I've stopped thinking to formulate content. I now think to prompt.
This makes complete sense though. We're simply trying to automate the human thinking process like we try to use technology to automate/handoff everything else.
MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
191–200 of 589 posts
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
That paper was debunked as a result of the open peer review enabled by preprints! Its astonishing how many people miss that and assume that closed peer review even performs that function well in the first place. For the absolute top journals or those with really motivated editors closed peer review is good. However, often it's worse...way worse (i.e. reams of correct seeming and surface level research without proper…
To your point the paper AFAIK wasn't debunked because someone read it carefully but because people tried to reproduce it. Peer reviews don't reproduce. I think we'd be better off with fewer peer reviews and more time spent actually reproducing results. That's why we had a while crisis named after that
> To your point the paper AFAIK wasn't debunked because someone read it carefully but because people tried to reproduce it.
Actually, from my recollection, it was debunked pretty quickly by people who read the paper because the paper was hot garbage. I saw someone point out that its graph of resistivity showed higher resistance than copper wire. It was no better than any of the other claimed room-temperature semiconductor papers that came out that year; it merely managed to catch virality on social media and therefore drove people to attempt to reproduce it.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#193Anecdote here, but when I was in grad school, I was talking to a PhD student i respected a lot. Whenever he read a paper, he would try to write the code out and get it working. I would take a couple of months but he could whip it up in a few days. He explained to me that it was just practice and the more you practice the better you become. He not only coded things quickly, he started analyzing papers quicker too and…
We are literally witnessing the skills split right in front of our eyes: (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability. For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years.
I think the bigger issue is outsourcing all or most thought to a LLM (data labeler really). Using tools you don't understand from first principles has always been commonplace and not really an issue. But not thinking anymore is new for most of us.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#194Management roles have always involved outsourcing cognitive work to subordinates. Are we seeing a cognitive decline there too? Maybe delegation was the original misalignment problem.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#195Anecdote here, but when I was in grad school, I was talking to a PhD student i respected a lot. Whenever he read a paper, he would try to write the code out and get it working. I would take a couple of months but he could whip it up in a few days. He explained to me that it was just practice and the more you practice the better you become. He not only coded things quickly, he started analyzing papers quicker too and…
>I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning. Alternatively they're just learning/building intuition for something else. The level of abstraction is moving upwards. I don't know why people don't seem to grok that the level of the current models is the floor, not the ceiling. Despite the naysayers like Gary Marcus, there is in fact no sign of scaling or progress slowing down at all on A…
This reads to me as extremely defensive.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#196I can't say I'm surprised by this. The brain is, figuratively speaking, a muscle. Learning through successes and (especially) failures is hard work, though not without benefit, in that the trials and exercises your brain works through exercises the 'muscle', making it stronger. Using LLMs to do replace the effort we would've otherwise endured to complete a task short-circuits that exercising function, and I would sug…
Sounds bullish for AI. It's like a drug. You start using it, and think you have super powers, and then you've forgotten how to think, and you need AI just to maybe be as smart as you were before. Every company will need enterprise AI solutions just to maybe get the same amount of productivity as they got before without it.
This is sad but true.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#197Anecdote here, but when I was in grad school, I was talking to a PhD student i respected a lot. Whenever he read a paper, he would try to write the code out and get it working. I would take a couple of months but he could whip it up in a few days. He explained to me that it was just practice and the more you practice the better you become. He not only coded things quickly, he started analyzing papers quicker too and…
We are literally witnessing the skills split right in front of our eyes: (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability. For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years.
> (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly loose that capability.
> loose that capability
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
And here I'm wondering if I'm putting my career at risk by not trying them out. Probably both are true: you should try them out and then use them where they are useful, not for everything.
HN is full of people who say LLMs aren't good at coding and don't "really" produce productivity gains. None of my professional life reflects that whatsoever. When used well, LLMs are exceptional and putting out large amounts of code of sufficient quality. My peers have switched entire engineering departments to LLM-first development and are reporting that the whole org is moving 2x as fast even after they fired the 5…
Yesterday I used Warp’s LLM integrations to write two shell scripts that would have taken me longer to author myself than to do the task manually. Of the three options, this was the fastest by a wide margin.
For this kind of low stakes, easily verifiable task it’s hard to argue against using LLMs for me.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#199Anecdote here, but when I was in grad school, I was talking to a PhD student i respected a lot. Whenever he read a paper, he would try to write the code out and get it working. I would take a couple of months but he could whip it up in a few days. He explained to me that it was just practice and the more you practice the better you become. He not only coded things quickly, he started analyzing papers quicker too and…
We are literally witnessing the skills split right in front of our eyes: (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability. For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years.
What about people who use the machines to augment their learning process? I find that being able to ask questions, particularly “dumb” questions that I don’t want to bother someone else with and niche questions that might not be answered well in the corpus, helps me better understand new concepts. If you just take the answers and move on, then sure, you’re going to have a bad time. But if you critically interrogate the answers and synthesize the information, I don’t see how this isn’t a _better_ era for people who want to develop a deep understanding of something.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#200Anecdote here, but when I was in grad school, I was talking to a PhD student i respected a lot. Whenever he read a paper, he would try to write the code out and get it working. I would take a couple of months but he could whip it up in a few days. He explained to me that it was just practice and the more you practice the better you become. He not only coded things quickly, he started analyzing papers quicker too and…
>I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning. Alternatively they're just learning/building intuition for something else. The level of abstraction is moving upwards. I don't know why people don't seem to grok that the level of the current models is the floor, not the ceiling. Despite the naysayers like Gary Marcus, there is in fact no sign of scaling or progress slowing down at all on A…
I remember this exact discussion (and exact situation) with WYSIWYG UI design tools.
They were still useful, and did solve a significant portion of user problems.
They also created even more problems, and no one really went out of work long term because of them.