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

zettelkasten.de

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

#141

Post by bccdee »

mallowdram wrote: post #83
bccdee wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Anyone who understands the development of intelligence and creativity is directly linked to the allocortex's ability to navigate freely, use vicarious trial and error, to invent novel short-cuts, built from both egocentric (landmark memories) and allocentric (extra body mapping) up until around the age of 16 in order to develop the basics of memory consolidation can take anecdotal evidence of kids that can't take a w…

Given that the current generation of kids missed out on several crucial years of socializing due to Covid and were forced to find community online, I'm skeptical of arguments that point to poorly-socialized kids and say, "it must be the phones." Even if this was based on real data and not a hodgepodge of anecdotes, the phones themselves would not be my #1 suspect.

> allocortex's ability to navigate freely

If your allocortex is navigating freely, something has gone badly wrong. Put it back under the neocortex where it belongs and seek immediate help from a neurologist.

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

#142

Post by thunderfork »

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…

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

#143

Post by xpe »

Gormo wrote: post #139
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…

How is an LLM making stochastic inferences based on aggregations of random blog pages more likely to be correct than looking things up on decidedly non -random blog pages written by people with relevant domain knowledge?

Is the above comment a genuine question? I’m concerned it’s a rhetorical question that isn’t really getting to the heart of the matter; namely, what is the empirical performance? One’s ability to explain said performance doesn’t always keep up.

How about we pick an LLM evaluation and get specific? They have strengths and weaknesses. Some do outperform humans in certain areas.

Often I see people latching on to some reason that “proves” to them “LLMs cannot do X”. Stop and think about how powerful such a claim has to be. Such claims are masquerading as impossibility proofs.

Cognitive dissonance is a powerful force. Hold your claims lightly.

There are often misunderstandings here on HN about the kinds of things transformer based models can learn. Many people use the phrase “stochastic parrots” derisively; most of the time I think these folks are getting it badly wrong. A careful reading of the original paper is essential, not to mention follow up work.

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

#144

Post by tkiolp4 »

I use AI at work, and certainly I’m doing less deep thinking over time. But at home, on side projects I still do it the traditional way. This is because I enjoy the process of thinking (rather than shipping. I actually never shipped any side project).

I guess I’m lucky, deep thinking (on interesting things at home) is a hobby so I feel less encouraged to automate that away. I never cared about my jobs, so as long as I bring home money, it’s fine.

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

#145

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #137
klodolph wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve tried the second path at work and it’s grueling. “Almost certainly succeed” requires that you mostly plan out the implementation for it, and then monitor the LLM to ensure that it doesn’t get off track and do something awful. It’s hard to get much other work done in the meantime. I feel like I’m unlocking, like, 10% or 20% productivity gains. Maybe.

10-20% productivity gains at the expense of making it grueling sounds like a recipe for burnout

And that's how many people feel now.

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

#146

Post by danenania »

jama211 wrote: post #136
danenania wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd actually say that you end up needing to think more in the first example. Because as soon as you realize that the output doesn't do exactly what you need, or has a bug, or needs to be extended (and has gotten beyond the complexity that AI can successfully update), you now need to read and deeply understand a bunch of code that you didn't write before you can move forward. I think it can actually be fine to do this…

Depends how complex the task is. Sometimes I’m handed tasks so simple but tedious that AI has meant I can breeze through these instead of burning myself out on them. Sure, it doesn’t speed things up much in terms of time, but I’m way less burnt out at the end because it’s doing all the fiddly stuff that would tire me out. I suspect the tasks I get aren’t that typical though.

Yeah, I think if it's simple enough that you can understand all the code that's generated at a glance, then it's fine. There are definitely tasks that fit this description—my comment was mainly speaking to more complex tasks.

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

#147

Post by ryanobjc »

trjordan wrote: post #50

I was talking with somebody about their migration recently [0], and we got to speculating about AI and how it might have helped. There were basically 2 paths: - Use the AI and ask for answers. It'll generate something! It'll also be pleasant, because it'll replace the thinking you were planning on doing. - Use the AI to automate away the dumb stuff, like writing a bespoke test suite or new infra to run those tests. I…

regarding #2: "Automate the dumb/boring stuff", I always think of the big short when Michael Burry said "yes I read all the boring spreadsheets, and I now have a contrary position". And ended up being RIGHT.

For example, I believe writing unit tests is way too important to be fully relegated to the most junior devs, or even LLM generation! In other fields, "test engineer" is an incredibly prestigious position to have, for example "lead test engineer, Space X/ Nasa/etc" -- that ain't a slouch job, you are literally responsible for some of the most important validation and engineering work done at the company.

So I do question the notion that we can offload the "simple" stuff and just move on with life. It hasn't really fully worked well in all fields, for example have we really outsourced the boring stuff like manufacturing and made things way better? The best companies making the best things do typically vertically integrate.

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

#148

Post by bad_username »

tikhonj wrote: post #63

> You have to remember EVERYTHING. Only then you can perform the cognitive tasks necessary to perform meaningful knowledge work. If humans did not have any facilities for abstraction, sure. But then "knowledge work" would be impossible. You need to remember some set of concrete facts for knowledge work, sure, but it's just one—necessary but small—component. More important than specific factual knowledge, you need two…

> More important than specific factual knowledge, you need two things: strong conceptual models for whatever you're doing and tacit knowledge

And the more experience with computers I get, the more I realize that there's actually not that many pure unique and mutually orthogonal _concepts_ in computer science and software engineering. Yes, a competent engineer must know, feel, live these concepts, and it takes a lot of work and exposure to crystallize them in the brain from all the libraries, books, programs, architectures one has seen. But there's not a lot of them! And once you are intimate with all of them, you can grok anything computer-related quickly and efficiently: because your brain will just wuickly find the "coordinates" of that thing in the concept space, ans that's all you'll have to understand and recall later.

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

#149

Post by _bramses »

A lot of good ideas in this comment section.

I’ll say this: between store, search, synthesize and share, store and synthesize are consistently the most difficult to nail down.

A society that wishes to succeed in creating an activated and knowledgeable populous should be interested in how to train people to notice better, and to create insightful follows.

In the words of David Deutsch (paraphrasing): knowledge consists of conjecture and error correction

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

#150

Post by wduquette »

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #138
wduquette wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I arrange my code to follow a certain order, so that I can get my head back into a given module quickly. I don't remember everything ; there's too much over the weeks, months, and years. But I can remember enough to find what I need to know if I structure it properly. Not unlike, you know, a Zettlekasten.

Isn't a Zettlekasten, structured so you can easily go back to a note easily?

Yes. And so's my code, so to speak.
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