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Thoughts on thinking

dcurt.is

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Re: Thoughts on thinking

#291

Post by NobodytheHobbit »

alganet wrote: post #191
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.

I'm not so sure about it. Maybe it's like that because there aren't many novel opportunities for varied experiences nowadays. The pointy ear sounds trivial in our experience, but it is radically different than ordinary everyday thought when observed as a piece of a whole imagined new world. Of course, pointy ears now are not a novelty anymore. But that's beyond the point. By the time they were conceived, human experi…

You're trying to expand the human experience instead of individual human experience which is really yours from your perspective and mine from my perspective if I can be redundant by enumerating. The frustration comes from the sacrifice of individual experience to this weird aggregated experience in the machine. It will push the capability of technology but does that service the aim of luxury made easy for the many to acquire as tech is supposed to do? What profit a person to gain the whole world but lose the very thing that makes themselves them? It feels systemically dehumanizing.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#292

Post by johnisgood »

layer8 wrote: post #167
johnisgood wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can learn a lot from LLMs though, same with, say, Wikipedia. You need curiosity. You need the desire to learn. If you do not have it, then of course you will get nowhere, LLMs or no LLMs.

From the article: “The irony is that I now know more than I ever would have before AI. But I feel slightly dumber. A bit more dull. LLMs give me finished thoughts, polished and convincing, but none of the intellectual growth that comes from developing them myself. The output from AI answers questions. It teaches me facts. But it doesn’t really help me know anything new.” I think the thesis is that with AI there is le…

I know, that is why you need the desire, the will to learn. I have been using LLMs for this, so I know it is possible. I understand what you are saying though, and it is indeed a sad state of affairs, but then again, this was the case due to search engines, Wikipedia, and so forth, long before LLMs.

Again, you can truly learn a lot using LLMs, but you have to approach it properly. It does not have to be just "facts", and sometimes, even learning "facts" is learning.

I can use LLMs and learn nothing, but I can use LLMs to learn, too!

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#293

Post by prmph »

IDK. I cancelled my Claude subscription because for the highly creative code I am working on, it is maybe useful for like 5% of it, and LLM produced code is still mostly slop.

I'm generally able to detect LLM writing output; In most contexts, I discount it as fluff with little depth.

AI produced paintings are still weird and uncanny.

So I'm utterly unable to identify with the author's sense of futility whenever they want to write or code. I truly believe the output of my skill and creativity is not diminished by the existence of AI.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#294

Post by johnisgood »

vendiddy wrote: post #163
calebkaiser wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can learn an incredible amount. I do quite a bit of research as a core part of my job, and LLMs are amazing at helping me find relevant research to help me explore ideas. Something like "I'm thinking of X. Does this make sense and do you know of any similar research?" I also mentor some students whose educational journey has been fundamentally changed by them. Like any other tool, it's more a question of how they…

I've used it these past few months to better understand the PDF format, Nix, and a few other technical concepts. I try to use AI to automate things I already know and force myself to learn things I don't know. It takes discipline/curiosity but it can be a net positive.

Thank you, and the previous commenter. I am tired of trying to convince people that LLM can be a really good tool for learning. :/

They should just simply try it. Start with something you actually know to see how useful it might be to you with your prompts.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#295

Post by baxtr »

> Learning by reading LLM output is cheap. Real exercise for your mind comes from building the output yourself.

Fully agree.

Sorry to say it like that but I thought the post was a bit "whiny". I really like the thought process of the author. An LLM would have never created a post like that. I think he should not give up.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#296

Post by vaylian »

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.

> 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.

That's easy. The hard part is to explain it to other people, because we lack a shared background and terminology to explain it.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#297

Post by worldsayshi »

perrygeo wrote: post #182
worldsayshi wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel there's a glaring counter point to this. I have never felt more compelled to try out whatever coding idea that pops into my head. I can make Claude write a poc in seconds to make the idea more concrete. And I can write into a good enough tool in a few afternoons. Before this all those ideas would just never materialize. I mean I get the existential angst though. There's a lot of uncertainty about where all thi…

Good point. It's not that AI is "pushing us" towards anything. AI can be a muse that elevates our creativity. IF we use it that way. But do we use it that way? I think there will be some who do. The majority of users seem to want convenience at any expense. Most are unconcerned with a loss of agency, almost enthusiastic about it if it removes the labor of thinking.

Agency only goes away if control of AI is ultimately centralized. If we end up in a world where anyone can run good enough models on consumer devices and we can install our own models into off the shelf humanoid robots I don't see that we have lost agency.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#298

Post by johnisgood »

hooverd wrote: post #222
johnisgood wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can learn a lot from LLMs though, same with, say, Wikipedia. You need curiosity. You need the desire to learn. If you do not have it, then of course you will get nowhere, LLMs or no LLMs.

Wikipedia isn't going to write your paper for you. I don't see the difference between an LLM and one of those paper writing services in this context.

We are talking about learning. You can learn much more from LLMs than Wikipedia, because if you do not understand something, you can always ask an LLM about it, and it would reply to you in any way you want; whatever helps you learn better.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#299

Post by ankit219 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #81
curl-up wrote: post #31

> The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation itself, but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel superior to others not being able to create? I find this to be a very unhealthy relationship to creativity. My mixer can mix dough better than I can, but…

> So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation itself, but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel superior to others not being able to create? I find this to be a very unhealthy relationship to creativity. People realize this at various points in their life, and some not at all. In terms the author might accept, the metaphor of the stoic archer comes to mind. Focusing on the action, not the targ…

This is a very millennial style of thinking (myself included). It feels like people can't just have a hobby, they have to be great at it. The sense of greatness, the sense of accomplishment is not merely doing a thing, but getting to an outcome which is measurable and/or which we can tell others or put on social media. I thought it was only me, but turns out this is all around me. I started gardening, spending 15 mins a day, I talk to a friend around it. They tell me about this gardening insta page, tips, and community. The community has people doing things at a better pace / rate than me. Putting in more effort than me. I suddenly feel that rush to have some competition. Then it becomes boring because the fun was the fifteen minutes i spent in there, not the part where it occupied rest of my day. Side projects, writing, painting, I somehow see people doing this all the time. Picking the wrong goals, or expecting a dopamine hit from wrong places.

Choosing the right goals is the great way to put that in perspective. I don't know what happened with hobbies, but it's not there anymore. (so much that i dont tell people i do xyz things on the side)

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#300

Post by globular-toast »

cameldrv wrote: post #275
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 sl…

For road navigation it might be worth seeing if your country has a proper system in place and learning how to use it. In the UK, for example, there is a simple "algorithm" to get you where you need to go. The signage is hierarchical starting from motorways and trunk routes and descending down to primary and secondary local routes. So to navigate anywhere you go via trunk routes and follow the signs to the nearest trunk destination beyond where you are trying to go. Then as you get closer you should start to see your actual destination appear on the signs as a primary route. Once you learn the system it's really quite possible to navigate by yourself anywhere.

The nice thing is you won't end up routed down some ridiculous difficult road just because the GPS says so and it calculated it would save 0.2 seconds if you were somehow going at the speed limit the whole way. Your brain includes a common sense module, and it's usually right.

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