[HN Gopher] Outsourcing Thinking
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Outsourcing Thinking
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 41 points
Date : 2026-01-31 21:06 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (erikjohannes.no)
(TXT) w3m dump (erikjohannes.no)
| wut-wut wrote:
| Interesting read..
|
| To his point: personally, I find it shifts 'where and when' I
| have to deal with the 'cognitive load'. I've noticed (at times)
| feeling more impatient, that I tend to skim the results more
| often, and that it takes a bit more mental energy to maintain my
| attention..
| camgunz wrote:
| This list of things not to use AI for is so quaint. There's a
| story on the front page right now from The Atlantic: "Film
| students who can no longer sit through films". But why? Aren't
| they using social media, YouTube, Netflix, etc responsibly?
| Surely they know the risks, and surely people will be just as
| responsible with AI, even given the enormous economic and
| professional pressures to be irresponsible.
| pixl97 wrote:
| We lose something when we give up horses for cars.
|
| Have too many of us outsourced our ability to raise horses for
| transport?
|
| Surely you're capable of walking all day without break?
| andrepd wrote:
| It's a funnily relevant parallel you're making, because
| _designing everything around the car_ has absolutely been one
| of the biggest catastrophes of 2nd half of the 20th century.
| Much like "AI" in the past couple years, the personal
| automobile is a useful tool but making anything and
| everything subservient towards its use has had catastrophic
| consequences.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| It is political. Designing everything around cars benefits
| the class of people called "Car Owners". Not so much people
| who don't have the money or desire to buy a car.
|
| Although, congestion pricing is a good counter-example. On
| the surface it looks like it is designed to benefit users
| of public transportation. But turns out it also benefits
| car-owners, because it reduces traffic jams and lets you
| get to your destination with your own car faster.
| hippo22 wrote:
| What is the lesson in the anecdote about film students? To me,
| it's that people like _the idea_ of studying film more than
| they like actually studying film. I fail to see the connection
| to social media or AI.
| squidbeak wrote:
| Perhaps the films were weren't worth sitting through?
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Recently a side discussion came up - people in the Western
| world are "rediscovering" fermented, and pickled, foods that
| are still in heavy use in Asian cultures.
|
| Fermentation was a great way to /preserve/ food, but it can be
| a bit hit and miss. Pickling can be outright dangerous if not
| done correctly - botulism is a constant risk.
|
| When canning of foods came along it was a massive game changer,
| many foods became shelf stable for months or years.
|
| Fermentation and pickling was dropped almost universally (in
| the West).
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| > surely people will be just as responsible with AI
|
| _That 's exactly what worries us._
| jemiluv8 wrote:
| Outsourcing to thinking is exactly what I tell our developers.
| They are hired to do the kind of thinking I'd rather not do.
| slfreference wrote:
| Distributed verification. 8 billions of us can divide up the
| topics and subjects and pool together our opinions and best
| conclusions.
| JamesTRexx wrote:
| What is that saying again, a person is smart, a group is dumb?
|
| That's the risk involved with opinions and conclusions.
| preston-kwei wrote:
| The "lump of cognition" framing misses something important. it's
| not about how much thinking we do, but which thinking we stop
| doing. A lot of judgment, ownership, and intuition comes from
| boring or repetitive work, and outsourcing that isn't free.
| Lowering the cost of producing words clearly isn't the same as
| increasing the amount of actual thought.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| See Scott Alexander's The Whispering Earring (2012):
|
| https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva...
| nsainsbury wrote:
| I actually wrote up quite a few thoughts related to this a few
| days ago but my take is far more pessimistic:
| https://www.neilwithdata.com/outsourced-thinking
|
| My fundamental argument: The way the average person is using AI
| today is as "Thinking as a Service" and this is going to have
| absolutely devastating long term consequences, training an entire
| generation not to think for themselves.
| jakubtomanik wrote:
| I believe that collectively we passed that point long before
| the onset of LLMs. I have a feeling that throughout the human
| history vast amounts of people ware happy to outsource their
| thinking and even pay to do so. We just used to call those
| arrangements religions.
| nine_k wrote:
| Thinking developed naturally as a tool that helps our species to
| stay dominant on the planet, at least on land. (Not by biomass
| but by the ability to control.)
|
| If outsourcing thought is beneficial, those who practice it will
| thrive; if not, they will eventually cease to practice it, one
| way or another.
|
| Thought, as any other tool, is useful when it solves more
| problems than it creates. For instance, an ability to move very
| fast may be beneficial if it gets you where you want to be, and
| detrimental, if it misses the destination often enough, and badly
| enough. Similarly, if outsourced intellectual activities miss the
| mark often enough, and badly enough, the increased speed is not
| very helpful.
|
| I suspect that the best results would be achieved by outsourcing
| relatively small intellectual acts in a way that guarantees very
| rare, very small errors. That is, AI will become useful when AI
| becomes _dependable_ , comparable to our other tools.
| gemmarate wrote:
| The interesting axis here isn't how much cognition we outsource,
| it's how reversible the outsourcing is. Using an LLM as a
| scratchpad (like a smarter calculator or search engine) is very
| different from letting it quietly shape your writing, decisions,
| and taste over years. That's the layer where tacit knowledge and
| identity live, and it's hard to get back once the habit forms.
|
| We already saw a softer version of this with web search and GPS:
| people didn't suddenly forget how to read maps, but schools and
| orgs stopped teaching it, and now almost nobody plans a route
| without a blue dot. I suspect we'll see the same with writing and
| judgment: the danger isn't that nobody thinks, it's that fewer
| people remember how.
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