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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

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Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#471

Post by WillAdams »

viccis wrote: post #163
staticshock wrote: post #66

The eloquence with which this point gets (repeatedly) made is continuing to improve each next time I read it. However, I still feel like we haven't nailed it. That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse (e.g. "the medium is the message", "you ship your org chart", "9 mothers can't make a baby in a month"), in which the most pointed version of this critique packs a punch in just a few words that r…

>the medium is the message If you asked 100 Americans what this aphorism means, I strongly doubt a single one could capture McLuhan's original meaning.

More worrisome is that the speech which that came from went on to prophetically observe that for each extension of human capability afforded by technology, there was a matching amputation in human skill/facility --- heretofore, computers have largely fit in with Steve Jobs' vision of them as "bicycles of the mind", making human effort more efficient --- the cognitive engine of LLMs looks to be dumbing down human reasoning to a least common denominator/mean:

https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artifi...

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#472

Post by Der_Einzige »

netcan wrote: post #318
nunez wrote: post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

Myopic is inevitable, to some extent. It's very hard to project this stuff. Socrates wrote about what was being lost as philosophy was becoming written rather than oral...and he was right. We can't even understand what was lost. Many methods of learning and thinking became entirely lost. You could say they were redundant, and they were. But... writing largely replaced oral traditions. It didn't just augment them. He…

Socrates was histories first Luddite. He opened Pandora’s box. I wish him and Plato would be radically rejected as the garbage trash they are (basically just a defense of hierarchy and dialects)

Quoting my boy Max Stirner who also fking hated these guys

“This war is opened by Socrates, and not until the dying day of the old world does it end in peace.“ - The Ego and its Own, Max Stirner

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#473

Post by crakhamster01 »

erdaniels wrote: post #443

This feels AI written as the post goes on. Either way, I'd like for us to stop fetishizing how we can use AI to make us stronger, better, and more valuable engineers. It's exhausting and doesn't consider other ways to use it. I've only been using it lately for tasks that are a step or two above google. Having it write code for me has just been a slippery, unfulfilling slope.

Pasted it into Pangram AI and it classified the article as 100% AI generated, so take that as you will...

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#474

Post by nkrisc »

darkwater wrote: post #392
ipython wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve also seen along those lines “there is no compression algorithm for experience” - a nice summary of the hn posts from today.

I don't know. Growing up and seeing life and people around me I firmly believe that if you have enough brain power and intuition for $TOPIC you can speed-run it. At the same time, with time and experience and doing/re-doing it, you will learn or master $TOPIC [1] even with less brain power. [1] Depending on the topic and the level of knowledge of it.

1. Intuition mostly “muscle-memory” earned from previous experience.

2. Don’t assume you’re the next Mozart. Someone is, statistically it’s not you.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#475

Post by Der_Einzige »

rimliu wrote: post #335
netcan wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Myopic is inevitable, to some extent. It's very hard to project this stuff. Socrates wrote about what was being lost as philosophy was becoming written rather than oral...and he was right. We can't even understand what was lost. Many methods of learning and thinking became entirely lost. You could say they were redundant, and they were. But... writing largely replaced oral traditions. It didn't just augment them. He…

I'd say that by purging stuff from the brain we are losing thinking itself. Thinking is manipulating ideas and concepts in your head, assembling and linking. The fewer things there is, the more primitive the result. You cannot juggle without object to juggle, connecting the dots result in trivial patterns when you have just a couple of dots.

Fuck thinking!

