Isn’t the irony of Pheadrus (the dialogue where Socrates speaks against writing) that its a written work, in a dramatic setting? Like, yes, writing, technology can make us stupid, but this article was written and transmitted to us via social media.
We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds
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Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds
#62Reminds me of when I debug why my aquascape (I’m a beginner) keeps having algae outbreak such as GSA and Cyanobacteria.
I have a lot of things correct, CO2, light, photoperiod. LLM told me that I have too much kH and gH and too much phosphate.
Followed the LLM advice, didn’t work. Apparently its an outdated advice. My kH and gH is high (not using RoDi water, just NJ tap water) but not that high such that plants struggle to get CO2, and my level of phosphate doesn’t necessarily what made the algae bloom.
Turns out my nutrition was the culprit. I bottomed out on Nitrogen all the time. But when I told that my Nitrate is 0 the LLM didn’t say a thing and instead “you got everything correct”.
Digital bullshit.
Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds
#63> You have to remember EVERYTHING. Only then you can perform the cognitive tasks necessary to perform meaningful knowledge work.
If humans did not have any facilities for abstraction, sure. But then "knowledge work" would be impossible.
You need to remember some set of concrete facts for knowledge work, sure, but it's just one—necessary but small—component. More important than specific factual knowledge, you need two things: strong conceptual models for whatever you're doing and tacit knowledge.
You need to know some facts to build up strong conceptual models but you don't need to remember them all at once and, once you've built up that strong conceptual understanding, you'll need specifics even less.
Tacit knowledge—which, in knowledge work, manifests as intuition and taste—can only be built up through experience and feedback. Again, you need some specific knowledge to get started but, once you have some real experience, factual knowledge stops being a bottleneck.
Once you've built up a strong foundation, the way you learn and retain facts changes too. Memorization might be a powerful tool to get you started but, once you've made some real progress, it becomes unnecessary if not counterproductive. You can pick bits of info up as you go along and slot them into your existing mental frameworks.
My theory is that the folks who hate memorization are the ones who were able to force their way through the beginner stages of whatever they were doing without dull rote memorization, and then, once there, really do not need it any more. Which would at least partly explain why there are such vehement disagreements about whether memorization is crucial or not.
Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds
#64A great deal of anti-AI posts as of late seem like milquetoast pearl clutching to me. They don’t want to outright say they feel threatened/devalued but the arguments they put forward are not only unconvincing, but in this case among many others actively work against them. nb. I tried really hard to not point out the smugness of Zettelkasten which I suspect emboldens this feeling of superiority, because I’d rather sit…
What's the difference between milquetoast pearl clutching and a take you disagree with about a currently hot topic?
How do you tell when someone who disagrees with you is coming from a place of feeling threatened or devalued vs. a place you'd consider legitimate?
Hoping your methods are reliable and transferable, you're applying them to "a great deal" of posts so maybe they'd be helpful to me too.
Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds
#65I was talking with somebody about their migration recently [0], and we got to speculating about AI and how it might have helped. There were basically 2 paths: - Use the AI and ask for answers. It'll generate something! It'll also be pleasant, because it'll replace the thinking you were planning on doing. - Use the AI to automate away the dumb stuff, like writing a bespoke test suite or new infra to run those tests. I…
I’ve tried the second path at work and it’s grueling. “Almost certainly succeed” requires that you mostly plan out the implementation for it, and then monitor the LLM to ensure that it doesn’t get off track and do something awful. It’s hard to get much other work done in the meantime. I feel like I’m unlocking, like, 10% or 20% productivity gains. Maybe.
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Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds
#66I was talking with somebody about their migration recently [0], and we got to speculating about AI and how it might have helped. There were basically 2 paths: - Use the AI and ask for answers. It'll generate something! It'll also be pleasant, because it'll replace the thinking you were planning on doing. - Use the AI to automate away the dumb stuff, like writing a bespoke test suite or new infra to run those tests. I…
I stay at the architecture, code organization and algorithm level with AI. I plan things at that level then have the agent do full implementation. I have tests (which have been audited both manually and by agents) and I have multiple agents audit the implementation code. The pipeline is 100% automated and produces very good results, and you can still get some engineering vibes from the fact that you're orchestrating a stochastic workflow dag!
Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US is, however, learning exactly what happens when rationality is not part of the equation. This is all a dance around what is a "fact" and how to string facts into a reasoning model that lets you predict or confirm other potential facts, etc... It's simply different people we're talking about. Certain personalities are always going to gravitate to the "search for reason" model in life rather than "reason about f…
At least in the field of sports science and exercise physiology, we have very little in the way of facts. Much of what we once thought were facts have been disproven or at least called into question by later research. So we need to be humble, and very circumspect in what we label as a "fact".
Yeah, so much of this is not about facts as much as judgment: knowing what are the most themes and factors to making a system work well. What are the parts that, if you get right, everything else will follow. Knowing what areas it's okay, even beneficial, to rediscover instead of trying to plan ahead of time.
Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds
#68The author makes a lot of bold claims and I don’t take his main one serious re: remembering everything. I think he’s being intentionally hyperbolic. But the gist is sound to me, if you can put one together. He needs an editor.
> To find what you need online, you require a solid general education and, above all, prior knowledge in the area related to your search. > > [...] > > If you can’t produce a comprehensive answer with confidence and on the whim [...] you don’t have the sufficient background knowledge. > > [...] > > This drives us to one of the most important conclusions of the entire field of note-taking, knowledge work, critical thinking and alike: You, not AI, not your PKM or whatever need to build the knowledge because only then it is in your brain and you can go the next step. > > [...] > > The advertised benefits of all these tools come with a specific hidden cost: Your ability to think. [This passage actually appears ahead of the previous one–ed.]
This is best read alongside: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45154088
Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds
#69[deleted]
Re: We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds
#70> You have to remember EVERYTHING. Only then you can perform the cognitive tasks necessary to perform meaningful knowledge work. You don't have to remember everything. You have to remember enough entry points and the shape of what follows, trained through experience and going through the process of thinking and writing, to reason your way through meaningful knowledge work.
Of course you have to remember everything. Your brain stores everything, and you then get to add things by forgetting, but that does not mean you erase things. The brain is oscillatory, it works somehow by using ripples that encode everything within differences, just in case you have to remember that obscure action-syntax...a knot, a grip, a pivot that might let you escape death. Get to know the brain, folks.
Interesting take.
I respectfully differ. IIRC, Feynman said something akin to my POV:
Brains are for thinking. Documents / PKM systems / tools are for remembering.
IOW: take notes, write things down.
FWIW I have a degree in cognitive psychology (psychobiology, neuroanatomy, human perception) and am an amateur neuroscientist. Somewhat familiar w/ the brain. :)