate their own
| advances. Just like every other information breakthrough
| that has happened before.
|
| Useful information is ultimately the currency of life.
| Selfish genes were just one embodiment of that. Their
| ability to contribute new innovations, on time scales that
| matter, has already been rendered obsolete.
| Retric wrote:
| > Grown exponentially since the first life form
|
| Not really. The total computing power available to
| humanity _per person_ has likely _gone down_ as we
| replaced "self driving" horses with cars.
|
| People created those curve by fitting definitions to the
| curve rather than data.
| Nevermark wrote:
| You can't disprove global warming by pointing out an
| extra cool evening.
|
| But I don't understand your point even as stated. Cars
| took over from horses as technology provided transport
| with greater efficiencies and higher capabilities than
| "horse technology".
|
| Subsequently transport technology continued improving.
| And continues, into new forms and scales.
|
| How do you see the alternative, where somehow horses were
| ... bred? ... to keep up?
| reaperman wrote:
| Cars do not strictly have higher capabilities than
| horses. GP was pointing out that horses can think. On a
| particularly well-trained horse, you could fall asleep on
| it and wake up back at your house. You can find viral
| videos of Amish people still doing this today.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Ah, good point. Then the global warming point applies,
| but in a much less trivial way.
|
| There is turbulence in any big directed change. Better
| overall new tech often creates inconveniences, performs
| less well, than some of the tech it replaces. Sometimes
| only initially, but sometimes for longer periods of time.
|
| A net gain, but we all remember simpler things whose
| reliability and convenience we miss.
|
| And some old tech retains lasting benefits in niche
| areas. Old school, inefficient and cheap light bulbs are
| ironically, not so inefficient when used where their heat
| is useful.
|
| And horses fit that pattern. They are still not obsolete
| in many ways, tied to their intelligence. As companions.
| As still working and inspiring creatures.
|
| --
|
| I suspect the history of evolution is filled with
| creatures getting that got wiped out by new waves, that
| were more generally advanced, but less advanced in a few
| ways.
|
| And we have a small percentage of remarkable ancient
| creatures still living today, seemingly little changed.
| Retric wrote:
| The issue is more than just a local cold snap. When the
| fundamental graph you're basing a theory on is wrong it's
| worth rejecting the theory.
|
| The total computing power of life on earth the fact it's
| fallen over the last 1,000 years. Ants alone represent
| something like 50x the computing power of all humans and
| all computers on the planet and we've reduced the number
| of insects on earth more than we've added humans or
| computing power.
|
| The same is true through a great number of much longer
| events. Periods of ice ages and even larger scale events
| aren't just an afternoon even across geological
| timescales.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Cars do not strictly have higher capabilities than
| horses.
|
| Another way to see it: A Horse (or any animal) is a
| _goddamn nanobot-swarm with a functioning hivemind_ that
| is literally beyond human science in many important ways.
| Unlike a horse:
|
| * Your car (nor even half of them) does not possess a
| manufacturing bay capable of creating additional cars.
|
| * Your car does not have a robust self-repair system.
|
| * Your car does not detect strain its structure and then
| rebuild stronger.
|
| * Your car does not synthesize its fuel from a wide
| variety of potential local resources.
|
| * Your car does not defend itself by hacking and counter-
| hacking attacks other nanobots, or even just by rust.
|
| * Your car does not manufacture and deploy its own
| lubricants, cooling fluid, or ground-surface grip/padding
| material.
|
| * Your car is not designed to survive intermittent
| immersion in water.
| agumonkey wrote:
| human existence doesn't really scale exponentially,
| that's my take on this
| Nevermark wrote:
| Our best bets are the following I think:
|
| First, and above all, Ethics. Ethics of humans, matters
| more than anything. We need to straighten out the ethics
| of the technology industry. That sounds formidable, but
| business models based on extraction, or externalizing
| damage, are creating a species of "corporate life forms"
| and ethically challenged oligarchs that are already
| driving the first wave of damage coming out of AI
| advancement.
|
| If we don't straighten ourselves out, it will get much
| worse.
|
| Superintelligence isn't going to be unethical in the end,
| because ethics are just the rational (our biggest
| weakness) big-picture long-term (we get weak there too)
| positive sum games individuals create that benefit all
| individuals abilities to survive, and thrive. With the
| benefits for all compounding. In economic/math terms, it
| is what is called a "great attractor". The only and
| inevitable stable outcome. The only question is, does
| that start with us in partnership, or do they establish
| that sanity after our dysfunctions have caused us all a
| lot of wasted time.
|
| The second, is that those of us that want to, need to be
| able to keep integrating technology into our lives. I
| mean that literally. From mobile, right into our biology.
| At some point direct connections, to fully owned, fully
| private, fully personalizable, full tech mental
| augmentation. Free from surveillance, gatekeepers,
| surveillance and coercion.
|
| That is a very narrow but very real path from human, to
| exponential humans, to post-human. Perhaps preserving
| conscious continuity.
|
| If after a couple decades of being a hybrid, I realize
| that all my biologically stored memories are redundant,
| and that 99.99% of my processing is now running on
| photonics (or whatever) anyway, I am likely to have no
| more problem jettisoning the brain that originally gave
| me consciousness, as I do every day, jettisoning the
| atoms and chemistry that constantly flow through me, only
| a temporarily part of my brain.
|
| The final word of hope, is that every generation gets
| replaced by the next. For some of us, viewing
| obsolescence by AI as no more traumatic, than getting
| replaced by a new generation of uncouth youth, helps. And
| that this transition is far more momentous and
| interesting, can provide some solace, or even joy.
|
| If we must be mortal, as all before us, what a special
| moment to be! To see!
| pdfernhout wrote:
| On the ethics point as a "best bet", consider also the
| importance of a sense of humor that recognizes irony. As
| I wrote in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-
| irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental
| mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century
| security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using
| those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly
| from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy.
| Given the power of 21st century technology as an
| amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a
| scarcity-based approach to using such technology
| ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful
| technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used
| from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us
| all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues,
| propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as
| Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such
| technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure
| for all. ... The big problem is that all these new war
| machines [and competitive companies] and the surrounding
| infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance.
| The irony is that these tools of abundance are being
| wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over
| scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset
| driving the military [and economic] uses the technologies
| of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a
| tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated
| by the mainstream."
| jancsika wrote:
| > We stand now at the edge of a new epoch, reading now being
| replaced by AI retrieval.
|
| Utilizing a lively oral trad. _at the same time as_ written
| is superior to relying on either alone. And it 's the same
| with our current AI tools. Using them as a substitute for
| developing oral/written skills is a major step back.
| Especially right now when those AI tools aren't very refined.
|
| Nearly every college student I've talked to in the past year
| is using chatgpt as a substitute for oral/written work where
| possible. And worse, as a substitute for oral/written skills
| that they have still not developed.
|
| Latency: maybe a year or two for the first batch of college
| grads who chatgpt'd their way through most of their classes,
| another four for med school/law school. It's going to be a
| slow-motion version of that video-game period in the 80s
| after pitfall when the market was flooded with cheap crap.
| Except that instead of unlicensed Atari cartridges, it's
| professionals.
| bradarner wrote:
| Writing seems to have worked out pretty well.
| Oarch wrote:
| ...so far!
| satisfice wrote:
| That's partly because writing enables time-binding
| (improvement across the lifetimes of men). Writing does not
| wither thinking, as such, although it may hurt our memory.
