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

171–180 of 188 posts

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

#171

Post by tim333 »

Looking at the example he gives of an exercise plan, I'm not sure the advice is very good. He says don't do the simplistic plan the LLM gave, and be aware of technical stuff like "discussions of Olaf Alexander Bu on the difference between capacity and power numbers".

My experience as a bit of geek is it's easy to get caught up in theory and do stuff that doesn't work in practice. Better than either the LLM or theorising is an experienced coach who can look at what you are doing and say don't to that - it's all wrong - do this etc.

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

#172

Post by mallowdram »

nathan_compton wrote: post #170
mallowdram wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Fourier transforms are simply ways of interpreting. The senses restrict, the existing memory/engram/affinity of those senses: we don't yet know how much is lost, whether any of it is lost. In the schema, we must assume their inputs are preserved in some way, (study those with photographic memory, or the eidetic as example) and it is assumed preservation is chemical in nature that represents or co-represents the oscillations, yet we're not sure what exactly this is as of 2024 (I haven't finished reading this year's). Of course there are disruptions, and sleep - you do not remember the sounds around us when asleep. But if you recorded an event, it is still there. By lossless, I am referring to the idea there is no true separation between the world and the brain. While the senses mitigate, the fields interact. Would the toroidal manifold of the entorhinal cortex exist without a Copernican-Mach universe? Of course not. In essence, as Northoff illustrates on his last book's cover, the universe is within us. He is neither being poetic nor ironic. Rather paradoxical. Brain's are oscillatory Copernican bulbs, the design elements of the brain reflect the Machian idea that everything affects.

Without direct perception, and using such poor tools as symbols and narratives to externalize memory, we're deeply impoverished as to the nature of memory and our ability to access it. But once we have a better grasp of the neuronal units, spatial-syntax, we will unlock every memory.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10500127/

Also to consider are the shapes and phases between oscillation. "It’s high dimensional complexity; the mind is an attractor in high dimensional phase space formed between neural oscillators." Emergent properties are not reducible to their constituent parts.

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

#173

Post by chain030 »

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

The smart ones saw this early on.

The rest are just catching up to the reality now.

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

#174

Post by buellerbueller »

skybrian wrote: post #112
buellerbueller wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This all assumes you have experts that you can talk to. But they might be difficult to find or expensive to hire. You wouldn't want to waste your lawyer's time on trivia.

Most of us don't have the domain expert in range, particularly pre-internet. I was merely suggesting you ask the most expert of the domain you have access to and work your way up the tree of knowledge from there.

However, the sibling commenter about books, journals, etc., is also an excellent suggestion.

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

#175

Post by chain030 »

palata wrote: post #168
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 go…

"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."

Great way of framing it - simple and cuts straight to the heart of the issue.

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

#176

Post by krapp »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #157
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the long term assumption is that the first path mentioned by trjordan mentioned above, where AI does all the work, is the goal. The second path is a necessary evil until the first path, which requires as yet unachieved improvements in AI (maybe approaching AGI, maybe not) becomes feasible. Burning out employees doesn't matter since they're still creating more value than they otherwise would, and they'll be replaced by AI anyway.

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

#177

Post by chain030 »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #144

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…

And you just described exactly why firms are going to be hurt in the long run by what is happening.

Short run? Sure shipping seems to accelerate. But as you mentioned - you are actually downtooling and optimising for what you do outside of work. Which is what labour always does. But now you have a tool to enhance it!

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

#178

Post by bccdee »

mallowdram wrote: post #162
bccdee wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Your first study says smartphone use is associated with conduct problems and hyperactivity in 6-year-olds; no teens or stupidity in sight.

Other studies discuss distraction, cyberbullying, bad diet/poor exercise, toddlers' sensory processing abilities, anxiety, and lost sleep. None of this covers stupidity, and much of it is not about teens.

The most interesting study you cited finds structural brain differences in preschool-aged children who spent more time on screens. It's still a stretch to make claims about the intelligence of teenagers based on the fact that babies who spend too much time on screens are, at age 3, less developed.

There's also a magnitude problem. Even if we assume smartphones do have some cognitive effect on teens, how can we know it's the only or largest one? You can't attribute anecdotes about kids being dumb to the presence of smartphones.

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

#179

Post by Gormo »

xpe wrote: post #143
Gormo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

I'm not making a blanket statement against LLMs for all use cases. I'm certain that LLMs are, for example, much more performant at indexing already-curated documents and locating information within them than humans operating manually are.

What I'm skeptical about isn't LLMs as a utilitarian tool to enhance productivity in specific use cases, but rather treating LLMs as sources of information in their own right, especially given their defining characteristic of generating novel text through stochastic inference.

I'm 100% behind RAG powering the search engines of the future. Using LLMs to find reliable sources within the vast ocean of dubious information on the modern internet? Perfect -- ChatGPT, find me those detailed blog posts by people competent in the problem domain. Asking LLMs to come up with their own answers to questions? No thanks. That's just an even worse version of "ask a random person to make up an answer on the spot".

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

#180

Post by mallowdram »

bccdee wrote: post #178
mallowdram wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your first study says smartphone use is associated with conduct problems and hyperactivity in 6-year-olds; no teens or stupidity in sight. Other studies discuss distraction, cyberbullying, bad diet/poor exercise, toddlers' sensory processing abilities, anxiety, and lost sleep. None of this covers stupidity, and much of it is not about teens. The most interesting study you cited finds structural brain differences in p…

The loss of attention, the erosion of reading and math skills as of 2025 are quantified, not anecdotal.

You keep ignoring: the basic science of creativity, imagination, learning all stem from free navigation and vicarious, trail and error path integration. It is deductive that devices that impair this impair learning. Learning is based on free exploration of space. Mammalian intelligence is way-finding that stitches together landmark and non-landmark space.

The idea you can't see a relationship between pre-school, three year-old impairment, short-form cyberbullying (in teens) and teen loss of learning, retention, attention-span, creativity, suggests you are the subject group. If you can't reason correlationally, than science is beyond your grasp. Your statements are only narrative and narrow, you pretend to grasp ideas and information, then make arbitrary statements.

That was the tip of the iceberg, that list.

Phones damage children's lives in multi-dinemsisons of emotional, memory, learning capability. You may be the study group's ideal subject. Face that possibility.

Post reply on HN