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Thoughts on thinking

dcurt.is

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Re: Thoughts on thinking

#401

Post by drdeca »

radlad wrote: post #234
drdeca wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? While I essentially never have need to compute a square root by hand (unless it is a perfect square of course), shouldn’t one know how one would?

Why should one? Perhaps they should if it's relevant to their work, daily routine, or interests. But if they have no need for it?

Well, I think one should be able to come up with a way of doing so on the fly just from knowing that the square root function is monotonically increasing, and knowing binary search? Of course, doing it another way might be more efficient.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#402

Post by imperfect_blue »

bccdee wrote: post #371
visarga wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a mistake to take the banality of current LLM outputs and extrapolate that into the future. Of course they are going to get better. But that is not the point - it is that in the chat room the human and LLM spark ideas off each other. Humans come with their own unique life experience and large context, LLMs come with their broad knowledge and skills.

> It would be a mistake to take the banality of current LLM outputs and extrapolate that into the future. Imagine a chef, congenitally unable to taste or smell food, who has nevertheless studied a million recipes. Can they reproduce existing recipes? Sure, if they follow the instructions perfectly. Can they improvise original recipes? I doubt it. Judging by the instructions alone, the recipes they invent may be indis…

As an amateur home-cook, I find current LLMs incredibly useful as a sounding board for the on-the-fly recipe modifications - for allergies and food sensitivities, adapting preparation methods to available equipment, or substituting produce not available in season. It may not be able to taste the final product, but its reasoning on what's likely to work (and what isn't) has not led me wrong so far.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#403

Post by ay »

jstummbillig wrote: post #327
ay wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could totally be the case, that, as I wrote in the very first sentence, I am holding it wrong. But I am not saying LLMs are impotent - the other week Claude happily churned me ~3500 lines of C code that allowed to implement a prototype capture facility for network packets with flexible filters and saving the contents into pcapng files. I had to fix a couple of bugs that it made, but overall it was certainly at least…

Reading this I am not sure I got the gist of your previous post. Re-reading the previous post, I still don't see how the two posts gel. I submit we might just have very different interpretations of the same observations. For example I have a hard imagining the described 3500 LOC program as 'simple'. Limited in scope, sure. But if you got it done 5-10x faster, then it can't be that simple? Anyway: I found the writers…

I suspect indeed we have the difference in terminology.

I put distinction between “simple” and “easy”.

Digging a pit of 1m * 1m * 1m is simple - just displace a cubic meter of soil; but it is not easy as it’s a lot of monotonous physical work.

A small excavator makes the task easy but arguably less simple since now you need to also know how to operate the excavator.

LLMs make a lot of coding tasks “easy” by being this small excavator. But they do not always make them “simple” - more often than not, they make bugs, for fixing which you need to understand subject matter, so they don’t eliminate the need to learn it.

Does this make sense ?

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#404

Post by nerder92 »

I feel something similar, mostly in the context of programming. Yesterday, I spotted a bug and instead of trying to understand the issue, I just typed a quick "why this doesn't work" into the Cursor Chat. A few seconds later, I got my answer and I tab around my solution. Of course it was a cool experience, yet another "wow" moment of working with AI, but that also gave me a strange feeling and made me wonder: will I lose my ability to think program independently?

After a bit of human reflection, my simple answer is no. I won’t lose these abilities; they'll evolve just as they've evolved many times during my lifetime. The critical difference this time is that the evolution will be much faster and more radical.

To clarify, a thought for me is an idea that comes to mind based on the things we know or have experienced. The bottleneck of thinking ability lies precisely there—how can you think about something you don’t know exists? An early human living inland couldn't possibly conceive of navigating the sea; the concept simply didn't exist for them. Their thinking was shaped entirely by their personal experiences and those of their peers, passed on around a campfire. Thinking evolved many time throughout history, from those campfire stories to sharing paper books, to browsing web pages and now this autocomplete on steroids.

The difference this time is that the paradigm is shifting. The bottleneck moves from accessibility of knowledge to the latency between your initial thought and the AI’s completion of it. With a Google search, you were a few clicks away from potential new knowledge. With AI, you're just a few keystrokes away from a fully developed thought.

Today, there is still a clear distinction between my thought and the AI’s, because you prompt it and then wait for the response. But what if that latency was virtually zero? What if merely thinking a prompt triggered the CoT within my brain? Would that thought still be mine? Would it belong to the AI?

My feeling is that what we are experiencing today is a transition phase until we completely "integrate" this AI thinking into our own thinking. What I don't see change or improve in AI anytime soon is curiosity, judgment, taste - those things are probably what we should double down on for now.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#405

Post by ay »

sabaimran wrote: post #280
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 le…

Agreed, and the analogy with calculators is very apt.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#406

Post by Aerbil313 »

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 industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.
- Industrial Society And Its Future, Ted Kaczynski (1975)

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#407

Post by bsenftner »

bartread wrote: post #399
bsenftner wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are worried about being rude when dealing with misunderstandings, you waste a lot of time coddling your audience. The author describes their highly emotional inability to effectively communicate with an LLM, I point out the issue is a lack of communications skill, and you call that as rude? How else to describe this issue? Effective communications and using LLMs is the issue. The piece is not that well written…

A big part of having good communication skills is knowing your audience. HN is a forum for people do discuss stories, not a forum for prompting LLMs. Moreover that discussion is supposed to be civil. You might see that civility as a waste of time but, if you do, you're likely to lose your audience, and that is a failure of communication. Similarly, the intended audience for the author's post is people, not LLMs. So i…

You seem to be defending the blog author. The author themselves describes their experience as:

But now, when my brain spontaneously forms a tiny sliver of a potentially interesting concept or idea, I can just shove a few sloppy words into a prompt and almost instantly get a fully reasoned, researched, and completed thought.

This is casual, unmeditated use of an LLM and then allowing an emotional reaction to shut down further investigation. Excuse me for describing the author's own experience and related that back with an interpretation you feel is disrespect. I can dress it with less comprehensible words, disguising the perspective, but it is still a mirror reflection of the blog author's own assessments. He describes being overshadowed and intimidated to paralysis. Is that happening across the board? Are people exposed to LLMs developing inferiority complexes and ambition loss? Can this ideas and issues even be discussed if people are afraid of the topics? Discuss my points, do not say my language is illegal to this community, that is a cop out in an forum that is supposed to be exploring ideas.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#408

Post by abathologist »

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#409

Post by starchild3001 »

The author is exagerating it. AI is more like a smart collaborator at this point. It's no replacement of your own thinking or formulations. A weak blog post -- keep working on it, with the help of AI, no less :))

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#410

Post by cameldrv »

nthingtohide wrote: post #372
cameldrv wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is nothing but how applied science realtime feedback loops should work. Earlier we used to study only planets, atoms and bacteria, now systems are studying us and guiding us to best outcomes.

Yes. Clearly these systems are smart enough to know what the best outcomes are, and also they are the ones that lead to the maximum ad revenue for the site.
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