| ge96 wrote:
| random thought if in the future children are born with a
| brain computer and inherit their family's data that would be
| interesting
| cognaitiv wrote:
| SOCRATES: Do you know how you can speak or act about rhetoric
| in a manner which will be acceptable to God? PHAEDRUS: No,
| indeed. Do you? SOCRATES: I have heard a tradition of the
| ancients, whether true or not they only know; although if we
| had found the truth ourselves, do you think that we should
| care much about the opinions of men? PHAEDRUS: Your question
| needs no answer; but I wish that you would tell me what you
| say that you have heard. SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of
| Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth;
| the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he
| was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and
| calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice,
| but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those
| days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of
| Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which
| the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is
| called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his
| inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be
| allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and
| Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of
| them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of
| them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus
| said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But
| when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the
| Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a
| specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied:
| O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is
| not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his
| own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance,
| you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of
| your own children have been led to attribute to them a
| quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours
| will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because
| they will not use their memories; they will trust to the
| external written characters and not remember of themselves.
| The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to
| memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not
| truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers
| of many things and will have learned nothing; they will
| appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they
| will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without
| the reality.
| cognaitiv wrote:
| "The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but
| nowadays the illiterates can read and write." Alberto
| Moravia, London Observer, 14 Oct. 1979
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It's a pretty interesting point.
|
| If a large fraction of the population can't even hold
| five complex ideas in their head simultaneously, without
| confusing them after a few seconds, are they literate in
| the sense of e.g. reading Plato?
| wolfram74 wrote:
| What makes an "idea" atomic/discrete/cardinal? What makes
| an idea "complex" vs simple or merely true? Over what
| finite duration of time does it count as "simultaneously"
| being held?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Whatever you want them to be?
|
| I don't care about enforcing any specific interpretation
| on passing readers...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I hope they're literate to understand we're only reading
| about that alleged exchange because Plato wrote it down.
|
| Median literacy in the US is famously somewhere around
| the 6th grade level, so it's unlikely most of the
| population is much troubled by the thoughts of Plato.
| empath75 wrote:
| Just keep in mind that Plato and (especially) Socrates made
| a living by going against commonly held wisdom at the time,
| so this probably wasn't an especially widely held belief in
| ancient greece.
| aylmao wrote:
| > In the deep past, they maintained an oral tradition, and
| scholars were expected to memorize everything. They saw
| writing/reading as a crutch that was ruining the youth's
| memory.
|
| Could you share a source for this? The research paper I found
| has a different hypothesis; it links the slow transition to
| writing to trust, not an "old-school's attitude towards
| writing". Specifically the idea that the institutional trust
| relationships one formed with students, for example, would
| ensure the integrity of one's work. It then concludes that
| "the final transition to written communications was completed
| only after the creation of institutional forms of ensuring
| trust in written communications, in the form of archives and
| libraries".
|
| So essentially, anyone could write something and call it
| Plato's work. Or take a written copy of Plato's work and
| claim they wrote it. Oral tradition ensured only your
| students knew your work; and you trusted them to not
| misattribute it. Once libraries and archives came to exist
| though, they could act as a trustworthy source of truth where
| one could confirm wether some work was actually Plato or not,
| and so scholars got more comfortable writing.
|
| [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331255474_The_At
| tit...
| wahern wrote:
| I don't think these hypotheses are in tension. The notion
| that some scholars, like Plato, distrusted writing based on
| epistemological theories--the nature of truth and knowing--
| is well attested. The paper you linked is a sociological
| description that seeks to better explain the evolution of
| the institutionalization of writing. Why people behave a
| certain way, and why they _think_ they behave that way
| (i.e. their rationalizations), are only loosely related,
| and often at complete odds.
| LanceH wrote:
| Gen x here. There are couple things I've been on both sides
| of.
|
| Card catalogs in the library. It was really important focus
| on what was being searched. Then there was the familiarity
| with a particular library and what they might or might not
| have. Looking around at adjacent books that might spawn
| further ideas. The indexing now is much more thorough and way
| better, but I see younger peers get less out of the new
| search than they could.
|
| GPS vs reading a map. I keep my GPS oriented north which
| gives me a good sense of which way the streets are headed at
| any one time, and a general sense of where I am in the city.
| A lot of people just drive where they are told to go.
| Firefighters (and pizza delivery) still learn all the streets
| in their districts the old school way.
|
| Some crutches are real. I've yet to meet someone who opted
| for a calculator instead of putting in the work with math who
| ended up better at math. It might be great for getting
| through math, or getting math done, but it isn't better for
| learning math (except to plow through math already learned to
| get to the new stuff).
|
| So all three of these share the common element of "there is a
| better way now", but at the same time learning it the old way
| better prepares someone for when things don't go perfectly.
| Good math skills can tell you if you typoed on the
| calculator. Map knowledge will help with changes to traffic
| or street availability.
|
| We see students right now using AI to avoid writing at all.
| That's great that they're are learning a tool which can help
| their deficient writing. At the same time their writing will
| remain deficient. Can they tell the tone of the AI generated
| email they're sending their boss? Can they fix it?
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Writing has ruined our memories. It would be far better if we
| were forced to recite things (incidentally, in some
| educational system they're made to recite poetry to remedy
| this somewhat); not that I'm arguing against letters and the
| written word.
|
| And AI will make us lazier and reduce the amount of cognition
| we do; not that I'm arguing against using AI.
|
| But the downsides must be made clear.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| There is an interesting contrast in the history of the
| Rabbinic Jewish oral tradition. In that academic environment,
| the act of memorizing the greatest amount of content was
| valorized. The super-memorizers, however, were a rung below
| those who could apply those memorized aphorisms to a
| different context and generate a new interpretation or
| ruling. The latter relied on the former to have accurately
| memorized all the precedents, but got most of the credit,
| despite having a lower capacity for memorization.
|
| That's probably why the act of shifting from an oral to a
| written culture was deeply controversial and disruptive, but
| also somewhat natural. Though the texts we have are written
| and so they probably make the transition seem more smooth
| than it was really was. I don't know enough to speak to that.
| fny wrote:
| We've had AI retrieval for two decades--this is the first
| time you can outsource your intelligence to a program. In the
| 2000-2010s, the debates was "why memorize when you can just
| search and synthesize." The debate is now "why even think?"
| (!)
|
| I think its obvious why it would be bad for people to stop
| thinking.
|
| 1. We need people to be able to interact with AI. What good
| is it if an AI develops some new cure but no one understands
| or knows how to implement it?
|
| 2. We need people to scrutinize an AI's actions.
|
| 3. We need thinking people to help us achieve further
| advances in AI too.
|
| 4. There are a lot of subjective ideas for which there are no
| canned answers. People need to think through these for
| themselves.
|
| 5. Also world of hollowed-out humans who can't muster the
| effort to write a letters to their own kids terrifies me[0]
|
| I could think of more, but you could also easily ask ChatGPT.
|
| [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/08/02/goo
| gle-...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I'd argue that most humans are _terrible_ at thinking. It
| 's actually one of our weakest and most fragile abilities.
| We're only rational because our intelligence is collective,
| not individual. Writing and publishing distribute and
| distill individual thinking so good and useful ideas tend
| to linger and the noise is ignored.
|
| What's happening at the moment is an attack on that
| process, with a new anti-orthodoxy of "Get your ideas and
| beliefs from polluted, unreliable sources."
|
| One of those is the current version of AI. It's good at the
| structure of language without having a reliable sense of
| the underlying content.
|
| It's possible future versions of AI will overcome that. But
| at the moment it's like telling kids "Don't bother to learn
| arithmetic, you'll always have a calculator" when the
| calculator is actually a random number generator.
| 65 wrote:
| Perhaps we're going technologically backwards.
|
| Oral tradition compared to writing is clearly less accurate.
| Speakers can easily misremember details.
|
| Going from writing/documentation/primary sources to AI to be
| seems like going back to oral tradition, where we must trust
| the "speaker" - in this case the AI, whether they're truthful
| with their interpretation of their sources.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Walter J. Ong's _Orality and Literacy_ is an illuminating
| read.
|
| One benefit of orality is that the speaker can defend or
| clarify their words, whereas once you've written something,
| your words are liable to be misinterpreted by readers
| without the benefit of your rebuttal.
