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The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

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Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#291

Post by daxfohl »

obscurette wrote: post #204
daxfohl wrote: post #165

The education system is already a relic of the past. All the points mentioned in the article assumes that a classroom full of students writing five-paragraph essays on The Red Badge of Courage in 12-point TNR with one-inch margins, hastily graded by an overworked, underpaid public school teacher is still the best way to teach kids in 2025 about critical thinking. I picture going forward we'll have much more personali…

Are you a parent? Have you ever seen a kid growing up? 90%+ of kids wouldn't care at all about any work or learning without social pressure from parents, teachers and peers. That's the whole point of schools – to create a social pressure to put all this knowledge into heads of kids in hope that some of this would be useful for them. And to do it through all these awfully messy years we call childhood and adolescence.

Yeah, but that's not the point I was trying to make. My main point was that traditional thinking is that schools need to fight AI or students won't learn. But I think we'd be better off working with AI instead, customizing education according to each student's interests and needs, providing immediate feedback, etc. And I expect school buildings themselves will still be used, if that wasn't clear. I'm not pitching a "school from home" campaign, not after 2020 forced one on us.

Of course teachers still have a role in maintaining discipline, motivation, and things that computers can't do, as well as validating that the AI systems are behaving correctly for the things they can.

The biggest thing I don't like about that approach is it's yet another bump in screen time, which, eh, if I think hard enough on that aspect, it maybe makes me hate the whole idea, so.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#292

Post by jrflowers »

rimeice wrote: post #5

I'm undecided on this, initially I was on the “this is bad, we’re outsourcing our thinking” bandwagon, now after using AI for lots of different types of tasks for a while now, I feel like generally I’ve learnt so much, so much more quickly. Would I recall it all without my new crutch? Maybe not, but I may not have learnt it in the first place without it.

> the “this is bad, we’re outsourcing our thinking”

> Would I recall it all without my new crutch? Maybe not

This just seems like you’ve shifted your definition of “learning” to no longer include being able to remember things. Like “outsourcing your thinking isn’t bad if you simply expect less from your brain” isn’t a ringing endorsement for language models

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#293

Post by obscurette »

daxfohl wrote: post #291
obscurette wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a parent? Have you ever seen a kid growing up? 90%+ of kids wouldn't care at all about any work or learning without social pressure from parents, teachers and peers. That's the whole point of schools – to create a social pressure to put all this knowledge into heads of kids in hope that some of this would be useful for them. And to do it through all these awfully messy years we call childhood and adolescence.

Yeah, but that's not the point I was trying to make. My main point was that traditional thinking is that schools need to fight AI or students won't learn. But I think we'd be better off working with AI instead, customizing education according to each student's interests and needs, providing immediate feedback, etc. And I expect school buildings themselves will still be used, if that wasn't clear. I'm not pitching a "…

It doesn't work for many reasons. For example it's completely normal for a young people to do things only because they are forced to. It doesn't matter how you customize it, how immediate your feedback is etc. I know that I'd used AI to do a lot of school work without learning anything because why not? Fortunately I hadn't any chance for that in seventies. And who/what determines each student's interests and needs? And is it even OK to align for these? I can very confidently say that if my school would align to my specific interests and needs back then, I'd be dead by now. I wouldn't have knowledge and experience to survive changing times.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#294

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jncfhnb wrote: post #247
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can’t say the author’s fixation on reading long texts resonates with me It’s an attention and working memory test. I don’t think I’ve ever prided myself on focus. But signing off social media ten years ago has absolutely left me in a competitive place when it comes to deep thinking, and that’s not because I’ve gotten better at it. > It wasn’t practical to convey knowledge in a short form previously because printing…

> This is entirely ahistoric. Pamphlets and books published in volumes, where each volume would today be a chapter, was the norm. The novel is a modern invention. I’d be curious to see some examples but I doubt these are anywhere near the size of a one or two page blog post. The referenced example is principia mathematica

> I’d be curious to see some examples

Victorian-era serialised fiction [1]. The Federalist Papers. Everything on clay tablets. Technologically speaking, you don't get a lot of large volumes until the advent of the printing press and mass literacy [2].

