Thoughts on thinking • Hacker News Board

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#271

Post by jonplackett » Sat, May 17, 2025, 7:21 AM UTC

fennecbutt wrote: post #181

abathologist wrote: post #159

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years. The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they…

99% if not 100% of human thought and general output is derivative. Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.

I think you misunderstand the point. It’s about intention. Are you creating this thing for the purpose of transforming or communicating? Or are you just making it for some businessy reason.

Yes, elves are derivative, as was a lot of the Tolkien world in a way - being intentionally based on ww1 - but its intention was to create something beautiful and amazing and communicative and transformational.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#272

Post by djhn » Sat, May 17, 2025, 7:23 AM UTC

don_neufeld wrote: post #176

hammock wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m very glad my kid’s school has hardcore banned them. What does that mean, I’m curious? The schools and university I grew up in had a “single-sanction honor code” which meant if you were caught lying or cheating even once you would be expelled. And you signed the honor code at the top of every test. My more progressive friends at other schools who didn’t have an honor code happily poo-pooed it as a repugnantly ha…

The school has an academic honestly policy which explicitly bans it, under “Cheating”, which includes: “Falsifying or inventing any academic work, including the use of AI (ChatGPT, etc)” Additionally, as mentioned, the school is taking actions to change how work is done to ensure students are actually doing their own work - such as requiring written assignments be completed during class time, or giving homework on ph…

Asking as a non-American non-school-pupil-parent: what does it mean for a school to be competitive in this context? Competitive entry into a school I understand, but that threshold has been cleared. Isn’t US college admission based on essays and standardised tests like GMAT, SAT, GRE?

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#273

Post by jonplackett » Sat, May 17, 2025, 7:25 AM UTC

parodysbird wrote: post #258

fennecbutt wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% if not 100% of human thought and general output is derivative. Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.

To emphasize again part of the post above: "The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation". When I write a poem in a birthday card for my wife to give her on her birthday, very little of the "meaning" that will be communicated to (and more importantly with ) her is really from some generic semantic interpretation of the tokens. Instead, almost all of the meaning will come from it being an actual…

Someone just the other day told me about how they used to have a group WhatsApp where they’d share these hand made memes. Just a bunch of guys photoshopping dumb stuff. It went on for years.

One day one of them discovers AI and post anything made with AI - initially it’s great, it’s much better quality than what they could photoshop. Everyone jumps on board.

But after a day or so, the joke is over. The love has gone. The whole things falls apart and no-one posts anything anymore.

It turns out - as you say - that the meaning - founded on the insight and EFFORT to create it - was more important than the anccuracy and speed.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#274

Post by keiferski » Sat, May 17, 2025, 7:27 AM UTC

I am somewhat in disbelief as my reaction to AI tools has been pretty much the exact opposite to the author’s. I had thousands of short notes, book ideas, etc. before AI, most of which were scattered in a notepad program.

Since AI, I’ve made genuine, real progress on many of them, mostly by discussing the concepts with ChatGPT, planning outlines, creating research reading lists, considering angles I hadn’t considered, and so on. It’s been an insanely productive process.

Like any technology, AI tools are in some sense a reflection of their users. If you find yourself wanting to offload all thinking to the machine, that’s on you, not the tool.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#275

Post by cameldrv » Sat, May 17, 2025, 7:30 AM UTC

abathologist wrote: post #159

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years. The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they…

I've personally noticed this as a big trend. For example, I had become more and more reliant on my GPS in the car. I've not really been the outer control loop of the vehicle. An automated system tells me what to do.

I recently got a running watch. It suggests workouts that will help me improve my speed (which honestly I don't even care about!). If you turn it on it will blare at you if you're going too fast or too slow.

When you use any social media, you're not really choosing what you're looking at. You just scroll and the site decides what you're going to look at next.

Anyhow recently I've been reducing my usage of these things, and it's made me feel much better. Even navigating the car without the GPS makes me feel much more engaged and alive.

Ultimately one of the core things that makes us human is making decisions for ourselves. When we cede this in the name of efficiency, we gain something but we also lose something.

Marshall Brain wrote an interesting short book about this called Manna.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#276

Post by russellbeattie » Sat, May 17, 2025, 7:30 AM UTC

AI's profound effect on communication is something I haven't worked out yet. Usually I'm pretty good at extrapolating tech trends out to the near future in broad strokes, but there's this paradox I'm running into: Creating long form content is now easy with the help of AI, but no one is going to read that content because AI will summarize it for us.

I can't figure out what the end result of this is going to be - society is going to become both more and less verbose at the same time.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#277

Post by neoden » Sat, May 17, 2025, 7:34 AM UTC

Homo sapience had a long period of its history when it was crucial to have a well developed body. Today we need to perform useless exercises just to maintain our bodies in somewhat acceptable shape. This might be applied to intellect as well.

In the coming era of unnecessary intellectual power we might need to do thinking exercises as something that helps maintaining a healthful (and beautiful) mind though our core values would shift towards something else, something that is regarded as good but not mandatory for personal success today.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#278

Post by whyage » Sat, May 17, 2025, 7:34 AM UTC

abathologist wrote: post #159

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years. The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they…

> The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation

That's a myopic point of view. Personal transformation is as significant, if not more. Production-oriented pastimes like painting, gardening, or organizing your stamp collection can do wonders for the mind. Their goals can be remaining sane in this crazy world, not producing the best painting ever, growing conversation-starting plants, or showing off your stamp collection. It's about doing for the sake of being.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#279

Post by Cipater » Sat, May 17, 2025, 7:39 AM UTC

abakker wrote: post #193

MoonGhost wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI pushes you towards That's interesting point. But here is the thing: you are supposed to drive. Not AI god. Look at it as at an assistant whom you can interrupt, instruct, correct, ask to redo. While focusing on 'what' you can delegate it some 'how' problems.

I for one, thing directing subordinates to do something I could be doing kinda … sucks? Like, I get that’s how you have to work with LLMs, but it isn’t a fun thing to do for me.

Do you do every single thing that you are capable of doing yourself?

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#280

Post by sabaimran » Sat, May 17, 2025, 7:45 AM UTC

ay wrote: post #115

Very strange. Either the author uses some magic AI, or I am holding it wrong. I used LLMs since a couple of years, as a nice tool. Besides that: I have tried using LLMs to create cartoon pictures. The first impression is “wow”; but after a bunch of pictures you see the evidently repetitive “style”. Using LLMs to write poetry results is also quite cool at first, but after a few iterations you see the evidently repetit…

We need to distinctly think about what tasks are actually suitable for LLMs. Used poorly, they'll gut our abilities to think thoughtfully. The push, IMO, should be for using them for verification and clarification, but not for replacements in understanding and creativity.

Example: Do the problem sets yourself. If you're getting questions wrong, dig deeper with an AI assistant to find gaps in your knowledge. Do NOT let the AI do the problem sets first.

I think it was similar to how we used calculators in school in the 2010s at least. We learned the principles behind the formulae and how to do them manually, before introducing the calculators to abstract the usage of the tools.

I've let that core principle shape some of how we're designing our paper-reading assistant, but still thinking through the UX patterns -- https://openpaper.ai/blog/manifesto.