|
| Consider too that courts (in the US at least) prefer oral
| arguments than written, perhaps we consider it more
| difficult to lie in person than in writing. PhD defenses
| are another holdover of tradition, to be able to
| demonstrate your competence and not receive your
| credentials merely from your written materials.
|
| AI, I disagree it's more like oral tradition, AI is not a
| speaker, it has no stake in defending its claims, I would
| call it hyperliterate, an emulation of everything that has
| been written.
| yapyap wrote:
| and honestly, reading and writing probably did make the
| youth's memory a few generations down weaker.
|
| If you are not expected to remember everything like the
| ancient Greek were, you are not training your memory as much
| and it will be worse than if you did.
|
| Now do I think it's fair to say AI is to what reading/writing
| as reading/writing was to memorizing? No, not at all. AI is
| nothing near as revolutionary and we are not even close to
| AGI.
|
| I don't think AGI will be made in our lifetime, what we've
| seen now is nowhere near AGI, it's parlor tricks to get
| investors drooling and spending money.
| alickz wrote:
| > If you need the answer to a question, and you can either get
| it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going
| to learn much more with the latter approach than the former.
|
| Why not force everyone to start from first principles then?
|
| I think learning is tied to curiosity and curiosity is not tied
| to difficulty of research
|
| i.e. give a curious person a direct answer and they will go on
| to ask more questions, give an incurious person a direct answer
| and they won't go on to ask more questions
|
| We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and that is a _good_
| thing, not bad
|
| Forcing us to forgo the giants and claw ourselves up to their
| height may have benefits, but in my eyes it is way less
| effective as a form of knowledge
|
| The compounding force of knowledge is awesome to behold, even
| if it can be scary
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yes exactly. I think the concern here is totally valid. But
| for me personally, having LLMs unblock me more quickly on
| each question I have has allowed me to ask more questions, to
| research more things in the same amount of time. Which is
| great!
| dragon96 wrote:
| One of the values of doing your own research is it forces you
| to speak the "language" of what you're trying to do.
|
| It's like the struggle that we've all had when learning our
| first programming language. If we weren't forced to wrestle
| with compilation errors, our brains wouldn't have adapted to
| the mindset that the computer will do whatever you tell it to
| do and only that.
|
| There's a place for LLMs in learning, and I feel like it
| satisfies the same niche as pre-synthesized Medium tutorials.
| It's no replacement for reading documentation or finding
| answers for yourself though.
| klodolph wrote:
| > They aren't considering the long term downside to this.
|
| This echoes sentiments from the 2010s centered around hiring.
| Companies generally don't want to hire junior engineers and
| train them--this is an investment with risks of no return for
| the company doing the training. Basically, you take your senior
| engineers away from projects so they can train the juniors, and
| then the juniors now have the skills and credentials to get a
| job elsewhere. Your company ends up in the hole, with a
| negative ROI for hiring the junior.
|
| Tragedy of the commons. Same thing to day, different mechanism.
| Are we going to end up with a shortage of skilled software
| engineers? Maybe. IMO, the industry is so incredibly wasteful
| in how engineers are allocated and what problems they are told
| to work on that it can probably deal with shortages for a long
| time, but that's a separate discussion.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Engineers partly did this to themselves. The career advice
| during that time period was to change jobs every few years,
| demanding higher and higher salaries. So now, employers don't
| want to pay to train entry-level people, as they know they
| are likely going to leave, and at the salaries demanded they
| don't want to hire junior folks.
| TeamDman wrote:
| If incentives to stay outweighed leaving, people would
| stay.
| Daishiman wrote:
| This is only because companies don't want to raise salaries
| as engineers' skill levels increase. If companies put
| junior employees in higher salary bands as their skill
| levels increase there wouldn't be a problem.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Capitalism and fiduciary duty prevents employers from
| paying people their market value when they are content
| enough to stay.
|
| An employee who does not do the effort to re-peg their
| labor time to market rates for their skill level is
| implicitly consenting to a prior agreement (when they
| were hired).
| klodolph wrote:
| Funny how fiduciary duty in these contexts is
| overwhelmingly short-sighted.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Sometimes because the company investors are
| overwhelmingly short-sighted, which IMO ties back to the
| whole "financialization" of our economy into a quasi-
| casino.
| Daishiman wrote:
| That is an extremely short-sighted view on what is
| essentially an iterated game where the domain knowledge
| employees have drastically increases their value to the
| company over time.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes that's why I said "partly."
|
| When I started work (this was in the pre-consumer-
| internet era), job hopping was already starting to be a
| thing but there was defintely still a large "old school"
| view that there should be some loyalty between employer
| and employee. One of my first jobs was a place where they
| hired for potential. They hired smart, personable people
| and taught them how to program. They paid them fairly
| well, and gave annual raises and bonuses. I was there for
| about 8 years, my salary more than doubled in that time.
| Maybe I could have made more elsewhere, I didn't even
| really look because it was a good environment, nice
| people, low stress, a good mix of people since not
| everyone (actually only a few) were Comp. Sci. majors.
|
| I don't know how much that still happens, because why
| would a company today invest in that only to have the
| employee leave after two years for a higher salary. "They
| should just pay them more" well yeah, but they _did_ pay
| them in the sense of teaching them a valuable skill. And
| their competitors for employees started to include VC
| funded startups playing with free money that didn 't
| really care what it cost to get bodies into the shop.
| Hard to compete with that when you actually have to earn
| the money that goes into the salary budget.
|
| Would the old school approach work today? Would employees
| stay?
| klodolph wrote:
| Cheap money seems to have dried up, so maybe more old-
| school approaches wouldn't get sniped by VC-funded
| startups.
| klodolph wrote:
| "Engineers did this to themselves..."
|
| Long, long ago, the compact was that employees worked hard
| for a company for a long time, and were rewarded with
| pensions and opportunities for career advancement. If you
| take away the pensions and take away the opportunities for
| career advancement, your employees will advance their
| careers by switching companies--and the reason that this
| works so well is because all of the _other_ companies would
| rather pay more to hire a senior engineer rather than take
| a risk on a junior.
|
| It's a systemic problem and not something that you can
| blame on employees. Not without skipping over a long list
| of other contributing factors, at least.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I think you've got cause and effect backwards. Employers
| used to offer incentives to stay in a company and grow
| organically. They decided that was no longer going to be
| the deal. So they got the current system. There was never
| some sudden eureka moment when the secret engineers club
| decided they wanted to have a super stressful life event
| every few years just to keep up with inflation.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| As I said in another response, I think (at least partly)
| a contributing factor was the essentially limitless
| salary budget that VC funded startups and the FAANG
| companies had. You had software developers who could
| suddenly make more than doctors and lawyers and of course
| many of them sensibly acted in their own best interest
| but that left other employers saying "we're not going to
| invest in employees who are only going to turn around and
| leave for salaries we can't pay" and "if we have to pay
| those kind of salaries, we're not going to hire junior
| people we want experience."
