Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies don't own employees: workers can leave at any time. Thus protecting employees productivity in the long run doesn't necessarily help the company. (Unless you explicitly set up contracts that help there, or there are strong social norms in your place around this.)
i am not talking about productivity. i am talking about quality and knowledge
Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
131–140 of 442 posts
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
To quote myself: > Companies don't own employees: workers can leave at any time. > Thus protecting employees productivity in the long run doesn't necessarily help the company. (Unless you explicitly set up contracts that help there, or there are strong social norms in your place around this.)
You are talking about productivity, I'm talking about knowledge. You may come-up with a product, then fire all engineers having built it. Then, what? It's not sustainable for a business to start from scratch every other year. Your LLM won't be a substitute for owning your product.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What is ranked as “top” is ultimately influenced by the priorities of the LLM's shareholders [123, 125]. As if that's anything new. There's the adage that's older than electronics, that freedom of the press is freedom for those who can afford to own a printing press. > However, this convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users' inclination to critically evaluate the LLM's output or ”opinions” (probabilis…
> Reminds me of Plato's concern about reading and writing dulling your mind. (I think he had his sock puppet Socrates express the concern. But I could be wrong.) Nope. Read the dialogue (Phaedrus). It's about rhetoric and writing down political discourses. Writing had existed for millennia. And the bit about writing being detrimental is from a mythical Egyptian king talking to a god, just a throwaway story used in th…
Well, so that's exactly my point: Plato was an old man who yelled at clouds before it was cool.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The brain does not retain information that it does not need. Sounds very plausible, though how does that square with the common experience that certain skills, famously 'riding a bike', never go away once learned?
> Sounds very plausible, though how does that square with the common experience that certain skills, famously 'riding a bike', never go away once learned? I worked with some researchers who specifically examined this when developing training content for soldiers. They found that 'muscle memory' skills such as riding a bike could persist for a very long time. At the other end of the spectrum were tasks that involved p…
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#135So now I am in the final editing stage, and I am going back over old writing that I don’t remember doing. The material has come together over many many drafts, and parts of it are still not quite consistent with other parts.
But when I am done, it will be mine. And any mistakes will be honest ones that represent the real me. That’s a feeling no one who uses AI assistance will ever have.
I have never and will never use AI to write anything for me.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#136I wouldn't call it "accumulation of cognitive debt"; just call it cognitive decline, or loss of cognitive skills. And also DUH. If you stop speaking a language you forget it. The brain does not retain information that it does not need. Anybody remember the couple studies on the use of google maps for navigation? One was "Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation"; another rep…
> The brain does not retain information that it does not need. Why do I still know how to optimize free conventional memory in DOS by configuring config.sys and autoexec.bat? I haven’t done this in 2 decades and I’m reasonably sure I never again will
People do stuff like that all the time, bringing up past memories in spontaneity. The brain absolutely does remember things it "doesn't need".
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#137I don't quite see their point. Obviously if you're delegating the task to someone/something then you're not getting as good at it as if you were to do it yourself. If I were to write machine code by hand, rather than having the compiler do it for me, I would definitely be better at it and have more neural circuitry devoted to it. As I see it, it's much more interesting to ask not wherther we are still good at doing t…
Your question is answered by the study abstract. > Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plato's sock puppet Socrates? I think that you and I have read different history books, or at least different books regarding the history of philosophy. That said, I would love to hear your perspective on this.
I presume they refer to the fact that Socrates is basically used as a rhetorical device in Plato’s writings, and it’s not entirely clear how much of the dialogues were Socrates’s thoughts and how much was Plato’s own.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#139When I write with AI, it feels smooth in the moment, but I’m not really thinking through the ideas. The writing sounds fine, but when I look back later, I often can’t remember why I phrased things that way. Now I try to write my own draft first, then use AI to help polish it. It takes a bit more effort upfront, but I feel like I learn more and remember things better.
The rule of thumb "LLMs are good at reducing text, not expanding it" is a good one here.
You put it in quote marks, but the only search results are from you writing it here on HN. Obviously LLMs are extremely good at expanding text, which is essentially what they do whenever they continue a prompt. Or did you mean that in a prescriptive way - that it would be better for us to use it more for summarizing rather than expanding?
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#140Now, let's do same exercise but with programming and over longer period of time. Would really like to present it to management that pushes ai assistance for coding
If I write the application, I have an internal map that corresponds (more or less) to what's going on in the code. I built that map as I was writing it, and I use that map as I debug, maintain, and extend the application.
But if I use AI, I have much less clear of a map. I become dependent on AI to help me understand the code well enough to debug it. Given AI's current limitations of actually understanding, that should give you pause...