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Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

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Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#231

Post by smokel »

wisty wrote: post #160
sdoering wrote: post #111

This reminds me of the recurring pattern with every new medium: Socrates worried writing would destroy memory, Gutenberg's critics feared for contemplation, novels were "brain softening," TV was the "idiot box." That said, I'm not sure "they've always been wrong before" proves they're wrong now. Where I'm skeptical of this study: - 54 participants, only 18 in the critical 4th session - 4 months is barely enough time…

Soapbox time. They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising reasonably large texts was common. See, e.g. the book Memory Craft. We're becoming increasingly like the Wall E people, too lazy and stupid to do anything without our machines doing it for us, as we offload increasing amounts onto them. And it's not even that…

> Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts

It seems more likely that there were only a handful of people who could. There still are a handful of people who can, and they are probably even better than in the olden times [1] (for example because there are simply more people now than back then.)

[1] https://oberlinreview.org/35413/news/35413/ (random first link from Google)

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#232

Post by titzer »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #189
wisty wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soapbox time. They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising reasonably large texts was common. See, e.g. the book Memory Craft. We're becoming increasingly like the Wall E people, too lazy and stupid to do anything without our machines doing it for us, as we offload increasing amounts onto them. And it's not even that…

Brains are adaptive. We're not getting dumber, we're just adapting to a new environment. Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse. As for the productivity paradox, this discounts the reality that we wouldn't even be able to scale the institutions we're scaling without the tech. Whether that scaling is a good thing is debatable.

Brains are adaptive but skills are cumulative. You can't get good at what you don't practice.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#233

Post by blibble »

vidarh wrote: post #167
mcv wrote: post #98

This seems to confirm my feeling when using AI too much. It's easy to get started, but I can feel my brain engaging less with the problem than I'm used to. It can form a barrier to real understanding, and keeps me out of my flow. I recently worked on something very complex I don't think I would have been able to tackle as quickly without AI; a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using…

My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems. Writing code has just typically been how I've needed to solve those problems. That has increasingly shifted to "just" reviewing code and focusing on the architecture and domain models. I get to spend more time on my actual job.

this is the standard consultant vs employee angle

if you're a consultant/contractor that's bid a fixed amount for a job: you're incentivised to slop out as much as possible to hit the complete the contract as quickly as possible

and then if you do a particularly bad job then you'll be probably kept on to fix up the problems

vs. an permanent employee that is incentivised to do the job well, sign it off and move onto the next task

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#235

Post by moffers »

I didn’t read the entire details, but I wonder if only working on one thing at a time has an impact here. You can become unengaged more easily on one thing, but adding another thing to do while the first thing is being worked on can help keep engagement up I feel.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#236

Post by mountainb »

nindalf wrote: post #224
wisty wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soapbox time. They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising reasonably large texts was common. See, e.g. the book Memory Craft. We're becoming increasingly like the Wall E people, too lazy and stupid to do anything without our machines doing it for us, as we offload increasing amounts onto them. And it's not even that…

> Homer Simpson I can't stress this enough, Homer Simpson is a fictional character from a cartoon. I would not use him in an argument about economics any more than I would use the Roadrunner to argue for road safety.

No, it's useful evidence in the same way that contemporaneous fiction is often useful evidence. The first season aired from 1989-1990. The living conditions from the show were plausible. I know because I was alive during that time. My best friend was the son of a vacuum cleaner salesman with a high school education, and they owned a three bedroom house in a nice area, two purebred dogs, and always had new cars. His mom never worked in any capacity. My friend played baseball on a travel team and eventually he went to a private high school.

A 2025 Homer is only plausible if he had some kind of supplemental income (like a military pension or a trust fund), if Marge had a job, if the house was in a depressed region, or he was a higher level supervisor. We can use the Simpsons as limited evidence of contemporary economic conditions in the same way that we could use the depictions of the characters in the Canterbury Tales for the same purpose.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#237

Post by n4r9 »

cess11 wrote: post #230
n4r9 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a two year old and often worry that I'll teach him some intuitive arithmetic technique, then school will later force a different method and mark him down despite getting the right answer. What if it ends up making him hate school, maths, or both?

Commonly school is teaching a method. "Getting the right answer" is just a byproduct of applying the method. If you tell your kid that they should just learn the methods you teach and be dismissive or angry about school trying to teach them other techniques, that's probably going to cause some issues downstream. Techniques of an "intuitive" character often lack or have formal underpinnings that are hard to understand…

I hope that I wouldn't be dismissive or angry. My worry is that my son will feel dejected because he (correctly) thinks he understands something but is told he's wrong. I also worry about him getting external validation from following a method, and will value that over genuine understanding and flexible thinking. But I see your point that it's my responsibility to help him work through that and engage with the syllabus.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#238

Post by jeffreygoesto »

mcv wrote: post #98

This seems to confirm my feeling when using AI too much. It's easy to get started, but I can feel my brain engaging less with the problem than I'm used to. It can form a barrier to real understanding, and keeps me out of my flow. I recently worked on something very complex I don't think I would have been able to tackle as quickly without AI; a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using…

Elk (Eclipse Layout Kernel) is a very good package solving that, you might want to check it's Javascript port https://github.com/kieler/elkjs

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#239

Post by [deleted] »

duskdozer wrote: post #222
Madmallard wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[redacted because the replier is in the business of not telling the truth]

And your political views are clouding your judgment of what a proper response to disease is. If surgical masks are insufficient because people are getting Covid sitting in rooms with others re-breathing the same air for hours, then valid solutions are to remove the people from the environment, remove the hazard from the environment, or provide better means to protect people from the environment, not increase people's…

[deleted]

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#240

Post by teeray »

Difwif wrote: post #196
thefaux wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like it conflates problem solving with the production of artifacts. It seems highly possible to me that the explosion of ai generated code is ultimately creating more problems than it is solving and that the friction of manual coding may ultimately prove to be a great virtue.

This statement feels like a farmer making a case for using their hands to tend the land instead of a tractor because it produces too many crops. Modern farming requires you to have an ecosystem of supporting tools to handle the scale and you need to learn new skills like being a diesel mechanic. How we work changes and the extra complexity buys us productivity. The vast majority of software will be AI generated, tool…

This is a false equivalence. If the farmer had some processing step which had to be done by hand, having mountains of unprocessed crops instead of a small pile doesn’t improve their throughput.
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