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Or the company could recognize the dangers of salary
| compression and inversion and pay developers at market
| rates
| Salgat wrote:
| This is merely the result of the incentive structure of
| corporations, which make it far more lucrative to switch
| jobs rather than stay at one company.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I don't know if I agree here. When I ask an LLM a question it
| always leads to a whole lot of other questions with responses
| tailored to my current level of understanding. This usually
| results in a much more effective learning session than reading
| a bunch of material that I might not retain anyway because I'm
| scanning it looking for my answers.
| cma wrote:
| Also challenging aspects of their explanations to get at
| something better is good for developing critical thinking.
| awongh wrote:
| *but most people will not do that*
|
| LLMs will definitely be a technology that widens the knowledge
| gap at the same time that it improves access to knowledge. Just
| like the internet.
|
| 30 years ago people dreamed about how smart everyone would be
| with humanity's knowledge instantly accessible. We've had
| wikipedia for a while, but what's the take-up rate of this
| infinite amount of information? Most people prefer to scroll
| rage-bait videos on their phones (content that doesn't give
| them knowledge or even make them feel better, just that makes
| them angry)
|
| Of course it's amazing to hear every once in a while the guy
| who maintains a vim plugin by coding on his phone in
| Pakistan.... or whatever other thing that is enabled by the
| internet by people who suddenly have access to this stuff.
| That's not an effect of all humans on average, it's an effect
| on a few people who finally have a chance to take advantage of
| these tools.
|
| I heard in a YouTube interview a physicist saying that LLMs are
| helping physics research just because any physicist out there
| can now ask graduate-level questions about currently published
| papers, that is, have access to knowledge that would have been
| hard to come by before, sharing knowledge across sub-domains of
| physics by asking ChatGPT.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Anecdotal, but I for one despise the youtube/instagram etc.
| rabbidholes. When I'm in the mood for a good one I scroll
| wikipedia. I had the best random conversations about what I
| read there and it feels like I remember this forever
| atlintots wrote:
| Pakistan mentioned! Let's go!!
| colechristensen wrote:
| >you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the
| answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter
|
| A LOT of the time the things I ask LLMs for are to avoid
| metaphorically wading through a garbage dump looking for a
| specific treasure. Filtering through irrelevant data and
| nonsense to find what I'm looking for is not personal
| development. What the LLM gives back is often a very much
| better jumping off point for looking through traditional
| sources for information.
| strix_varius wrote:
| Often when I ask LLM things about topics I was once
| reasonably expert in, but have spent a few months or years
| away from, its answers provide garbage as if it were
| treasure.
| taeric wrote:
| I had thought I saw somewhere that learning is specifically
| better when you are wrong, if the feedback for that is rapid
| enough. That is, "guess and check" is the quickest path to
| learning.
|
| Specifically, asking a question and getting an answer is not a
| general path to learning. Being asked a question and you
| answering it is. Somewhat, this is regardless of if you are
| correct or not.
| matsemann wrote:
| I hated when doing math homework and they didn't give me the
| answer sheet. If I could do an integral and verify if it's
| correct or not, I could either quickly learn from my mistake,
| or keep doing integrals with added confidence. Which is how I
| learned the best. Gatekeeping it because someone might use
| the answers wrong felt weird, you still had to show your
| work.
| taeric wrote:
| Yeah. I also felt it largely went at odds with the entire
| concept of flashcards. Which... are among the most
| effective tools that I did not take advantage of in grade
| school.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Sure, if I spend one hour researching a problem vs asking AI in
| 10 seconds, yes I will almost always learn more in the one
| hour. But if I spend an hour asking AI questions on the same
| subject I believe I can learn way more than by reading for one
| hour. I think the analogy could be comparing a lecture to a
| one-on-one tutoring session. Education needs to evolve to keep
| up with the tools that students have at their disposal.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I think you put your finger on it with the mention of
| discipline. I find AI tools quite useful for giving me a quick
| outline of things I want to play with or get up to speed on
| fast, but not necessarily get too invested in. But if you fin
| yourself so excited by a particular result that it sets your
| imagination whirling, it might be time to switch out of
| generative mode and use the AI as a tutor to deepen your actual
| understanding, ideally in combination with books or other
| static learning resources.
| ankit219 wrote:
| There are two aspects to this from my pov. And I think it might
| be controversial.
|
| When i have a question about any topic, and I ask Chatgpt, i
| usually chat about more things, coming up with questions based on
| the answer, and mostly stupid questions. I feel like I am taking
| in the information, analyzing, and then diving deeper because I
| am curious. This is based on how I learn about stuff. I know i
| need to check a few things, and that it's not fully accurate, but
| the conversation flows in a direction I like.
|
| compared this to researching on the internet, there are some good
| aspects, but more often than not, I end up reading an opinionated
| post by someone (no matter the topic, if you go deep enough, you
| will land on an opinionated factual telling). That feels like
| someone decided what questions are important, what angles we need
| to look at, and what the conclusion should be. Yes, it is
| educational, but I am always left with lingering questions.
|
| The difference is curiosity. If people are curious about a topic,
| they will learn. If not, they are happy with the answer. And that
| is not laziness. You cannot be curious about everything.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Like an indefatigable, kindly professor.
| regentbowerbird wrote:
| > compared this to researching on the internet, there are some
| good aspects, but more often than not, I end up reading an
| opinionated post by someone (no matter the topic, if you go
| deep enough, you will land on an opinionated factual telling).
|
| ChatGPT is in fact opinionated, it has numerous political
| positions ("biases") and holds some subjects taboo. The
| difference is that a single actor chooses the political
| opinions of the model that goes on to interact with many more
| people than a single opinion piece might.
| immibis wrote:
| An example (over 1 year old): https://www.reddit.com/r/LateSt
| ageCapitalism/comments/17dmev...
| ankit219 wrote:
| Yes that is true. Though that can be subsumed if you notice
| it, and ask the model to ignore those biases. (an extreme
| example would be opposition prep for a debate). I am not
| interested in politics and other related issues anyway.
| lazybreather wrote:
| Political searches I assume would be very very minor
| percentage of real learning. Even in such cases, I would
| rather rely on a good LLMs response than scrounging websites
| of mainstream media or blogs etc. For an objective response,
| reading through opinionated articles and forming my opinion
| is an absolute waste of time. I'd want the truth as
| accurately as possible. Plus people don't generally change
| political opinions based what they read. They read stuff
| aligning with their side.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _For an objective response, reading through opinionated
| articles and forming my opinion is an absolute waste of
| time_
|
| If the sources are all opinionated articles, per GP, that's
| what the LLM is going to base its "objective response" on.
| That's literally all it has as sensory input.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Fine. But it would never occur to me to try to form political
| opinions using chatgpt.
| snapcaster wrote:
| I don't think that's modeling the risk correctly. In my
| mind the risk is that ChatGPT's creators are able to
| influence your political opinions _without_ you seeking
| that out
| sanderjd wrote:
| I honestly don't see how. I haven't ever asked a question
| that implicates politics. This is just not what I use it
| for.
|
| I understand the concern about this risk in general. I'm
| just making a personal observation that this isn't how I
| use these tools.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I really think the ability to ask questions entirely free from
| all judgment is an under-emphasized aspect of the power of
| these tools. Yes, some people are intellectually secure enough
| to ask the "dumb" questions of other humans, but most people
| are not, especially to an audience of strangers. I don't think
| I ever once asked a question on Stack Overflow, because it was
| easy to see how the question I worried might be dumb might be
| treated by the community there. But I ask all sorts of dumb
| questions of these models, with nary a concern about being
| judged. I love that aspect of it.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| The tool is absolutely biased, what makes you think it
| wouldn't be?
