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Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

arxiv.org

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Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#421

Post by lukasego »

LLMs should be used to REFLECT cognitive states while writing, and not for generating text. Reflecting thought patterns would be a mode where the writer deepens their understanding when writing essays, and gains better decision-making as well as coherence, as the LLM assesses and suggests where thinking could be refined. That will help against the accumulation of cognitive debt and increase cognitive width and depth.

Cogilo (https://cogilo.me/) was built for this purpose in the last weeks. This paper comes at a very welcome time. Cogilo is a Google Docs add-on (https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/cogilo/31975274...) that sees thinking patterns in essays. It operates on a semantic level and judges and tries to reveal the writer's cognitive state and thinking present in the text - to themselves, hence making the writer deepen their thinking and essay.

Ultimately, I think that in 300 years, upon looking back at the effect and power that AI had on humanity, we will see that it was built by us, and existed, to reflect human intelligence. I think that's where the power of LLMs will be big for us.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#422

Post by ninetyninenine »

throwawayoldie wrote: post #415
ninetyninenine wrote: post #66

The next generation of programmers will be stupider then the current generation thanks to LLMs. That means age-ism will become less and less prevalent. "Look at that old timer! He can code without AI! That's insane!"

Speaking as an engineer coming up on 50 years old: nice.

IQ increases every year. Let’s see if LLMs cause a decrease.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#423

Post by [deleted] »

llamasushi wrote: post #279

Socrates: "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…

[deleted]

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#424

Post by rightbyte »

devmor wrote: post #146
falcor84 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are there such tests? Sounds like IQ tests to me, which is a quite indirect measurement.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#425

Post by rightbyte »

elric wrote: post #298
unsupp0rted wrote: post #282

Also ever since we invented the written word it has been eating our brains by killing our memory

For those who don't get the reference, Plato thought that the written word was not a good tool for teaching/learning, because it outsources some of the thinking. Simiarly (IIRC) Socrates thought the written word wasn't great for communicating, because it lacks the nuance of face-to-face communication. I wonder if they ever realised that it could also be a giant knowledge amplifier.

You need to take into account that books were in the price range of houses at the time.

It was probably a huge waste of resources to not just talk to each other instead.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#426

Post by bootsmann »

Kon5ole wrote: post #419
bootsmann wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed Hard disagree, LLVM will always outperform me in writing assembly, it won't just give up and fail randomly when it meets a particularly non-trivial problem, causing me to write assembly by hand to fix it. If LLMs would be 100% reliable on the tasks I had to do, I don't think anyone here would seriously debate about the issue of mental attrition (i.e. yo…

>The problem is that in too many cases, the LLM will only get so far and you will still have to switch to doing actual programming to get the task finished The LLM makes mistakes sure and isn't a slam dunk tool like a compiler, but it could still save lots of time and be useful. Some things are fine to let rot. Nobody should spend too much time learning Vue, React or Laravel, or even nhibernate, entity framework or s…

> Some things are fine to let rot. Nobody should spend too much time learning Vue, React or Laravel, or even nhibernate, entity framework or structuremap, for example.

The way you phrase this you make it sound like an LLM can already solve every possible task you would ever get in Vue, React or Laravel but my entire point is that this is simply not true. As a consequence of this, whenever the LLM fails at a task (which gets more likely the more complex the task is) you will still need to know how Vue, React or Laravel work to actually finish your task but this is the exact knowledge you lose if you spend 80% of your day prompting instead of writing code. The more you rely on the LLM to write your code the more the code you are able to produce converges with the one that the LLM can put out.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#427

Post by nodar86 »

There was a post I think here on Hackernews by a university professor (of philosophy, maybe) about how student's performance have declined a lot recently and how he cannot do anything about it. Can someone help me if you remember it? I cannot find it for the life of me

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#428

Post by JohnFen »

hansmayer wrote: post #220
mjburgess wrote: post #179

It feels, more and more, that LLMs will be another technology that society will inoculate itself against. It's already starting to happen in education: teachers conversing with students, observing them learn, observing them demonstrate their skills. In business, quickly I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people -- as authors of what they want to…

It's all already there. When you converse with a junior-engineer about their latest and greatest idea (over a chat platform), and they start giving you real-time responses which are a page long and structured into bullet points...it's not even that they are using chatgpt to avoid thinking, it is the fact that they think either no-one will notice, or that this is how grown-ups actually converse with each other, is ter…

I haven't encountered that (yet), but I can't think of a faster way to get me to stop paying attention to them. I'm more interested in their analysis, not the analysis of a machine I can just use myself directly.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#429

Post by Frummy »

throwawayoldie wrote: post #417
Frummy wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the thread: yes, it's sarcasm. Here's some clarification as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44291314 Yes, I'm acknowledging a lack of skill transfer, but that there are new ways of working and so I sarcastically imply the article can't see the forest for the trees, missing the big picture. A horse and carriage is very useful for lots of things. A horse is more specialised. I'm getting at the analogy o…

> A horse and carriage is very useful for lots of things. A horse is more specialised. You have that backwards. A horse and carriage is good for traveling on a road. If you have just the horse, however, you can travel on a road, travel offroad, pull a plow, ride into battle and trample evildoers, etc.

No it's only half backwards because of the infrastructure there is scalability in amount of work you're right in the phrasing however but the intention/idea matters more. So the horse and carriage is a generalization of the core value of the horse and increases the core value and generalization -> general, horse more specialised or at least reduced to niches today like competitions and hobbies

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#430

Post by Kon5ole »

bootsmann wrote: post #426
Kon5ole wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem is that in too many cases, the LLM will only get so far and you will still have to switch to doing actual programming to get the task finished The LLM makes mistakes sure and isn't a slam dunk tool like a compiler, but it could still save lots of time and be useful. Some things are fine to let rot. Nobody should spend too much time learning Vue, React or Laravel, or even nhibernate, entity framework or s…

> Some things are fine to let rot. Nobody should spend too much time learning Vue, React or Laravel, or even nhibernate, entity framework or structuremap, for example. The way you phrase this you make it sound like an LLM can already solve every possible task you would ever get in Vue, React or Laravel but my entire point is that this is simply not true. As a consequence of this, whenever the LLM fails at a task (whi…

Poor phrasing perhaps, my point is that you the human should spend time and effort on the challenging and interesting things, and learning things that have lasting value. Not the boring, tedious and quickly irrelevant things.

Remember knockout.js? script.aculo.us? I do, but wish I didn't so those brain cells could know more SQL and vanilla javascript instead. :)

I also think LLM's are way more useful than you give them credit for. I save hours per week already and I'm just getting started in how to get the most value from LLM's. It's clear to me that my ability to phrase questions and include context matters more than which model I use.

To be clear I'm not talking about the cool-aid promises of one-shotting complex apps here, I mean questions like

"Give me a log4jconfig that splits logfiles per errorlevel and day"

"Look at #locationclass, #customerclass, #shop.css and #customerview and make a crud view for customers similar to locations"

"We are converting a vue app to react. Look at #oldvue1 and #newreact1 and make a react version of #oldvue2 following the same patterns"

"What could cause the form from #somewebview to pass a null whateverId to #somerepository?"

Questions like that are solved by LLM's at least close enough to 100% that it feels like asking a human to do it.

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