> referenced example is principia mathematica

Published in the 20th century.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_books#The_printing_...

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#295

Post by dns_snek »

DrewADesign wrote: post #253
dns_snek wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The core premise-- we will rely on AI so much that we will de-skill ourselves-- requires acknowledging that AI works. No it doesn't require that because the vast majority of people aren't rational actors and they don't optimize for the quality of their work - they optimize for their own comfort and emotional experience. They'll happily produce and defend low quality work if they get to avoid the discomfort of havin…

It doesn't have to be perfect, or even good, to 'work': it just has to perform the expected function well enough to satisfy their use case, which is low-effort text generation without significant quality requirements. Therefore, it absolutely works.

In that case, nobody ever argued that LLMs aren't capable of generating low effort, low quality text so I don't understand the point of the earlier comment. We don't have to "accept" this as it was never questioned.

But what does it matter? After the game of semantics is all said and done, the work is still being done to a lower standard than before, and people are letting their skills atrophy.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#296

Post by hyc_symas »

erichocean wrote: post #205
dagmx wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’ve made a decision based on three months of use. I am legitimately interested in your experience though. What are you creating where you can see the results in that time frame to make entire business decisions like that? I would really like to see those kinds of productivity gains myself.

I'll give you an easy example. LMDB has a (very) long-standing bug where "DUPSORT" databases become corrupted over time. Separately, I wanted to make some changes to LMDB but the code is so opaque that it's hard to do anything with it (safely). So I gave the entire codebase to Gemini Pro 2.5 and had it develop a glossary for local variable renames and for structure member renames. I then hand-renamed all of the struc…

What's the bug ID, have you submitted the fix back?

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#297

Post by simianwords »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #289
simianwords wrote: post #101

Why does everyone talk about this part of the issue but never the other one? Society can’t progress if we can’t delegate the boring stuff and work on complicated stuff. How else will it progress? Do you think we could have progressed to this level if we were still calculating stuff by hand? Log tables??

who decides what is boring stuff? there are prompts on github to build entire applications from scratch. if you are going to go in this direction, what happens to the critical thinking pathways inside your brain that no longer have to work?

Who decided doing arithmetic is boring and we need calculators?

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#298

Post by stogot »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #219
mcny wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started programming before stack overflow, was never any good (still am not to this day), but I was always scared of asking questions on stack overflow. I felt like there was a certain amount of homework expected when you ask a question and usually by the time I did enough work to post a question, it was moot because I would have solved my problem usually by stringing together two or more stack overflow questions t…

Oh, yeah. SO is infamous for treating question-askers badly. I have used LLMs for some time, and have no intentions of ever going back to SO. I get tired of being insulted. > The only stupid question is the one you don't ask. - A poster on my old art teacher's studio wall.

Wikipedia does the same to those who contribute

StackOverflow intimidated me for reasons you say. What is it with the power trip that some of these forum mods have?

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#299

Post by AlecSchueler »

jader201 wrote: post #43
AlecSchueler wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you didn't lose your ability to think to scrolling social media ... Didn't we?

> However, I think a lot of people lost their ability to think by scrolling social media and that is problematic.

I only read two sentences max of any comment since I downloaded TikTok.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#300

Post by cout »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #219
mcny wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started programming before stack overflow, was never any good (still am not to this day), but I was always scared of asking questions on stack overflow. I felt like there was a certain amount of homework expected when you ask a question and usually by the time I did enough work to post a question, it was moot because I would have solved my problem usually by stringing together two or more stack overflow questions t…

Oh, yeah. SO is infamous for treating question-askers badly. I have used LLMs for some time, and have no intentions of ever going back to SO. I get tired of being insulted. > The only stupid question is the one you don't ask. - A poster on my old art teacher's studio wall.

SO wasn't even the first site with this phenomenon. IMO SO is way more cordial than some of the forums from the early 00s. And before that, many irc channels were known for being brutal to people coming for help. I was part of the problem there until I realized there was a problem and decided to change my approach, but it took years to unlearn what I had picked up from other channels ops.
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