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| This guy is obviously unfamiliar with Tay lol.
| sanderjd wrote:
| My comment doesn't say anything about bias...
| henriquemaia wrote:
| That's a subtle, yet important point. Putting themselves out
| there is not easy for some. LLMs can take that pressure away.
|
| The 'but' in that lies with how much freedom is given to the
| LLM. If constrained, its refusal to answer may become a
| somewhat triggering possibility.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| A preprint is available on arxiv [0], see the top of page 18 for
| what metacognitive laziness is:
|
| "In the context of human-AI interaction, we define metacognitive
| laziness as learners' dependence on AI assistance, offloading
| metacognitive load, and less effectively associating responsible
| metacognitive processes with learning tasks."
|
| And they seem to define, implicitly, "metacognitive load" as the
| cognitive and metacognitive effort required for learners to
| regulate their learning processes effectively, particularly when
| engaging in tasks that demand active self-monitoring, planning,
| and evaluation.
|
| The analogize metacognitive laziness to cognitive offloading,
| where we have our tools do the difficult congnitive tasks for us,
| which robs us of opportunities to develop and ultimately
| dependent on those tools.
|
| [0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09315
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > In the context of human-AI interaction, we define
| metacognitive laziness as learners' dependence on AI
| assistance, offloading metacognitive load, and less effectively
| associating responsible metacognitive processes with learning
| tasks.
|
| This sounds like parents complaining when we use Google Maps
| instead of a folding map. Am I worse at reading a regular map?
| Possibly. Am I better off overall? Yes.
|
| Describing it as "laziness" is reductive. "Dependence on
| [_____] assistance" is _the point of all technology_.
| amrocha wrote:
| When you're using a map you're still navigating, even if
| you're just following directions. The act of navigating
| teaches you spatial awareness regardless of how you got
| there.
|
| AI doesn't provide directions, it navigates for you. You're
| actively getting stupider every time you take an LLMs answer
| for granted, and this paper demonstrates that people are
| likely to take answers for granted.
| diggan wrote:
| > AI doesn't provide directions, it navigates for you.
|
| LLMs (try to) give you what you're asking for. If you ask
| for directions, you'll get something that resembles that,
| if you ask it to 100% navigate, that's what you get.
|
| > and this paper demonstrates that people are likely to
| take answers for granted.
|
| Could you point out where exactly this is demonstrated in
| this paper? As far as I can tell from the study, people who
| used ChatGPT for the studying did better than the ones that
| didn't, with no different in knowledge retention.
| amrocha wrote:
| Page 18 first paragraph, it talks about how ChatGPT users
| engaged less with the editing process compared to other
| methods. Sorry, copy and paste isn't working for some
| reason.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > Could you point out where exactly this is demonstrated
| in this paper? As far as I can tell from the study,
| people who used ChatGPT for the studying did better than
| the ones that didn't, with no different in knowledge
| retention.
|
| This is what I observed as well. For the "metacognitive
| laziness" bit they had to point to other studies.
| danielbln wrote:
| If I use Google Maps I ain't navigating. I follow the
| instructions until I arrive.
| aylmao wrote:
| > "Dependence on [_____] assistance" is the point of all
| technology.
|
| I will note two things though.
|
| 1. Not all technology creates "dependence". Google Maps
| removes the need of carrying bulky maps, or buy new ones to
| stay updated, but someone who knows how to read Google Maps
| will know how to read a normal map, even if they're not as
| quick at it.
|
| 2. The best technology isn't defined by the "dependence" it
| creates, or even the level of "assistance" it provides, but
| for what it enables. Fire enabled us to cook. Metalworking
| enabled us to create a wealth of items, tools and structures
| that wouldn't exist if we only had wood and stone. Concrete
| enabled us to build taller and safer. Etc.
|
| It's still unclear what AI chatbots are enabling. Are LLM's
| big claim to fame allowing people to answer problem sets and
| emails with minimal effort? What does this unlock? There's a
| lot of talk about allowing better data analysis, saving time,
| and vague claims of an ai revolution, but until we see X, Y
| and Z, and can confidently say "yeah, X, Y and Z are great
| for mankind, and they couldn't have happened without
| chatbots", it's fair for people to keep complaining about the
| change and downsides AI chatbots are bringing about.
| enjoyitasus wrote:
| I think this holds water.
|
| Metacognition is really how the best of the best can continue to
| be at their best.
|
| And if you don't use it, you lose it.
|
| https://x.com/redshirtet/status/1879922330983358941
| ziddoap wrote:
| I'm certainly of two minds on this.
|
| On one hand, this reminds me of how all of the kids were going to
| be completely helpless in the real world because "no one carries
| a calculator in their pocket". Then calculators became something
| ~everyone has in their pocket (and the kids ended up just fine).
|
| On the other hand, I believe in the value of "learning to learn",
| developing media literacy, and all of the other positives gained
| when you research and form conclusions on things independently.
|
| The answer is probably somewhere in the middle: leveraging LLMs
| as a learning aid, rather than LLMs being the final stop.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| tl;dr: I agree.
|
| We don't teach slide rules and log tables in school anymore.
| Calculators and computers have created a huge metacognitive
| laziness for me, and I teach calculus and have a PhD in
| statistics. I barely remember the unit circle except for
| multiples of pi/4 radians. I can do it in multiples of pi/6 but
| I'm slower.
|
| But guess what? I don't think I'm a worse mathematician because
| I don't remember these things reflexively. I might be a little
| slower getting the answer to a trivial problem, but I can still
| find a solution to a complex problem. I look up integral forms
| in my pocket book of integrals or on Wolfram Alpha, because
| even if I could derive the answer myself I don't think I'd be
| right 100% of the time. So metacognitive laziness has set in
| for me already.
|
| But I think as long as we can figure out how to stop
| metacognitive laziness before it turns into full-fledged brain-
| rot, then we'll be okay. We'll survive as long as we can still
| teach students how to think critically, and figure out how to
| let AI assist us rather than turn us into the humans on the
| ship from Wall-E. I'm a little worried that we'll make some
| short term mistakes (like not adapting our cirriculum fast
| enough), but it will work out.
| mlyle wrote:
| I am not sure calculators have hurt us much on the high end
| of mathematical ability.
|
| But man I cringe when I see 18 year old students reach for a
| calculator to multiply something by .1.
| largbae wrote:
| I think you're right at the edge of explaining why this
| "laziness" is a good thing. Everything that we have made is
| built on what we had before, and abstracts away what we had
| before. 99% of us don't remember how to make even the
| simplest Assembly program, and yet we unleash billions of
| instructions per second on the world.
|
| Even outside of math and computers, when was the last time
| you primed a well pump or filled an oil lamp? All of these
| tasks have been abstracted away, freeing us to focus on ever-
| more-specialized pursuits. Those that are useful will too be
| abstracted away, and for the better.
| nottorp wrote:
| > when was the last time you primed a well pump or filled
| an oil lamp? All of these tasks have been abstracted away
|
| They have not been abstracted away, they have been made
| obsolete. Significant difference.
|
| The danger with LLMs is people will never learn tasks that
| are still needed.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| Your comment exposes how much metacognitive laziness you
| have in modern society that you didn't realize that
| people still do these things, just not you. They aren't
| obsolete tasks, just done at a layer you don't see.
|
| I don't have to prime a well pump any more because my
| house and workplace are hooked into the municipal water
| system. I don't have to prime a pump because that task
| has gotten so abstract as to become turning a faucet
| handle. But engineers at the municipal water plant do
| have to know how to do this task.
|
| Similarly, filling an oil lamp and lighting it is now
| abstracted for normal people as flipping a light switch
| (maybe changing a light bulb is a more appropriate
| comparison). But I actually have filled an oil lamp when
| I was a kid because we kept "decorative" hurricane lamps
| in my house that we used when the power went out. The
| exact task of filling an oil lamp is not common, but
| filling a generator with fuel is still needed to keep the
| lights on in an emergency, although it is usually handled
| by the maintenance staff of apartment buildings and large
| office buildings.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > On the other hand, I believe in the value of "learning to
| learn", developing media literacy, and all of the other
| positives gained when you research and form conclusions on
| things independently.
|
| That is not going away. Learning better prompts, learning when
| to ignore AI, learning how to take information and _turn it
| into something practical_. These new skills will replace the
| old.
|
| How many of us can still...
|
| - Saddle a horse
|
| - Tell time without a watch
|
| - Sew a shirt
|
| - Create fabric to sew a shirt
|
| - Hunt with primitive tools
|
| - Make fire
|
| We can shelter children from AI, or we can teach them how to
| use it to further themselves. Talk to the Amish if you want to
| see how it works out when you forgo anything that _feels_ too
| futuristic. A respectable life, sure. But would any of us
| reading this choose it?
