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

MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

publichealthpolicyjournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 589 posts

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#211

Post by LocalPCGuy »

This is a bad and sloppy regurgitation of a previous (and more original) source[1] and the headline and article explicitly ignore the paper authors' plea[2] to avoid using the paper to try to draw the exact conclusions this article saying the paper draws.

The comments (some, not all) are also a great example of how cognitive bias can cause folks to accept information without doing a lot of due diligence into the actual source material.

> Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"?

> No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", "passivity", "trimming" and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it

> Additional vocabulary to avoid using when talking about the paper

> In addition to the vocabulary from Question 1 in this FAQ - please avoid using "brain scans", "LLMs make you stop thinking", "impact negatively", "brain damage", "terrifying findings".

1. https://www.brainonllm.com/

2. https://www.brainonllm.com/faq

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#212

Post by benterix »

el_benhameen wrote: post #199
benterix wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I fully agree. Using LLMs for learning concepts is great if you combine it with actively using/testing your knowledge. But outsourcing your tasks to an LLM makes your inner muscles weaker.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#213

Post by imchillyb »

hamburga wrote: post #151
dahart wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment reminds me of the so called Dunning Kruger Effect. That paper had pretty close to the same participation size, and participants were pulled from a single school (Cornell). It also has major methodology problems, and has had an uphill battle for replication and generalizability, actually losing the battle in some cases. And yet, we have a famous term for it that people love to use, often and incorrectly,…

Socrates famously complained about literacy making us stupider in Phaedrus. Which I believe still does have a large grain of truth. These things can make us simultaneously dumber and smarter, depending on usage.

Socrates was correct. In his day memory was treasured. Memory was how ideas were linked, how quotes were attained, and how arguments were made.

Writing leads to the rapid decline in memory function. Brains are lazy.

Ever travel to a new place and the brain pipes up with: ‘this place is just like ___’? That the brain’s laziness showing itself. The brain says: ‘okay I solved that, go back to rest.’ The observation is never true; never accurate.

Pattern recognition saves us time and enables us too survive situations that aren’t readily survivable. Pattern recognition leads to short cuts that do humanity a disservice.

Socrates recognized these traits in our brains and attempted to warn humanity of the damage these shortcuts do to our reasoning and comprehension skills. In Socrates day it was not unheard of for a person to memorize their entire family tree, or memorize an entire treaty and quote from it.

Humanity has -overwhelmingly- lost these abilities. We rely upon our external memories. We forget names. We forget important dates. We forget times and seasons. We forget what we were just doing!!!

Socrates had the right of it. Writing makes humans stupid. Reduces our token limits. Reduces paging table sizes. Reduces overall conversation length.

We may have more learning now, but what have we given up to attain it?

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#214

Post by jugg1es »

All of the nay-sayers in the comments here are thinking about this from the POV of a person who reached intellectual maturity without LLMs and now use it as a force multiplier, and rightly so.

However, I think that take is too short-sighted and doesn't take into account the effect that these products have on minds that have not yet reached maturity. What happens when you've been using ChatGPT since grade school and have effectively offloaded all the hard stuff to AI through college? Those people won't be using it as a force multiplier - they will be using it to perform basic tasks. Ray-Ban sells glasses now with LLMs built in with a camera and microphone so you can constantly interact with it all day. What happens when everyone has one of these devices and use it for everything?

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#215

Post by aprilthird2021 »

sudosteph wrote: post #88

Meanwhile my main use cases for AI outside of work: - Learning how to solder - Learning how to use a multimeter - Learning to build basic circuits on breadboxes - learning about solar panels, mppt, battery management system, and different variations of li-on batteries - learning about LoRa band / meshtastic / how to build my own antenna And every single one of these things I've learned I've also applied practically t…

Cool, but most people will get brain rotted by this. It's the same way we constantly talk about how social media is probably bad for people then some commenter comes and says he's not addicted and there's no other way he could communicate with his high school friends who live overseas and know about their lives. Not everyone will only get the positives out of any technology

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#216

Post by blackqueeriroh »

I’d encourage folks to listen to this podcast[1] or read the transcript which is done by two incredibly respected people, Dr. Cat Hicks, a psychologist who studies software teams, and Dr. Ashley Juavinett, who is a practicing and teaching neuroscientist. They note the many flaws in the study and discuss what actually good brain research would look like.

1: https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/17378968-...

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#217

Post by lr4444lr »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #189
benterix wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers. I don't care about the individual lines of code, I care about architecture, code structure, rigorous automated e2e tests, contracts with comprehensive validation, etc. Rather than waste a bunch of time pouring over agent PRs I just make them jump over extremely high static/analytic hurdles that guarantee functionality, then my only job is to ide…

I'd be very cautious about calling LLM output "an abstraction layer" in software.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#218

Post by benterix »

chaps wrote: post #197
benterix wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ...is it really only going to be these two? No middle ground, gradient, or possibly even a trichotomous variation of your split? > loose that capability You mean "lose". ;)

Well, in real life you always have a gradient (or, more usually, a normal distribution) - actually it would be interesting to understand what the actual distribution is and how it changes with time.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#219

Post by tmcb »

mrits wrote: post #177
benterix wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suppose the question is if we need to understand the concepts deeply. I'm not sure many of us did to begin with and we have shipped a lot of code.

Well, cargo cult programming is definitely a thing, and has been for a long time. It may “deliver value”, but it is not guaranteed. I believe entrepreneurs have an easier time having AI do the work for them because their value assessment framework is decoupled from code generation proper.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#220

Post by bgwalter »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #189
benterix wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers. I don't care about the individual lines of code, I care about architecture, code structure, rigorous automated e2e tests, contracts with comprehensive validation, etc. Rather than waste a bunch of time pouring over agent PRs I just make them jump over extremely high static/analytic hurdles that guarantee functionality, then my only job is to ide…

Compilers are sound abstractions. CompCert is literally a proven compiler.

LLMs make up whatever they feel like and are pretty bad at architecture as well.

Post reply on HN