Earlier quoted context omitted.
i am not talking about productivity. i am talking about quality and knowledge
Your workers can still quit, and take their knowledge with them.
You can put effort in making workers not want to quit.
Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
141–150 of 442 posts
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> In fact the conclusion of that bit of the dialogue is that merely having access to text may give an illusion of understanding. Quite relevant and on point I'd say. Well, so that's exactly my point: Plato was an old man who yelled at clouds before it was cool.
Wow.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#143[flagged]
Please don't do this here. If a comment seems unfit for HN, please flag it and email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can have a look. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287157 and marked it off topic.
I did not say it was unfit and I don't see how discussing writing styles and the influence of LLMs on it is off topic on a thread about the effects of LLMs on cognition.
I don't believe I was impolite or making a personal attack. I had a relevant point and I made it clearly and in a civil manner. I strongly disagree with your assessment.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#144The discussion here about "cognitive debt" is spot on, but I fear it might be too conservative. We're not just talking about forgetting a skill like a language or losing spatial memory from using GPS. We're talking about the systematic, irreversible atrophy of the neural pathways responsible for integrated reasoning. The core danger isn't the "debt" itself, which implies it can be repaid through practice. The real da…
It's up to everyone to decide what to use LLMs for. For high friction / low throughput (eg, online research using inferieor search tools) tasks, i find text models to be great. To ask about what you don't know, to skip the 'tedious part' (I don't feel like looking for answers, especially troubleshooting arcane technical issues among pages of forums or social media, makes me smarter in any way whatsoever, especially that the information usually needs to be verified and taken with a grain of salt).
StackExchange, the way it was meant to be initially, would be way more valuable over text models. But in reality people are imperfect and carry all sorts of cognitive biases and baggage, while a LLM won't close your question as 'too broad' right after it gets upvotes and user interaction.
On the other hand, I still find LLM writing on the subjects familiar to me, vastly inferior. Whenever I try to write a say, email with its help, I end up spending just as much time either editing the prompt to keep it on track, or rewriting it significantly after. I'd rather write it on my own with my own flow, than proofread/peer review a text model.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> bicycles ... has made us increasingly weak This is pretty difficult for me to buy. Cycling has been shown time & again to be a great way to increase fitness.
> Cycling has been shown time & again to be a great way to increase fitness. Compared to sitting on your butt in a car or public transport. Perhaps not compared to walking everywhere and chasing the antelope you want to cook for lunch. I think what he meant is that both bicycles and LLMs are a force multiplier and you still provide the core of the work, but not all of the work any more.
Cycling, in my experience, is usually way more intense than walking or even running/jogging. It just lets you cover larger distance and gives you more control over how your energy is used.
With the example of LLMs, sure, you could cycle the initial destination you were meant to walk to - write an article with its help, save a few hours and call it a day. Or you could cycle further and use the saved time to work on something a text model can't help you well with.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But it's not that they "underperformed" at life in general - they underperformed when assessed on various aspects of the task that they weren't practicing. To me it's as if they ran a trial where one group played basketball, while another were acting as referees - of course that when tested on ball control, those who were dribbling and throwing would do better, but it tells us nothing about how those acting as refere…
I see what you’re getting at now. I agree I’d like to see a more general trial that measures general changes in problem solving ability after a test group is set at using LLMs for a specific problem solving task vs a control group not using them.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#147What about llms for grammar correction, English is my second language so I find it useful for that
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#148AI is the anti-Zettelkasten. Rather than getting ever deeper insight into a subject matter by actively working on it, you iterate fast but shallow over a corpus of AI generated content. Example: I wanted to understand the situation in the Middle East better so I wrote an 10 page essay on the genesis if Hammas and Hizbulah using OpenAI as a cowriter. I remember nothing, worse of the things I remember I don’t know if i…
Most intelligent people are aware of the fact that writing is about thinking as much as it is about getting the written text. LLMs can be great sparring partners for this, if you don't use it as a tool that writes for you, but as a tool that finds mistakes, points out gaps and errors (which you may or may not ignore) and helps in researching general questions aboit the world around you (always woth caution and source…
Exactly! Never ever ever have AI write for you. Ask it to critique what you wrote, ask it to pick your arguments apart. Then use your mind to fix what it pointed out. If you cannot figure out how, ask the AI to explain how. Then take a break, 20 minutes is fine, and then return and fix the issue yourself using your own mind to write without assistance. This is how one uses AI to learn.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#149I can’t believe riding a horse and carriage wouldn’t make you better at riding a horse. Sure a horserider wouldn’t want to practice the wrong way, but anyone else just wants to get somewhere
i didn't read the article but come on riding a horse to get to a destination is not remotely similar to writing an essay. if you say it's a means to an end - to what a good grade? - we've lost the plot long ago. writing is for thinking.
I'm making an analogy as to the type of skill it is, so yes, means to an end. I wouldn't mean an apathetic student jumping through bureaucratic educational hoops and requirements, but perhaps a selfdriven person wanting to get something done.
What I'm saying is that yes writing essays is one skill and if it's your goal to write essays then obviously not doing it yourself entirely will make you worse than otherwise. But I'm expanding a bit beyond the paper saying that yes the brain won't grow for this specific skill because it's actually a different skill.
Thinking can be done in lots of ways such as when having a conversation, and what I think the skill is is steering and creating structures to orchestrate AIs into automated workflows which is a new way of working. And so what I mean is that with a new technology you can't expect a transfer to the way you work with old technologies rather you have to figure out the better new way you can use the new technology, and the brain would grow for this specific new way of working. And one could analyse depending on ones goal if it's a tool you'd want to use in the sense that cause leads to effect or if you would be better off for your specific goal to ignore the new technology and do it the usual way.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#150I 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…
I would call it cognitive debt. Have you ever tried writing a large report with an LLM? It's very tempting to let it write a lot, let it structure things, let it make arguments and visuals. It's easy to let it do more and more... And then you end up with something that is very much... Not yours. But your name is on it, you are asked to explain it, to understand it even better than it is written down. Surely the repor…
I found that I just really have to do the work, to develop the mental models, to articulate and to re-articulate and re-articulate again. For different audiences in different ways
Yes definitely!
I'd say that being able to turn an idea over in your head is how you know if you know it ... And even pre-LLM, it was easy to "appear to know" something, but not really know it.
PG wrote pretty much this last year:
in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.
So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots.