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We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

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Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

#101

Post by wduquette »

mallowdram wrote: post #75
chrisweekly wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take. I respectfully differ. IIRC, Feynman said something akin to my POV: Brains are for thinking. Documents / PKM systems / tools are for remembering. IOW: take notes, write things down. FWIW I have a degree in cognitive psychology (psychobiology, neuroanatomy, human perception) and am an amateur neuroscientist. Somewhat familiar w/ the brain. :)

Feynman wasn't a neurobiologist. I'd read Spontaneous Brain by Northoff (Copernican, irreducible neuroscience) or oscillatory neurobiology Buzsaki. The brain is lossless. I would agree that external forms of memory are evolutionarily progressive, that ability to utilize the external forms requires a lossless relationship. Once we grasp the infinitely inferior external of arbitrariness (symbols words) are correlated t…

But taking notes and writing ideas out requires that we think them through...which we usually don't do otherwise. This has been a commonplace of the intellectual life for centuries.

Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

#102

Post by buellerbueller »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #92

Before the internet we asked people around us in our sphere. If we wanted to know the answer to a question, we asked, they made up an answer, and we believed it and moved on. Then the internet came, and we asked the internet. The internet wasn't correct, but it was a far higher % correct than asking a random person who was near you. Now AI comes. It isn't correct, but it's far higher % correct than asking a random pe…

If you are asking random people, then your approach is incorrect. You should be asking the domain experts. Not gonna ask my wife about video games. Not gonna ask my dad about computer programming.

There, I've shaved a ton of the spread off of your argument. Possibly enough to moot the value of the AI, depending on the domain.

Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

#103

Post by steezeburger »

bccdee wrote: post #77
mallowdram wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, kids lack the foundational ability to remember, reason, imagine because their phones cauterize their basic intelligence foundations in sharp wave ripples: navigation, adventurous short-cuts, vicarious trial and error, these are the basis for memory consolidation. And we build this developmentally until we are 16 or so. Once we offload this dev to phones, we are essentially unintelligent buffoon, lacking the ba…

No, you're just saying that. There's no evidence that using phones makes teenagers stupid.

There is no evidence that using phones makes teenagers stupid? I see several studies. I feel like you're the one just saying things.

Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

#104

Post by barrenko »

wduquette wrote: post #101
mallowdram wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feynman wasn't a neurobiologist. I'd read Spontaneous Brain by Northoff (Copernican, irreducible neuroscience) or oscillatory neurobiology Buzsaki. The brain is lossless. I would agree that external forms of memory are evolutionarily progressive, that ability to utilize the external forms requires a lossless relationship. Once we grasp the infinitely inferior external of arbitrariness (symbols words) are correlated t…

But taking notes and writing ideas out requires that we think them through...which we usually don't do otherwise. This has been a commonplace of the intellectual life for centuries.

Or alternate "pen is mightier that the sword."

Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

#105

Post by mallowdram »

wduquette wrote: post #101
mallowdram wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feynman wasn't a neurobiologist. I'd read Spontaneous Brain by Northoff (Copernican, irreducible neuroscience) or oscillatory neurobiology Buzsaki. The brain is lossless. I would agree that external forms of memory are evolutionarily progressive, that ability to utilize the external forms requires a lossless relationship. Once we grasp the infinitely inferior external of arbitrariness (symbols words) are correlated t…

But taking notes and writing ideas out requires that we think them through...which we usually don't do otherwise. This has been a commonplace of the intellectual life for centuries.

Words and thoughts are wholly separate. Notes aren't the direct results of perception, they are more like sportscasters reading the mind of pitchers. Notes point to thoughts or observations, they aren't the thoughts themselves.

“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024

Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

#106

Post by wduquette »

birdman3131 wrote: post #12

AI is not a replacement for a greybeard. That said AI, Search and the like can be quite useful and helpful.

I remember the dotCom bubble. After the bubble burst, people got on with putting storefronts and other kinds of business on-line in a more sober fashion.

I predict the same thing will happen with the current AI tools: the bubble will burst, a bunch of folks will lose their shirts, and the world in general will come to a more realistic and sober understanding of what they are good for. We will figure out how to provide the useful parts without massive data centers and it will become natural. (I remember when things a graphics card can do trivially required a supercomputer with supporting staff.)

Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

#108

Post by BinaryIgor »

A bit too extreme, but there definitely is something to it; trivially, you need to challenge your mind all the time and at regularly work at the edge of your current abilities to progress further. I like this part a lot:

"In knowledge work the bottleneck is not the external availability of information. It is the internal bandwidth of processing power which is determined by your innate abilities and the training status of your mind."

Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

#109

Post by Ethee »

I've been having conversations about this topic with friends recently and I keep coming back to this idea that most engineering work, which I will define as work that begins with a question and without a clear solution, requires a lot of foundational understanding of the previous layer of abstraction. If you imagine knowledge as a pyramid, you can work at the top of the pyramid as long as you understand the foundation that makes up your level, however to jump a level above or below that would require building that foundation yet again. Computer science fits well into this model where you have people at many layers of abstractions who all work very well within their layer but might not understand as much about the other layers. But regardless of where you are in the pyramid, understanding ALL the layers underneath will lead to better intuition about the problems of your layer. To farm out the understanding for these things will obviously end up having negative impact not just on overall critical thinking, but on the way we intuit how the world works.

Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

#110

Post by skybrian »

mmargenot wrote: post #18

> You have to remember EVERYTHING. Only then you can perform the cognitive tasks necessary to perform meaningful knowledge work. You don't have to remember everything. You have to remember enough entry points and the shape of what follows, trained through experience and going through the process of thinking and writing, to reason your way through meaningful knowledge work.

This is task-specific. Consider having a conversation in a foreign language. You don't have time to use a dictionary, so you must have learned words to be able to use them. Similarly for other live performances like playing music.

When you're writing, you can often take your time. Too little knowledge, though, and it will require a lot of homework.

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