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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

211–220 of 656 posts

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but I think it's beside the point. The flip side of that argument, which is equally true, goes something like, "not doing cognitive push-ups leads to cognitive atrophy." There are skills we're losing that are probably ok to lose (e.g. spacial memory & reasoning vs GPS, mental arithmetic vs calculators), primarily because those are well bounded domains, so we understand the nature of the codependency we'r…

> There are skills we're losing that are probably ok to lose (e.g. spacial memory & reasoning vs GPS, mental arithmetic vs calculators) I'd argue these are not at all OK to lose. You live in an earthquake zone? You sure better know which way is north and where you have to walk to get back home when all the lines are down after a big one. You need to do a quick mental check if a number is roughly where it should be? Y…

Yep, there are tons. Growing food, building shelter, etc. But, for pretty much all of the skills we've allowed to atrophy in response to the advances of capitalism, technological & scientific progress, and societal changes, one COULD make the same basic argument, which is that losing that skill is detrimental to the individual, and yet here we are, not growing our own food, not building our own shelter, etc.

The arguments you make ≤ the values you actually hold ≤ the actions you take in support of those values.

I'm only interested in any such argument to the extent to which you've personally put it into practice. Otherwise, you're living proof of the argument's weakness. (To be fair, it's extremely hard to be internally consistent on this stuff! We all want better for ourselves than we have time and energy for. But that's my point: your fully subconscious emotional calculus will often undercut at least some of your loftier aspirations. Skills that don't matter anymore invariably atrophy due to the opportunity cost of keeping them honed.)

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#212
This is so spot on and I’ve been harping on this for about two years based on my own professional experiences. The surprising thing, though, is that upper management is ostensibly cool with incompetent people using AI to produce things that are clearly not accurate and have no idea whether it is or not. I believe this is because upper management themselves believe AI is much more accurate in its current form than it is. It’s not clear what if anything will change this but I believe many organizations are rotting from within because they no longer have stringent requirements.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#214
post #212

This is so spot on and I’ve been harping on this for about two years based on my own professional experiences. The surprising thing, though, is that upper management is ostensibly cool with incompetent people using AI to produce things that are clearly not accurate and have no idea whether it is or not. I believe this is because upper management themselves believe AI is much more accurate in its current form than it…

It’s because senior management builds processes with a base assumption of unreliability because a good chunky of employees are.

Thats why they’re relaxed - it’s just switching from one sort of unreliability to a slightly different flavour

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#215
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse we learn by doing

I’ve also seen along those lines “there is no compression algorithm for experience” - a nice summary of the hn posts from today.

It seems overly pessimistic about education. Book learning isn't everything, but a physics textbook could be seen as the compression of centuries of experience.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing plenty of internal work where I ask someone about their code, they ask Claude, and reply with "Claude says...". That's substantively different than going from assembly to C.

I am that someone thinking why you can't ask Claude yourself.

The better question may be "What value did that person acting as a glorified front-end for Claude create?" (vs. what they were expected to).

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#218
95% of the population is educated to think inside of the box and just rely on repetition/memorization. There’s not a lot of thinking happening in this world outside of a very small group of people. AI is not going to change that reality at least not until we educate our children for the AI age.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You are changing your argument by adding this: "when they started in a garage." No, you are. You first asked: "When was tech not bureaucratic and political?" To which I replied "in the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's when they started in garages". What did you fail to understand here? >Look at OpenAI and Anthropic, both fairly new companies that are excessively political already. Everything becomes political when you tell th…

Why did you just lie about what you wrote? What you actually wrote in the comment four hours ago: >60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, basically before the Google and Meta found out ads and money printing run the world Your lie just now: >To which I replied "in the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's when they started in garages". --- >What did you fail to understand here? Nothing because you never said it. Wild behavior.

>Nothing because you never said it.

You literally just quoted me saying before two comments above: "You are changing your argument by adding this: "when they started in a garage." and then pretend otherwise.

Now you're pretending I never said and acting like you didn't read it.

Are you unable to understand an argument made by adding the context of two sentence from two consecutive comments following up on each other(which you yourself quoted and said it changes the argument), or are you just a troll acting in bad faith pretending you can't understand just to score a cheap gotcha?

>Wild behavior.

Yes you have, which is why I'll stop replying to you now, to protect my sanity. Jesus Christ.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#220
post #79

Theory of Bounded Rationality and its implications is something they should teach everyone.

Thank you for sharing this. We are all less rational than we imagine ourselves to be, even if we're hyper-critical of ourselves and exercise a lot of intellectual humility.
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