Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

zettelkasten.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 188 posts

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

#161

Post by jama211 »

danenania wrote: post #146
jama211 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah fair

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

#162

Post by mallowdram »

bccdee wrote: post #159
mallowdram wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We're in an attentional crises that isn't because kids didn't go to school for two years.

It's destroying their ability to experience reality as paths, free navigation, vicarious trial and error, all of this is fundamental to memory consolidation: the brain's fundamental unit: action-syntax in memory, is built from non-screen topological integrations of landmark and allocentric experiences. Phones destroy this.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6059409/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-20922-0

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/brb3.70656

https://www.mdpi.com/2254-9625/15/6/98

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40255102/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00246-025-03862-0

https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9067/12/4/503

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40172268/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40173157/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-025-04024-x

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00223...

“A growing body of evidence has found that children’s brains can structurally and functionally change due to prolonged media multitasking, such as diminished gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, where attentional control and complex decision making abilities reside, among other really important skills, like the development of empathy and understanding nonverbal social communication,”

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

#163

Post by Amaury-El »

I used to think it wasn't necessary to remember much, as long as I could look things up. But over time, I realized that without a personal mental framework, it's hard to judge whether what you find is actually valuable.

Some insights only emerge when knowledge has stayed in your mind long enough to collide and connect with other ideas. Tools can help, but it's the knowledge that has been internalized and shaped over time that holds the real power.

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

#164

Post by mallowdram »

Barrin92 wrote: post #160
defanor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

"Neuro-muscular" great insight.

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

#165

Post by blankx32 »

js8 wrote: post #45

While I agree with the gist of the article, I think the AI example is poor, because we know AI can make stuff up and it's a problem. So this failure of AI to be reasonably correct weakens the argument. In the old days, you would rely on an expert (through say a book, like encyclopedia) to tell you this. The issue then becomes who you trust. I would say your own knowledge is like a memory cache. If you know stuff, the…

Amazed I had to scroll this far to find a comment on trust. It’s an important facet I urge is not taken lightly.

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

#166

Post by palata »

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.

I don't think that the point of the article was "you are dumb if you don't remember absolutely everything".

The point, I believe, was that the more you remember, the better you can think. As in you should strive to remember stuff, and not just be lazy and rely on LLMs. I agree with that.

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

#167

Post by palata »

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…

I have seen multiple posts about this "remembering EVERYTHING", and I think they miss the point. Also they don't quote the context:

> So, coming back to the initial starting point that “you don’t have to remember anything”. The opposite is true. You have to remember EVERYTHING.

I see it like this: it is absolutely wrong to think that you don't have to remember anything. In fact, ideally you would remember everything. The more you remember, the better you can think. Now in practice, it's impossible to remember absolutely everything, so we should strive to remember as much as we can. And of course we need to be clever in how we select what we remember (but that seems obvious).

The point is really that it is common to say "it's useless to remember it because you can ask your calculator or an LLM", and the article strongly disagrees with that.

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

#168

Post by palata »

keiferski wrote: post #43

I am sympathetic to memory-focused tools like Anki and Zettelkasten (haven't used the latter myself, though) but I think this post is a bit oversimplified. I think there are at least two models of work that require knowledge: 1. Work when you need to be able to refer to everything instantly. I don't know if this is actually necessary for most scenarios other than live debates, or some form of hyper-productivity in wh…

> What is actually new lately, in my experience, is that AI tools are a huge help for situations where you don't have either Type 1 or Type 2 knowledge of something

IMO, this is the whole point of the article: AI tools "help" a lot when we are completely uninformed. But in doing that, they prevent us from getting informed in the first place. Which is counter-productive in the long term.

I like to say that learning goes in iterations:

* First you accept new material (the teacher shows some mathematical concept and proves that it works). It convinces you that it makes sense, but you don't know enough to actually be sure that the proof was 100% correct.

* Then you try to apply it, with whatever you could memorise from the previous step. It looked easy when the teacher did it, but when you do it yourself it raises new questions. But while doing this, you memorise it. Being able to say "I can do this exercise, but in this other one there is this difference and I'm stuck" means that you have memorised something.

* Now that you have memorised more, you can go back to the material, and try to convince yourself that you now see how to solve that exercise you were stuck with.

* etc.

It's a loop of something like "accept, understand, memorise, use". If, instead, you prompt until the AI gives you the right answer, you're not learning much.

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

#169

Post by palata »

I once saw a comment that said "AIs are great for things that are hard to find, but easy to verify". Which I agree with.

In order to verify, we need knowledge.

If the AI is the last stop ("I asked my LLM and it said that"), it's the wrong way to do it. If the AI is part of the process ("The LLM mentioned this, which made sense, and I confirmed it by [...]"), then it may (or may not) be useful.

In any case, "knowing it" is always more efficient than "having to search for it". So the more you know, the better.

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

#170

Post by nathan_compton »

mallowdram wrote: post #125
nathan_compton wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The brain is lossless." Nothing is lossless.

Fourier transforms are lossless. If it entered the oscillations of senses, it's still there in your brain. You may never need it, but every action is detailed by difference.

A Fourier transform is just a change of coordinates. It has nothing to do with the signal per se. If you have a signal which was measured or recorded with finite precision (as any signal must be) then the fourier transform (as a pure mathematical object) simply preserves the same amount of loss that the original signal had. But, in fact, to do that, we would need to do the transform on hardware that could represent real numbers. This hardware does not exist in computers or in your brain, and so a fourier transform is lossy in that case. Still, the idea that your brain encodes all information in oscillations is not accurate - your temporary electrical activity can be substantially disrupted without you losing your memories, suggesting very strongly (to put it mildly) that some of your memories are encoded chemically and physically in changes to the connectivity between neurons that do not depend on persistent electrical activity. That encoding scheme must be lossy.
Post reply on HN