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

media.mit.edu

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

#321

Post by TomasBM »

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…

Your criticism of this study is roughly on point, IMO. It's not badly designed by any means, but it's an early look. There are already similar studies on the (cognitive) effects of LLMs on learning, but I suspect this one gets the attention because it's associated with the MIT brand.

That said, these kinds of studies are important, because they reveal that some cognitive changes are evidently happening. Like you said, it's up to us to determine if they're positive or negative, but as is probably obvious to many, it's difficult to argue for the status quo.

If it's a negative change, teachers have to go back to paper-and-pen essay writing, which I was personally never good at. Or they need to figure out stable ways to prevent students from using LLMs, if they are to learn anything about writing.

If it's a positive change, i.e., we now have more time to do "better" things (or do things better), then teachers need to figure out substitutes. Suddenly, a common way of testing is now outdated and irrelevant, but there's no clear thing to do instead. So, what do they do?

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

#322

Post by casey2 »

alt187 wrote: post #66
softwaredoug wrote: post #32

Druids used to decry that literacy caused people to lose their ability to memorize sacred teachings. And they’re right! But literacy still happened and we’re all either dumber or smarter for it.

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…

I don't buy your "theory" at all. Learning requires curiosity. If you want to know how something works you will do all those things irregardless if you saw it in a book or an AI spat it out. If you don't you won't.

There is no free lunch, if you use writing to "scaffold" your learning, you trade learning speed for a limited "neural pathways" budget that could connect two useful topics. And when you stop practicing your writing (or coding, as reported by some people who stopped coding due to AI) you feel that you are getting dumber. Since you scaffolded your knowledge of a topic with writing or coding, rather than doing the difficult work of learning it from more pervasive conceptions.

The best thing AI taught us is to not tie your knowledge to some specific task. It's overly reactionary to recommended task/action based education (even from an AI) in response to AI.

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

#323

Post by theblazehen »

footy wrote: post #304
theblazehen wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm adhd as well, so I get the pain. I tend to try and do frontend / backend on a single project to at least stay within the same domain

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

#324

Post by biophysboy »

albumen wrote: post #180
probably_wrong wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of "TL;DR" but I think 52 minutes would qualify. I jumped to a random point of the transcript and found just platitudes, which didn't quite hook me into listening to all of it. How about some more info on what their main conclusions are?

They view the framing of the MIT paper not just as bad science, but as a dangerous social tool that uses brain data to "consign people" to being less worthy or "stupid" for using cognitive aids. It flags the paper's alarmist findings as "pseudoscience" designed to provoke fear rather than provide rigorous insight. They highlight several "red flags" in the study's design: lack of a coherent scientific framework, metho…

Is this comment written by AI?

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

#325

Post by vidarh »

sodapopcan wrote: post #305
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.

> 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.

I use AI heavily to review the code too, and it makes it far simpler.

E.g. "show me why holds" makes it far more pleasant to do reviews. AI code review tooling works well to reduce that burden. Even more so when you have that AI cod review tooling running as part of your agent loop first before you even look at a delivery.

"prove X" is another one - if it can't find a test case that already proves X and resorts to writing code to prove X, you probably need more tests, and now you have one,.

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

#326

Post by acedTrex »

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.

Did you not read the comment you are replying too?

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

#329

Post by wiseowise »

vidarh wrote: post #300
wiseowise wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> perhaps AI is the electric scooter for the mind More like mobility scooter for disabled. Literally Wall-E in the making.

This is the typical arrogance of developers not seeing the value in anything but the coding. I've been hands on for 45 years, but also spend 25 of those dealing with architecture and larger systems design. The actual programming is by far the simplest part of designing a large system. Outsourcing it is only dumbing you down if you don't spend the time it frees up to move up the value chain.

Talk about arrogance, Mr 45 years of experience. Ever thought that there might be people under skyscraper that is your ego? I’m pretty sure majority of tech workers aren’t even 45 years old. Where are they supposed to learn good design when slop takes over? You’ve spent at least 20 years JUST programming, assuming you’ve never touched large scale design before last 25 years. Simplest part my ass.

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

#330

Post by vidarh »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #309
vidarh wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The entire point is we increasingly don't need to be authors.

Most of us aren't paid to be authors in your analogy.

(Which is good, because outside of your analogy, most authors are paid peanuts, and most of those of us who do write do so because we enjoy it, not as a job)

But even if our jobs were to be authors, while I learned some things about writing books from writing the novels I have written and published, I learned far more from being a voracious reader for decades.

I probably needed both, and I'm sure I'd improve as a writer past what I could from just reading by writing more, I think your analogy if anything is a perfect fit for my point that we don't need to spend more than a tiny proportion our time writing to be competent at it (I won't claim great).

Many of us will probably keep doing it for fun, but it will be increasingly hard to justify "manual coding" at work.

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