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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

#301

Post by casey2 »

The goal of any study is to build a mental model in your head. The math curriculum for example is based on analysis so we gain an intuitive feel for physics and engineering. If the utility of building a model for research is low (essentially 0 since the advent of the internet) this should be a specialist skill, not general education.

A general education should focus on structure, all mental models built shall reinforce one another. For specific recommendations, completely replace the current Euler inspired curricula with one based on category theory. Strive to make all home and class work multimedia, multi-discipline presentations. Seriously teach one constructed meta-language from kindergarten. And stop passing along students who fail, clearly communicate the requirements.

I believe this is vital for students. Think about Student-AI interaction. Does this thing the AI is telling me fit with my understanding of the world, if it does they will accept it. If the student can think structurally the mismatch will be as obvious as a square peg in a round hole. A simple check for an isomorphism. Essentially expediting a proof certificate of the model output.

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

#302

Post by direwolf20 »

taco_emoji wrote: post #281
vidarh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't care what my "actual" job is. I like writing code. I like exercising my brain in that way. I like building things. I do not want to be a supervisor of AI agents. I do not want to engineer prompts, I want to engineer software.

Devs are one of the last fields to be ruined by capitalism, but it has finally arrived here too.

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

#303

Post by alt187 »

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…

It's more complex than that. The three pillars of learning are theory (finding out about the thing), practice (doing the thing) and metacognition (being right, or more importantly, wrong. And correcting yourself.). Each of those steps reinforce neural pathways. They're all essential in some form or another.

Literacy, books, saving your knowledge somewhere else removes the burden of remembering everything in your head. But they don't come into effect into any of those processes. So it's an immensely bad metaphor. A more apt one is the GPS, that only leaves you with practice.

That's where LLMs come in, and obliterate every single one of those pillars on any mental skill. You never have to learn a thing deeply, because it's doing the knowing for you. You never have to practice, because the LLM does all the writing for you. And of course, when it's wrong, you're not wrong. So nothing you learn.

There are ways to exploit LLMs to make your brain grow, instead of shrink. You could make them into personalized teachers, catering to each student at their own rhythm. Make them give you problems, instead of ready-made solutions. Only employ them for tasks you already know how to make perfectly. Don't depend on them.

But this isn't the future OpenAI or Anthropic are gonna gift us. Not today, and not in a hundred years, because it's always gonna be more profitable to run a sycophant.

If we want LLMs to be the "better" instead of the "worse", we'll have to fight for it.

Yes, I wrote this comment under someone else's comment before, but it seems to apply to yours even better.

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

#304

Post by footy »

theblazehen wrote: post #293
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I feel like it makes my ADHD worse. If I code “manually” then I can enter hyperfocus/flow and it’s relaxing. If I use AI to code then I have to sit around waiting for it to respond and I get distracted and start something else, forgetting what I was doing before. Maybe there’s a better workflow for me though.

Try running multiple agents - more task switching overhead, but I find planning in one agent while another is executing is a good balance for me, and avoids the getting-distracted trap

task switching is precisely an issue with adhd though

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

#305

Post by sodapopcan »

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.

> My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems.

You're like 836453th person to say this. It's not untrue, but many of us will take writing over reviewing any day. Reviewing is like the worst part of the job.

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

#306

Post by Izkata »

wiz21c wrote: post #149
richrichardsson wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Calculators do do arithmetic and if you ask me to do the kind of calculations I had to do in high school by hand today I wouldnt be able to I got scared by how awfully my juniour (middle? 5-11) school mathematics had slipped when helping my 9 year old boy with his homework yesterday. I literally couldn't remember how to carry the 1 when doing subtractions of 3 digit numbers! Felt literally idiotic having to ask an…

On my part, I don't use that carry method at ll. When I have to substract, I substract by chunks that my brain can easily subtract. For example 1233 - 718, I'll do 1233 - 700 = 533 then 533 - 20 = 513 then 513 + 2 = 515. It's completely instinctive (and thus I can't explain to my children :-) ) What I have asked my children to do very often is back-of-the-envelope multiplications and other computations. That really h…

"Common core" math is an attempt to codify this style so more kids can get a deeper understanding of numbers instead of just blindly following steps. Like the people that created it noticed people like you and me (I do something similar but not quite the same) have an intuitive understanding of math that made us good at it that they want to replicate for everyone. But it seems like very few parents and teachers understand it themselves, resulting in a blind-leading-the-blind situation where it gets taught in a bad way that doesn't achieve the goal.

Also aside, in the method I was taught in school (and I assume you and GP from terminology), "carrying" is what you do with addition (an extra 1 can be carried to the next column), "borrowing" is for subtraction (take a 1 away from the next column if needed).

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

#307

Post by ahoka »

discreteevent wrote: post #198
CuriouslyC wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. They are, but you go on to assume that they will adapt in a good way. Bodies are adaptive too. That didn't work out well for a lot of people when their environment changed to be sedentary.

Yes, that's like saying I'm not weak, just my muscles are adapted to the couch.

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

#309

Post by HumblyTossed »

vidarh wrote: post #295
HumblyTossed wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that a dev's job is to solve problems. However, one loses a lot of that if one doesn't think in computerese - and only reading code isn't enough. One has to write code to understand code. So for one to do one's _actual_ job, they cannot depend solely on "AI" to write all the code.

We used to say that about people who wrote in C instead of assembler. Then we used to say that (any many still do) about people who opted for "scripting languages" over "systems languages". It's "true" in a sense. It helps. But it is also largely irrelevant for most of us, in that most of us are writing code you can learn to read and write in a tiny proportion of the time we spend in working life. The notion that you…

> The notion that you need to keep spending more than a tiny fraction of your time writing code in order to understand enough to be able to solve business problem will seem increasingly quaint.

Completely disagree. Reading books doesn't make you an author. Reading books AND writing books makes you an author.

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

#310

Post by vacuity »

jondwillis wrote: post #289
wiseowise wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse. It literally does. If your brain shuts down the moment you can't access your LLM overlord then you're objectively worse.

The reality is that the LLM overlord stays accessible most of the time. Works until it doesn’t is kinda adaptivity’s motto.

So the real test is waiting until the LLMs are inaccessible and then seeing what happens. Empirical testing!
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