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _How many of us can still... <stuff>_
|
| Yes, this is what I meant by the calculator part of my
| comment. You've got some other good examples.
|
| > _learning when to ignore AI, learning how to take
| information and turn it into something practical._
|
| This is what I meant by using LLMs as a tool rather than an
| end.
| skydhash wrote:
| How many of us still have to do these things? You either
| eed to do them or you don't. If you do, you will learn how
| or find someone that do.
|
| We still need to calculate numbers and I can say it's silly
| if I find someone need to get a calculator to do 5x20. Same
| if you're taking hours and multiple sheets of paper for
| something that will take you a few minutes with a
| calculator. There's a question of scale and basic
| understanding that divides the two.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _How many of us still have to do these things?_
|
| Yep, we agree. That's the whole point of what I said in
| the first half of my original comment.
|
| At one time, they were common skills. Things changed,
| they aren't common, they aren't really needed (for most
| people), and everyone is doing just fine without them.
| We've freed up time and mental capacity for other
| (hopefully more beneficial) tasks.
|
| (I'm confused why this reply and the other above it are
| are just restating the first part of my original comment,
| but framing it like it's not a restatement).
| 65 wrote:
| It's astounding to me that people just like... always trust
| whatever the LLM says.
|
| I have some friends who use ChatGPT for everything. From doing
| work to asking simple questions. One of my friends wanted a bio
| on a certain musician and asked ChatGPT. It's a little
| frightening he couldn't, you know, read the Wikipedia page of
| this musician, where all of the same information is and there
| are sources for this material.
|
| My mom said she used ChatGPT to make a "capsule wardrobe" for
| her. I'm thinking to myself (I did not say this to her)... you
| can't just like look at your clothes and get rid of ones you
| don't wear? Why does a computer need to make this simple
| decision?
|
| I'm really not sure LLMs should ever be used as a learning aid.
| I have never seen a reason to use them over, you know,
| searching something online. Or thinking of your own creative
| story. If someone can make a solid use case as to why LLMs are
| useful I would like to hear.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Regarding your mom's clothes: she wasn't asking the machine
| to give advice she couldn't think of on her own, she was
| seeking external validation and permission to purge and
| override the hoarder urge of her personality.
|
| This is like when CEOs hire outside consulting firms to do
| layoffs for them. Pinning the pain of loss on some scapegoat
| makes it more bearable.
| nottorp wrote:
| > One of my friends wanted a bio on a certain musician and
| asked ChatGPT.
|
| I use ChatGPT (or Gemini) instead of web searches. You can
| blame the content and link farms that are top of the search
| results, and the search engines focusing on advertising
| instead of search, because we're the product.
|
| Why your friend doesn't know about wikipedia is another
| matter, if i wanted a generic info page about some topic i'd
| go directly there. But if i wanted to know if Bob Geldof's
| hair is blue, I might ask a LLM instead of reading the whole
| wikipedia page.
|
| I also ask LLMs for introductory info about programming
| topics i don't know about, because i don't want to go to
| google and end up on w3schools, geeksforgeeks and crap like
| that.
|
| I don't really trust LLMs for advanced programming topics,
| you know, what people pay me for. But they're fine for giving
| me a function signature or even a small example.
| 65 wrote:
| You can use source material instead of LLMs for all of
| this.
|
| "Is Bob Geldof's hair blue?" -> Search for Bob Geldof ->
| Look at images of Bob Geldof.
|
| Intro programming topics can be found at the documentation
| of the website. Your searching query might be "[programming
| topic] getting started" and usually if it's a package or a
| tool there will be documentation. If you want good
| documentation on web dev stuff that isn't w3schools or
| geeksforgeeks you can use MDN documentation.
|
| Or, if you really want a general overview there's probably
| a YouTube video about the topic.
|
| Additionally appending "reddit" to a search will give
| better results than SEO junk. There are always ways to find
| quality information via search engines.
| nottorp wrote:
| > "Is Bob Geldof's hair blue?" -> Search for Bob Geldof
| -> Look at images of Bob Geldof
|
| Assuming I get images of Bob Geldof. More likely the
| first page will be pinterest login-required results.
|
| > there's probably a YouTube video about the topic.
|
| Life's too short to watch talking heads about ... you
| know, WRITING code ...
|
| > can be found at the documentation of the website
|
| Seriously? Maybe for the top 500 npm packages. Not for
| the more obscure libraries that may have only some
| doxygen generated list of functions at best.
| 65 wrote:
| > Assuming I get images of Bob Geldof. More likely the
| first page will be pinterest login-required results.
|
| You do realize Google/Bing/DDG/Kagi all have an Images
| tab, right? Come on.
|
| > Life's too short to watch talking heads about ... you
| know, WRITING code ...
|
| If I want a high level overview of what the thing even
| is, a YouTube video can be useful since there will be
| explanations and visual examples. You can read
| documentation as well. For example, if I want a slower
| overview of something step by step, or a talk at a
| conference about why to use this thing, YouTube can be
| helpful. I was just looking at videos about HTMX this
| weekend, hearing presentations by the authors and some
| samples. That's not saying if I actually use the thing I
| won't be reading the documentation, it's more just useful
| for understand what the thing is.
|
| > Seriously? Maybe for the top 500 npm packages. Not for
| the more obscure libraries that may have only some
| doxygen generated list of functions at best.
|
| How do you expect your LLM to do any better? If you're
| using some obscure package there will probably be
| documentation in the GitHub README somewhere. If it's
| horrible documentation you can read the Typescript types
| or do a code search on GitHub for examples.
|
| This is all to say that I generally don't trust LLM
| output because I have better methods of finding the
| information LLMs are trained on. And no hallucinations.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I agree, at first I thought gpt would be used by tech savvy
| folk, but now it is clear that it's becoming a crutch. My
| friend couldn't respond to an email without it.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I was taught to not use calculators on exams and homework and
| that's why I am able to do math in my head today.
|
| I have recently seen GenZ perplexed by card games with addition
| and making change. For millennials, this is grade school stuff.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Sure, there's obviously a scale.
|
| I'm not about to divide 54,432 by 7.6, even though I was
| taught how to. I'll pull out my phone.
|
| On the other end, I'm not going to pull out my phone to
| figure out I owe you $0.35.
|
| I think the point I was trying to make still stands.
| robviren wrote:
| This technology is arguably as ubiquitous as a calculator. So
| long as I can understand that generative AI is a tool and not a
| solution is it bad to treat it like a bit of a calculator? Does
| this metacognitive laziness apply to those who depend on
| calculators?
|
| I understand it is a bit apples to oranges, but I'm curious
| peoples take.
| alternatex wrote:
| I am definitely lazier today in regards to doing math in my
| head compared to when I was young.
|
| I think a comparison with calculators is possible, but the
| degree to which calculators are capable of assisting us is so
| incomparably smaller that the comparison would be meaningless.
|
| Smart phones changed society a lot more than calculators did
| and now AI is starting to do the same, albeit in a more subtle
| manner.
|
| Treating AI like it's just a calulator seems naive/optimistic.
| We're still reeling from the smart phone revolution and have
| not solved many of the issues it brought upon its arrival.
|
| I have a feeling the world has become a bit cynical and less
| motivated to debate how to approach these major technological
| changes. It's been too many of them in too short of a time and
| now everyone has a whatever attitude towards the problems these
| adcancements introduce.
| teekert wrote:
| Idk, the "explain {X} to me like I'm 12" has certainly helped my
| delve into new topics, Nix with Flakes comes to mind as one of my
| latest ventures.
| charlie0 wrote:
| I mean this is the same exact thing that happened when
| calculators where invented. The amount of people who can count in
| their heads drastically dropped because why waste your time?
| Ditto for when maps app came out. No more need to memorize a
| bunch of locations because you can just use maps to take you
| there.
| hb-robo wrote:
| It's funny, the calculators were incredibly politicized when I
| was growing up (TI84 generation, so kids were getting caught
| programming functions to solve exam questions) but GPS was just
| taken as a given.