If I am free as “rational I,” then the rational in me, or reason, is free; and this freedom of reason, or freedom of the thought, was the ideal of the Christian world from of old. They wanted to make thinking – and, as aforesaid, faith is also thinking, as thinking is faith – free; the thinkers, the believers as well as the rational, were to be free; for the rest freedom was impossible. But the freedom of thinkers is the “freedom of the children of God,” and at the same time the most merciless – hierarchy or dominion of the thought; for Isuccumb to the thought. If thoughts are free, I am their slave; I have no power over them, and am dominated by them. But I want to have the thought, want to be full of thoughts, but at the same time I want to be thoughtless, and, instead of freedom of thought, I preserve for myself thoughtlessness. If the point is to have myself understood and to make communications, then assuredly I can make use only of human means, which are at my command because I am at the same time man. And really I have thoughts only as man; as I, I am at the same time thoughtless. He who cannot get rid of a thought is so far only man, is a thrall of language, this human institution, this treasury of human thoughts. Language or “the word” tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas. Just observe yourself in the act of reflection, right now, and you will find how you make progress only by becoming thoughtless and speechless every moment. You are not thoughtless and speechless merely in (say) sleep, but even in the deepest reflection; yes, precisely then most so. And only by this thoughtlessness, this unrecognized “freedom of thought” or freedom from the thought, are you your own. Only from it do you arrive at putting language to use as your property. If thinking is not my thinking, it is merely a spun-out thought; it is slave work, or the work of a “servant obeying at the word.” For not a thought, but I, am the beginning for my thinking, and therefore I am its goal too, even as its whole course is only a course of my self-enjoyment; for absolute or free thinking, on the other hand, thinking itself is the beginning, and it plagues itself with propounding this beginning as the extremest “abstraction” (such as being). This very abstraction, or this thought, is then spun out further

- The ego and its own, Max Stirner

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#476

Post by darkwater »

rimliu wrote: post #397
darkwater wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. Growing up and seeing life and people around me I firmly believe that if you have enough brain power and intuition for $TOPIC you can speed-run it. At the same time, with time and experience and doing/re-doing it, you will learn or master $TOPIC [1] even with less brain power. [1] Depending on the topic and the level of knowledge of it.

Isn't intuition just distilled experience?

It can be but it can also be derived by raw brain power, IMO, and that's my point. You can understand how something work by simulating many mental models quickly in your mind, comparing them and deciding the one that makes more sense, or you can be overwhelmed by doing this and be unsuccessful at it. But with the years and experience you actually distill that understanding, and you are able to apply it to other similar topics as well.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#477

Post by tgv »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #17

No, AI is not creating that group of people. They already existed. They were the people who would google for StackOverflow snippets and copy+paste them without even reading the entire snippet, much less understand them. Same people, new tool.

Do you use AI? For what?

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#478

Post by iewj »

pydry wrote: post #451
erdaniels wrote: post #443

This feels AI written as the post goes on. Either way, I'd like for us to stop fetishizing how we can use AI to make us stronger, better, and more valuable engineers. It's exhausting and doesn't consider other ways to use it. I've only been using it lately for tasks that are a step or two above google. Having it write code for me has just been a slippery, unfulfilling slope.

I wish people would stop pretending that agentic coding and elevated thinking arent mutually exclusive. Theres way too much money on this hype train now though to point out the emperor isnt wearing any clothes and way too many people who always did think that "boilerplate spew" (the one thing AI really does well) is a valid form of programming rather than a shortcut to tech debt.

All this stuff is proving to me one thing: we don’t need to get better at producing stuff faster. We need to get better at producing the right stuff. Right stuff meaning getting better at project selection.

I guarantee a firm that is really good at project selection with hand written code will annihilate a firm that is full of agentic engineers. And frankly I hope the outcome is that all those who went all in on agentic coding go out of business because they got beaten by disciplined and visionary leaders who understand this subtle and nuanced point.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#479

Post by [deleted] »

nunez wrote: post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

[deleted]

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#480

Post by koshyjohn »

crakhamster01 wrote: post #473
erdaniels wrote: post #443

This feels AI written as the post goes on. Either way, I'd like for us to stop fetishizing how we can use AI to make us stronger, better, and more valuable engineers. It's exhausting and doesn't consider other ways to use it. I've only been using it lately for tasks that are a step or two above google. Having it write code for me has just been a slippery, unfulfilling slope.

Pasted it into Pangram AI and it classified the article as 100% AI generated, so take that as you will...

Ironically making the case for the thesis of the piece - what happens when you let A.I. do all the thinking instead of exercising competent judgement. Disclaimers and leaving real thought to others do not make it much better. Pangram is confidently wrong here.
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