proposed solution:
every time you search via web do a rep by looking in a book. (maybe read a dictionary page or encyclopedia entry from a book)
every time you use an llm or genai do a rep by creating something new (physically draw, paint, write)
What we lost when search stopped making us think
51–60 of 64 posts
Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think
#52I do worry about Google AI overview's long-term impact, but man, it has been such a great experience of late. It surely does feel like the old google but better. There was a point, perhaps about five years ago, where using Google had become a genuinely frustrating hurdle I needed to overcome to do the actual work. Now the frustration is completely gone.
Just this morning I had a worrying result when I googled "UV index " and it confidently told me the current UV index was zero. It was not, and at least because it was obviously wrong I clicked through to a page with the real UV index. But had it said "The UV index is 1.7" I might have believed it, but it'd still have been wrong, potentially dangerously so. Now to be clear, live data is precisely the sort of thing I e…
Had the same experience outside of AI recently. With the cli friendly weather reporting site wttr. It reported temperatures that were about 30°C off.
Can't trust anything anymore these days.
Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting given this is the polar opposite of my experience. I find Googles AI overview to give wrong answers constantly. Occasionally, even for questions I believe Google circa 2018 was able to answer confidently. Ironically, Googles AI overview often links to references that state the polar opposite of what the AI overview claims.
Each Google "AI" response should state a correctness confidence value. A range 0-40% will probably suffice.
Just recently I read that it is futile to make AI give out scores like that, as they are pretty much completely made up. Can't find the article anymore, though.
Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google's fault that SEO exists? The incentive isn't even there, they want people to pay for ads rather than gaming their results. But SEO finds a way.
The people that have money and time to put into SEO are the people with ads on their websites. I bet a large number of them run Google ads. As such, it is not in Google's best interests to cut them out of search, regardless of how low quality they are. It is well known that Google and SEO have a wink wink / nudge nudge relationship where Google "hides" its search algorythm, and somehow the websites with the most ads…
If this were true, I would expect other search engines to give less SEO'd results, but it's more the opposite case
Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think
#55> This isn't really anyone's fault in a simple sense Or, in a more simple sense it’s entirely Google’s fault
Google's fault that SEO exists? The incentive isn't even there, they want people to pay for ads rather than gaming their results. But SEO finds a way.
They literally control the feedback loop...
Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think
#56I was still digesting the throat-clearing intro when my eye noticed "quietly" and "honest" and I decided I'd not bother. But I scrolled through out of politeness, just in case the Basilisk will be very thorough. > I want to be clear that I'm not against these tools generally. I use them myself No essay is made worse by being stripped of filler. If the reader has got this far, this sentence is entirely redundant, I th…
I literally did the same thing, by the way: scanned the first paragraph for predatory signals; got "quietly," "honest;" skimmed.
The shape of the final paragraphs confirmed my prejudice.
I realized, though, that initial reading now is primarily to identify predatory signals on time and attention; in the absence of predatory LLM-signals, cautiously read; but every deviation from information-density triggers a flight response.
Rarely make it through anything anymore unless it's ancient (Horace, Cicero, Lucretius); but maybe they were forced into information density by the act of writing plus meter?
Lucilius, apparently, a degenerate counter-example; who used to dictate 200 lines a day standing on one foot: criminal.
Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Each Google "AI" response should state a correctness confidence value. A range 0-40% will probably suffice.
Just recently I read that it is futile to make AI give out scores like that, as they are pretty much completely made up. Can't find the article anymore, though.
Definitely. I was being ironic. Sorry not to say!
Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm against them, vehemently, but I'm also not going to fight a tidal wave. I'm not going to be unemployed and unemployable by refusing to use them. Principles are expensive and I certainly cannot realistically afford to hold them tightly. Being forced to use them to continue to have an income is causing me a cognitive dissonance and a level of stress that is surely going to kill me though. I strongly resent the fact…
Pro AI: It’s inevitable and I love it Anti AI: It’s inevitable and I hate it Oh no. They’re converging. But I guess that just proves the point doesn’t it.
What else do you expect me to do exactly?
If I thought there was an actual, substantial amount of support for people with my point of view then things would be different. But there just isn't. Most people are just too passive and go along with whatever is happening.
I've already been fired from one job for a very mild pushback against their AI strategy, is it worth being poor forever to fight this battle?
Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think
#59Search is not, what it was.
And for those like me who vastly prefer an searchable list of active web sites that returns search matches based on actual matching of the search terms entered, and loath big tech to the point of bieng unembarassed to gibber and rave about it publicly, like out there , wherever the fit happens to me, articulating the impossibility, ooops, anyway search is broken, and it actualy forces me to think long and hard about what I am going to do ,out there, to get things done with what I can put my hands on right now.
Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think
#60There is a further point to doing your own hard research, after all: you'll learn the subject in much greater detail than you would if someone just handed you the answer. But this has been known forever. The absolute worst way to learn something is to have someone just hand you the answer.
But we don't have enough time to recreate our software systems from sand and iron ore, so we take shortcuts. We decide to sacrifice in-depth understanding for speed of implementation. We punt on the understanding.
The outstanding question is what happens if we punt too far? And is there such a thing?
I think there is a punt too far, personally. And I try to not offload too much of my critical thinking work onto LLMs. No shine without friction, and all that. Sometimes it pays to spend time with pen and paper making your brain sweat before you give up and let the AI just hand you the answer.