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Thoughts on thinking

dcurt.is

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Re: Thoughts on thinking

#411

Post by cameldrv »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #333
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…

The big benefits I find about modern satnav have little to do with route planning. That can be done with maps and dead reckoning. Where it shines are 1. Having knowledge that cannot be acquired ahead of time, such as traffic conditions 2. Providing a countdown timer until my next turn

This is the paradox. The computer knows the best route, better than you do, most of the time. But, you are not in control anymore. You are not the one making the decisions, figuring out where the turn is, and whether you want to turn there or at the next intersection. All I can say is, try leaving your phone at home for a day and get where you're going without it. You'll probably get there a few minutes later, but it will feel completely different.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#412

Post by cjk »

Anecdotally, I have seen some engineers totally give in and start using LLMs to do 90%+ of their work, and the atrophy in their critical thinking skills is readily apparent. It's both shocking and entirely predictable.

I'm extremely worried about how this phenomenon is going to affect junior engineers and folks getting into programming from here on out. It's not hard to imagine an entire generation of “engineers” that can't program their way out of a paper bag without assistance from an LLM.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#413

Post by c-oreills »

neoden wrote: post #277

Homo sapience had a long period of its history when it was crucial to have a well developed body. Today we need to perform useless exercises just to maintain our bodies in somewhat acceptable shape. This might be applied to intellect as well. In the coming era of unnecessary intellectual power we might need to do thinking exercises as something that helps maintaining a healthful (and beautiful) mind though our core v…

I thought of the same parallel when reading the post.

I've recently read Outlive for health advice. On its recommendation, I've taken up regularly walking with a loaded backpack of 20-30kg ("rucking").

The basis for this recommendation is that until recently, people would have been exposed to carrying weight in day to day life, but an increase in our daily convenience has reduced this more and more.

I can see that there would be benefits in doing the equivalent thing mentally as physically. "Rucking" for the mind.

Outlive also recommends mental exercises like learning an instrument or new language as potential ways to stave off neurodegeneration.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#414

Post by ajuc »

bartread wrote: post #400
ajuc wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a loop. It's the main() function. The loop is driven by the system and that makes a lot of difference.

> It's not a loop. It's the main() function. No it isn't. I regularly use my car to travel to multiple destinations in a single "session". The reason I use GPS is because the apps built on top of it often know about traffic issues along the way - even those that have recently developed - as well as normal patterns of traffic flow of which I may not be aware, or may only have a tenuous grasp of (and don't want to wast…

You are calling the main function with arguments "New York, Chicago, Washington". Then the system runs the loop and you are just an effector managed by the system.

Running the loop takes hours. Choosing the arguments for the main function takes seconds.

Which means for vast majority of time you delegate decision-making to the system. Which means your decision-making circuits atrophy. This is the problem people are talking about.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#415

Post by BeFlatXIII »

bccdee wrote: post #369
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because something isn't unique, doesn't make it derivative. We rediscover things every day. This is the argument I use to dunk on ranters who spam conversations with “How can you say Christopher Columbus discovered the new world when there were already people living there?”

In fairness, Columbus thought he had found India, even after other, smarter people had told him otherwise. You can't give him too much credit, especially given that he was considered a monster even by contemporary monsters like Isabella I of Spain, his sponsor, who founded the Spanish Inquisition and still thought his treatment of the Taino natives was unconscionable. She wanted him to convert them to Christianity, a…

Those are all good arguments against praising Columbus. Especially his insistence that he had found India is a strong argument against saying he discovered America.

The specific argument “but it's not a discovery because it was already inhabited” is a particularly literal-minded child applying their teacher’s prohibitions on plagiarism to the real world.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#416

Post by BeFlatXIII »

cameldrv wrote: post #411
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big benefits I find about modern satnav have little to do with route planning. That can be done with maps and dead reckoning. Where it shines are 1. Having knowledge that cannot be acquired ahead of time, such as traffic conditions 2. Providing a countdown timer until my next turn

This is the paradox. The computer knows the best route, better than you do, most of the time. But, you are not in control anymore. You are not the one making the decisions, figuring out where the turn is, and whether you want to turn there or at the next intersection. All I can say is, try leaving your phone at home for a day and get where you're going without it. You'll probably get there a few minutes later, but it…

I wish GPS systems had a “shut up until I get to the highway” mode and a “I've entered my neighborhood” button—the former is more important, as the later can be solved with “end route”. I do not need their (inaccurate) instructions on how to get in and out of my house.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#417

Post by immibis »

immibis wrote: post #338
empiricus wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For GPS, I start by looking at the overall route, and compare with potential alternatives. Then during the driving the GPS just manages the local details, I still have some understanding and agency over where to go and how to get there.

I start by looking at the map. I go in the direction of the place I want to be. If I want to know the technically fastest route then I let my device calculate that. I don't always take that route. It's an assistant, not a boss. It's more interesting to walk down different streets sometimes. (And while I'm preaching to Americans, it's also good to walk down streets sometimes. It breaks away a few layers of abstraction…

btw on that walk I happened across a store selling lots of varieties of some of the things I wanted - more than the place I was actually going to. Exploring pays off. Randomly.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#418

Post by abathologist »

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…

I think it was indeed use of GPS that first made me aware of how much the systems we are building are trying to automate me. From the socials to Jira to slack GitHub to crypto to GenAI... it is now painfully obvious that all these systems are pressing upon us to react to stimulus in predictable ways to execute a part of some larger movement which -- probably -- no one has actually designed or considered the purpose of.

I think we are in the third act of a very long play:

> If mechanical thinking and ingenious experiment produced the machine, regimentation gave it a soil to grow in: the social process worked hand in hand with the new ideology and the new technics. Long before the peoples of the Westenr nworld turned to the machine, mechanism as an element in social life had come into existence. Before inventors created engines to take the place of men, the leaders of men had drilled and regimented multitudes of human beings: they had discovered how to reduce men to machines. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_and_Civilization)

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#419

Post by azinman2 »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #339
azinman2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never underestimate laziness, or willingness to take something 80% as good for 1% of the work. So most are not curious. So what do you do for them?

Leave ‘em behind and win the race.

Why would you advocate for society failing apart? What race is there to win if most lose?

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#420

Post by jstummbillig »

ay wrote: post #403
jstummbillig wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

I actually considered that option, while writing the comment (and should probably have said so, my bad). I guess I considered it improbable that the task you describe you would actually think of as easy. To me, it does not seems to meet the characteristics, specially not after 3500 LOC.

To put a little bone on the flesh from my side of the isle: I am currently writing what I would consider a fairly complex (web) system in Rails, managing all aspects of a medical startup (patient portal, provider platform, documentation, billing, scheduling, PWAs). Think in terms of complexity and aspiration what might be required to run https://www.onemedical.com/

I understand that it is not John Carmack type work, but I would not describe it as either easy or simple. But maybe you would – and then this is where all the confusion ends :)

I do this mostly in Windsurf using the new Gemini 2.5 pro (which just came out recently and is a huge jump up; before that it was mostly Sonnet 3.7). It writes probably around 95% of LOC and it also definitely does what I would consider some of the code design, although there the contribution percentage is much lower and it's definitely more of a thought partner, that can do some things better than I can. There is definitely a lot of collaborative plan writing involved, todo lists with check-off boxes and explicit instructions on the process.

What it absolutely does not do is, well, anything, unless I explain to it what I want good enough. That part comes relatively natural, because I would normally just write a lot before coding/designing to understand that it is what I want. That lends itself to work with the LLM I guess (and I just now wonder if most of the daylight can be found there)

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