| floppiplopp wrote:
| I'm at this very moment testing deepseek-r1, a so called
| "reasoning" llm, on the excellent "rustlings" tutorial. It is
| well documented and its solutions are readily available online.
| It is my lazy go-to-testing for coding tasks to assess for me if
| and when I have to start looking for a new job and take up
| software engineering as a hobby. The reason I test with rustlings
| is to also assess the value as a learning tool for students and
| future colleagues. Maybe these things have use as a teacher?
| Also, the rust compiler is really good in offering advice, so
| there's an excellent baseline to compare the llm-output.
|
| And well, let me put it this way: deepseek-r1 won't be replacing
| anyone anytime soon. It generates a massive amount of texts,
| mostly nonsensical and almost always terribly, horribly wrong.
| But inexperienced devs or beginners, especially beginners, will
| be confused and will be led down the wrong path, potentially
| outsourcing rational thought to something that just sounds good,
| but actually isn't.
|
| Currently, over-reliance on the ramblings of a statistical model
| seems detrimental to education and ultimately the performance of
| future devs. As the probably last generation of old school
| software engineers, who were trained on coffee and tears of
| frustration, who had to really work code and architecture
| themselves, golden times might lie ahead, because someone will
| have to fix the garbage produced en masse by llms.
| diggan wrote:
| > And well, let me put it this way: deepseek-r1 won't be
| replacing anyone anytime soon. It generates a massive amount of
| texts, mostly nonsensical and almost always terribly, horribly
| wrong. But inexperienced devs or beginners, especially
| beginners, will be confused and will be led down the wrong
| path, potentially outsourcing rational thought to something
| that just sounds good, but actually isn't.
|
| Are you considering the full "reasoning" it does when you're
| saying this? AFAIK, they're meant to be "rambling" like that,
| exploring all sorts of avenues and paths before reaching a
| final conclusive answer that is still "ramble-like". I think
| the purpose seems to be to layer something on top that can
| finalize the answer, rather than just taking whatever you get
| from that and use it as-is.
|
| > Currently, over-reliance on the ramblings of a statistical
| model seems detrimental to education and ultimately the
| performance of future devs. As the probably last generation of
| old school software engineers, who were trained on coffee and
| tears of frustration, who had to really work code and
| architecture themselves, golden times might lie ahead, because
| someone will have to fix the garbage produced en masse by llms.
|
| I started coding just before Stack Overflow got popular, and
| remember the craze when it did get popular. Blogposts about how
| Stack Overflow will create lazy devs was all over the place,
| people saying it was the end of the real developer. Not arguing
| against you or anything, I just find it interesting how
| sentiments like these keeps repeating over time, just minor
| details that change.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| What did the researchers expect?
|
| Humans are lazy by nature, they seek shortcuts.
|
| So given the chance to go rote learning for years for an
| education which in most cases is simply a soon to be forgotten
| certification vs watching TikTok while letting ChatGPT do the
| lifting - this is all predictable, even without Behavioral
| Design, Hooked etc.
|
| And that usually the benefits rise with IQ level - nothing new
| here, that's the very definition of IQ.
|
| Learning and academia is hard, and even harder for those with
| lower IQ scores.
|
| A fool with a tool is still a fool and vice versa.
|
| Motivation seems also at an all time low. Why put in hours when a
| prompt can works wonders?
|
| Reading a book is a badge of honor nowadays more than ever.
| diggan wrote:
| > So given the chance to go rote learning for years for an
| education which in most cases is simply a soon to be forgotten
| certification vs watching TikTok while letting ChatGPT do the
| lifting - this is all predictable, even without Behavioral
| Design, Hooked etc.
|
| Would you argue that having books/written words also made
| people more lazy and be able to remember less? Because some
| people argued (at the time) that having written words would
| make humanity less intellectual as a whole, but I think
| consensus is that it led to the opposite.
| n4r9 wrote:
| > the benefits rise with IQ level - nothing new here, that's
| the very definition of IQ
|
| This is not obvious to me, and certainly is not the
| "definition" of IQ. There are tools that become less useful the
| more intelligent you are, such as multiplication tables. IQ is
| defined by a set of standardized tests that attempt to quantify
| human intelligence, and has some correlations with social,
| educational and professional performance, but it's not clear
| why it would help with use of AI tools.
| nottorp wrote:
| Funny, I passed the link to a whatsapp group with some friends
| and the preview loaded with the title "error: cookies turned
| off".
|
| I'm sure my friends will RUSH to read the article now...
| submeta wrote:
| My observation is that I learn more than ever using LLMs.
|
| I tend to learn asking questions, I did this using Anki cards for
| years (What is this or that?) and find the answer on the back of
| the index card. Questions activate my thinking more than
| anything, and of course my attempt at answering the question in
| my own terms.
|
| My motto is: Seek first to understand, then to be understood
| (Covey). And I do this in engaging with people or a topic---by
| asking questions.
|
| Now I do this with LLMs. I have been exploring ideas I would
| never have explored hadn't there been LLMs, because I would not
| have had the to research material for learning, read it, create
| material in a Q&A session for me.
|
| I even use LLMs to convert an article into Anki cards using
| Obsidian, Python, LLMs, and the Anki app.
|
| Crazy times we are in.
| boromi wrote:
| What does your workflow look like?
| submeta wrote:
| I use functions in openai and a template that forces the LLM
| to generate questions and answers from a text in a format
| that can be synced into the Anki app. Very straightforward
| workflow.
| boromi wrote:
| Very interesting, would love a more detailed tutorial on
| setting something similar up
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Yeah I've found the same. I might have some surface
| understanding of some topic and I like just asking "am I right
| in thinking this and this about this?" Or "Tell me why I'm
| wrong about this".
| david_allison wrote:
| > Questions activate my thinking more than anything, and of
| course my attempt at answering the question in my own terms.
|
| This is very well-studied:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect [not a high-
| quality article, but should give an overview]
| bradarner wrote:
| Any time an empirical research project has to add QUOTES around a
| common term, it sets off the non-sense radar:
|
| ..."laziness"...
|
| In the battle cry of the philosopher: DEFINE YOUR TERMS!!
|
| What they really mean: new and different. Outside-the-box. "Oh
| no, how will we grade this?!?" a threat to our definition and
| control of knowledge.
| vunderba wrote:
| I've been calling this out since OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT.
|
| The danger in ubiquitously available LLMs, which seemingly have
| an answer to any question, isn't necessarily their existence.
|
| The _real danger_ lies in their seductive nature - over how
| tempting it becomes to immediately reach for the nearest LLM to
| provide an answer rather than taking a few moments to quietly
| ponder the problem on your own. That act of manipulating the
| problem in your head--critical thinking--is ultimately a craft.
| And the only way to become better at it is by practicing it in a
| deliberate, disciplined fashion.
| motorest wrote:
| > The real danger lies in their seductive nature - over how
| tempting it becomes to immediately reach for the nearest LLM to
| provide an answer rather than taking a few moments to quietly
| ponder the problem on your own.
|
| I get the point you're trying to make. However, quietly
| pondering the problem is only fruitful if you have the right
| information. If you don't, best case scenario you risk wasting
| time reinventing the wheel for no good reason. In this
| application, a LLM is just the same type of tool as Google: a
| way to query and retrieve information cor you to ingest. Like
| Google, the info you get from queries is not the end but the
| means.
|
| As the saying goes, a month in the lab saves you a week in the
| library. I would say it can also save you 10 minutes with
| Claude/ChatGPT/Copilot.
|
| Is hiring a private tutor also laziness?
| abathur wrote:
| I'll stop short of asserting you don't, but I'm having a hard
| time convincing myself your reply does reflect that you get
| GP's point.
|
| If I were to reframe GP's point, it would be: having to
| figure out how to answer a question changes you a little.
| Over time, it changes you a lot.
|
| Yes, of course, there is a perspective from which a month
| spent in the lab to answer a question that's well-settled in
| the literature is ~wasted. But the GP is arguing for a
| utility function that optimizes for improving the questioner.
|
| Quietly pondering the problem with the wrong information can
| be fruitful in this context.
|
| (To be pragmatic, we need both of these. We'd get nowhere if
| we had to solve every problem and learn every lesson from
| first principles. But we'd also get nowhere if no one were
| well-prepared and motivated to solve novel problems without
| prior art.)
| Arainach wrote:
| >wasting time reinventing the wheel for no good reason
|
| Nearly all of learning relies on reinventing the wheel. Most
| personal projects involve reinventing wheels, but improving
| yourself by doing so.
| aylmao wrote:
| Very much this.
|
| Some of the most memorable moments I had in my learning
| were when I "reinvented" something. In high-school, our
| math teacher had us reinvent the derivative rules, and
| later had us derive Euler's identity through Taylor Series.
| They were big eureka moments. Going through all the work
| someone else did hundreds of years ago is very inspiring,
| and IMO gets you in the right mindset for discovery. I
| can't imagine where the joy of learning comes for someone
| who sees learning as a test --a question, an answer,
| nothing in between.
|
| In uni we built a CPU from scratch over the course of a few
| weeks. First building an small ALU, widening its bus,
| adding memory operations, etc. Beyond learning how things
| work, it makes you wonder how inventing this without a
| teacher to guide you must've been, and gives you an
| appreciation for it. It also makes you extrapolate and
| think about the things that haven't been invented or
| discovered yet.
|
| In theory LLMs could serve as a teacher guiding you as you
| reinvent things. In practice, people just get the answer
| and move on. A person with experience teaching, who sees
| how you're walking the path and compares it to how they
| walked theirs, will know when to give you an answer and
| when to have you find it yourself.
|
| One doesn't learn how to do lab-work in the library.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| I recognize this problem, but I find in my own uses of ChatGPT
| it actually allows me to overcome my laziness rather than
| making it worse.
|
| I'll have a problem that I want to work on but getting started
| is difficult. Asking ChatGPT is almost frictionless, the next
| thing I know I'm working on the project, 8 hours go by and I'm
| done. When I get stuck on some annoying library installation,
| ChatGPT solves if for me so I don't get frustrated. It allows
| me to enter and maintain flow states better than anything else.
|
| ChatGPT is a really good way of avoiding procrastination.
| sebmellen wrote:
| I've found the same. Claude outputs are usually not good
| enough for what I'm looking for but the conversation is
| enough to get me engaged and started on a project.
| mwpmaybe wrote:
| There's something magical about ChatGPT giving you a mostly-
| wrong answer.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| I think this is where my physical laziness benefits me. I'm
| often too lazy to spend the time to fully describe the problem
| to the LLMs and wrap it in a prompt that will produce
| something, in written text, so I think through it first.
| Usually I solve it myself or think of a better primary source.
| danielbln wrote:
| I'll say that there is value in the rubber duck process, and
| LLMs make wonderful rubber ducks.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| LLMs have taught me something that I sort of already knew from
| Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: the key to problem solving is
| asking the right question in the first place. It's not
| dangerous that answers can be retrieved quickly. Indeed, people
| had the same things to say about Google in the 90s or pocket
| calculators in the 70s. To me LLMs just speed up the process by
| which I would have manually searched the internet for in the
| first place. The only way to get good at critical thinking is
| to ask more questions.
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| Inevitably the advancement of knowledgeable information
| generation will have same mental effect as having a contact list
| on your phone. When I was a kid I knew at least 5 peoples phone
| numbers maybe more. Even now I can recall 2 of them. How many can
| you recall from your actual contact list?
| golly_ned wrote:
| I don't see how the "metacognitive laziness" (a term used by the
| abstract, but not defined) follows from what they describe in the
| abstract as the outcomes they observed. They specifically called
| out no difference in post-task intrinsic motivation; doesn't that
| imply that the ChatGPT users were no lazier after using ChatGPT
| than they were before?
|
| I'm also a skeptic of students using and relying on ChatGPT, but
| I'm cautious about using this abstract to come to any conclusions
| without seeing the full paper especially given that they're
| apparently using "metacognitive laziness" in a specific technical
| way we don't know about if we haven't read the paper.
| tippytippytango wrote:
| This is not a concern when you are responsible for real results.
| If you aren't responsible for real results you can pass off the
| good rhetoric of these models as an "answer". But when you need
| results you realize most answers they give are just rhetoric.
| They are still extremely valuable, but they can only help you
| when you have done the work to get deep understanding of the
| problem, incentivized by actually solving it.
| jmmcd wrote:
| In my recent programming exam (in an MSc in AI), I asked students
| to reflect on how generative AI has changed their coding. Almost
| all remarked that it's a great time-saver, but it makes them lazy
| and worse at coding.
|
| And yes indeed, their ability to answer basic questions about
| coding on the same exam has drastically dropped versus last year.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Is the problem the use of AI in coding, or using AI in coding
| in a curriculum designed without that assumption? Because if AI
| _is_ an effort-saver, than a curriculum that isn 't designed
| with its use in mind will just result in the students doing
| less work, in which case learning less is unsurprising but not
| really an "AI makes you less knowledgeable" problem but an
| "insufficiently challenging curriculum for the actual context"
| problem.
| lxe wrote:
| Before pervasive GPS, it took me very little time to actually
| learn and internalize a route. Now it takes a lot longer to
| remember it when you're constantly guided. Same exact thing is
| happening with guided reasoning we get with LLMs
| numba888 wrote:
| I have different experience. It took me some time to make a
| rote and write down all turns. Now getting from location A to B
| is a lot easier. Take a look at proposed rote and make some
| corrections. Meanwhile I spend time thinking about something
| else. So, GPS doesn't make me stupid or forgetful. It's just a
| tool which makes me more productive. The same almost true for
| LLM, except getting the right answer isn't always easy or
| possible. But overall on coding small utilities it's very
| helpful. For reasoning models I still need to find the right
| tasks. May be more complex utilities. Or the one I can't get
| from 4o yet: red-black tree with custom memory management and
| custom 'pointers' in data objects (small integers). While
| custom allocators are supported by std, the implementation
| still keeps native pointers, which locks it in memory.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| As technology gets more impressive, we internalize less knowledge
| ourselves.
|
| There is a "plato" story on how he laments the invention of
| writing because now people don't need to memorize speeches and
| stuff.
|
| I think there is a level of balance. Writing gave us enough
| efficiencies that the learned laziness made us overall more
| effective.
|
| The internet in 2011 made us a bit less effective. I am not gonna
| lie; I spent a lot more time being able to get resources, whereas
| I would have to struggle on my own to solve a problem. You
| internalize one more than the other, but is it worth the
| additional time every time?
|
| I worry about current students learning through LLMs just like I
| would worry about a student in 2012 graduating in physics when
| such a student had constant access to wolfram alpha.
| wisty wrote:
| This is the old "siiiiiir why do we need to do this if we have
| calculators"? It matters -
| https://www.edweek.org/education/little-numbers-add-up-to-bi...
| Students who know the facts will be better at math.
|
| Even if the computer is doing all the thinking, it's still a
| tool. Do you know what to ask it? Can you spot a mistake when it
| messes up (or you messed up the input)? Can you simplify the
| problem and figure out what the important parts of the problem
| are? Do you even know to do any of that?
|
| Sure, thinking machines will sometimes be autonomous and not need
| you to touch them. But when that's the case, your job won't be to
| just nod along to everything the computer says, you won't have a
| job anymore and you will need to find a new job (probably one
| where you need to prompt and interpret what the AI is doing).
|
| And yes, there will be jobs where you just act as an actuator for
| the thinking machine. Ask an Amazon warehouse worker how great a
| job that is :/
|
| Everything is the same as with calculators.
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