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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

#151

Post by photonthug »

rorylaitila wrote: post #74
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…

Yeah I think this is what I've tried to articulate to people that you've summed up well with "You've compressed all your thinking work, back-to-back, and you're just doing hard thing after hard thing" - Most of the bottleneck with any system design is the hard things, the unknown things, the unintended-consequences things. The AIs don't help you much with that. There is a certain amount of regular work that I don't w…

> There is a certain amount of regular work that I don't want to automate away, even though maybe I can. That regular work keeps me in the domain. It leads to epiphany's in regards to the hard problems. It adds time and something to do in between the hard problems.

Exactly, some kinds of refactors are like this for me. Pretty mindless, kind of relaxing, almost algebraic. It's a pleasant way to wander around the code base just cleaning and improving things while you walk down a data or control flow. If you're following a thread then you don't even make decisions really, but you also get better acquainted with parts you don't know, and subconsciously get the practice holding some kind of gestalt in your head.

This kind of almost dream-like "grooming" seems important and useful, because it preps you for working with design problems later. Definitely formatting and style type trivia should absolutely be automated, and real architecture/design work requires active engagement. But there's a sweet spot in the middle.

Even before LLMs maybe you could automate some of these refactors with tools for manipulating ASTs or CSTs, if your language of choice had those tools. But automating everything that can be automated won't necessarily pay off if you're losing fluency that you might need later.

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

#152

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

The problem with LLMs is that they are not good enough to do the dumb stuff by themselves. and they are still so dumb that they will bias you once you have to intervene.

But this is the idea behind compilers, type checkers, automated testing, version control, and etc. It's perfectly valid.

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

#153

Post by wtbdbrrr »

Another one of those things that will separate humans on different levels of consciousness even more.

Enough people simply don't want to train their minds. For a lot of people, IT is just a job. Programmers, consultants, ... CEOs and CTOs, people want money and that's fine. Some just don't want a boss.

Some of these people will replace the training of their minds with other stuff, pure experience and laughter. Somewhere else all the time. Other will only train specific parts of their minds, actively or passively.

The big question is, IMO: what will the young face when they enter school, when they enter university, the job market. Will humanity be able to keep the variety it is currently maintaining or is the reduction one of the first steps towards singularity?

All above is rather obvious but the side effects of outsourcing much of everything systematic and structural to AI will build up. Will people care less or more about law and justice? Or just the same? Privacy? Safety? Morals and ethics?

MITM already create a rift between customers and companies. AI will make this rift bigger.

So it's not just the training of the mind that we can't circumvent, it's the (heartwarming I know) the heart as well. How to care for your creation, product and customer if your are completely alienated from almost everything except the balance sheet? Ah, wait, there are a couple of million people like that already. So we'll just have more of those. But don't they read a lot and cooperate and mentor and fiddle with politics, investments and are life long learners and stuff ... I wonder.

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

#154

Post by mallowdram »

bccdee wrote: post #141
mallowdram wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 all…

Sorry, that's a narrative argument, lack of covid socializing, the sciences tell us otherwise. Phones correlate to cog decline.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

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

#155

Post by kjkjadksj »

skybrian wrote: post #110
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.

There might be words I don’t use or chords I don’t know. It doesn’t matter though because part of expertise is being able to consult a reference and go “of course”, implement it, and keep moving.

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

#156

Post by Jensson »

danenania wrote: post #71
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…

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…

> I'd actually say that you end up needing to think more in the first example.

Yes, but you are thinking about the wrong things, so the effort get spent poorly.

It is usually much more efficient to build your own mental model than to try to search for a solution that solves exactly what you need from externally. Without that mental model it is hard to evaluate whether the external solution even does what you want, so its something you need to do either way.

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

#157

Post by bluefirebrand »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #145
bluefirebrand wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's a bad strategy

Burning out a substantial portion of the workforce for short term gains is going to cause way more long term decline than the short term gains are worth

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

#158

Post by OmarShehata »

procaryote wrote: post #34
OmarShehata wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing that happened in your mind when you read that sentence is (1) a bad feeling. That then triggered (2) a rational, conscious thought that interpreted that bad feeling: "this feels bad because it's not true, here are the reasons why it is not true. There is ALWAYS an "emotional/intuitive" response that precedes the rational, conscious thought. There's a ton of research on this (see system 1 vs system 2 t…

That's very hard to know without being in an FMRI machine while reading, which I wasn't, sadly. Just functionally, it seems reasonable that something happened before that bad feeling to trigger it, e.g. "trying to fit this with already known things, and finding it doesn't".

this isn't a "it depends on what computation happens in this specific case" question, this is a "how does human cognition work".

Every website you visit has the payload delivered over the network before any JS is parsed. It has to, there's no other way. Same with intuition followed by rational thought

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

#159

Post by bccdee »

mallowdram wrote: post #154
bccdee wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 all…

Sorry, that's a narrative argument, lack of covid socializing, the sciences tell us otherwise. Phones correlate to cog decline. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

> Phones correlate to cog decline.

Do they? Let's check your source.

> To investigate this hypothesis, participants aged 20–34 perform a concentration and attention test in the presence and absence of a smartphone. The results of the conducted experiment imply that the mere presence of a smartphone results in lower cognitive performance, which supports the hypothesis of the smartphone presence using limited cognitive resources.

So, no. The presence of your smartphone on the desk in front of you is distracting, but that distraction goes away if you remove the smartphone. That's not "cognitive decline."

> Sorry, that's a narrative argument

No, that's me pointing out a competing plausible hypothesis. I'm not saying Covid is necessarily responsible for your anecdotal incidents; I'm saying that until you can prove Covid wasn't responsible, you have no standing to state conclusively that phones were.

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

#160

Post by Barrin92 »

defanor wrote: post #47
flerchin wrote: post #13

Before the internet I siloed knowledge that I could lookup to books. Don't worry, the kids will be ok.

Indeed, I thought that "decades old" sounds like an underestimate there: Socrates is said to have criticized writing for letting people to not train their memory, so that would be millennia by now. Though of course it is possible that the article's author would not agree with that, and would have a beef with more easily searchable content only, like the people who criticized tables of contents. I do not mean that the…

>Socrates is said to have criticized writing for letting people to not train their memory

And he likely had a point. What I recently noticed is that my father, who had very little formal education but happened to have very old-school teachers who hammered him with memorizing a lot of poetry, which he continued in adult life, is more verbally fluent somehow than a lot of young kids who don't have command of grammar any more. ("would of")

Granted they likely don't write or read much either but directionally if you keep outsourcing mental work, you degrade. When I studied Japanese I liked the term a teacher had for his defense of memorizing Kanji by handwriting, which he called "neuro-muscular". Like playing scales on the guitar or piano there is something that keeps you snappy in memorization and rote practice that goes away if you only passively search.

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