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Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

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Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#61

Post by teiferer »

kensai wrote: post #41

It definitely helps with expressing oneself in good "structured English" (or whatever natural language you speak). In my humble opinion, this is exactly the future of programming so it is worth it to invest some time and also learn how natural language processing if functioning.

Does it? I can blurb whatever grammatical, structural, spelling mess into the LLM input, it still gets what I mean. If I do that with a co-worker, they will be either offended or ask if I'm drunk or both.

Just like omnipresent spell-check got people used to not caring about their correct spelling since a machine always fixes it up for them. It made spelling proficiency worse. We could see a similar trend in how people express themselves if they spend a lot if time with forgiving non-judgemental LLMs.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#62

Post by jraph »

johnfn wrote: post #54
firefoxd wrote: post #42

Not to dismiss other people's experience, but thinking improves thinking. People tend to forget that you can ask yourself questions and try to answer them. There is such thing as recursive thinking where you end up with a new thought you didn't have before you started. Don't dismiss this superpower you have in your own head.

I'm mystified by this comment. Do people really forget that they can think in their own mind?

— john asked to himself.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#63

Post by fullstackchris »

agree with this article 100%... its those who have no long term programming experience who are likely complaining - the models are just a mirror, a coworker... if you can't accurately describe what you want (with the proper details and patterns you've learned across the years) your going to get generic stuff back

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#64

Post by peepee1982 »

firefoxd wrote: post #42

Not to dismiss other people's experience, but thinking improves thinking. People tend to forget that you can ask yourself questions and try to answer them. There is such thing as recursive thinking where you end up with a new thought you didn't have before you started. Don't dismiss this superpower you have in your own head.

No one is arguing that thinking doesn’t improve thinking. But expressing thoughts precisely by formulating them into the formalized system of the written word adds a layer of metacognition and effort to the thinking process that simply isn’t there when 'just' thinking in your head. It’s a much more rigorous form of thinking with more depth - which improves deeper, more effortful thinking.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#65

Post by ares623 »

johnfn wrote: post #54
firefoxd wrote: post #42

Not to dismiss other people's experience, but thinking improves thinking. People tend to forget that you can ask yourself questions and try to answer them. There is such thing as recursive thinking where you end up with a new thought you didn't have before you started. Don't dismiss this superpower you have in your own head.

I'm mystified by this comment. Do people really forget that they can think in their own mind?

I think there’s a subset of people who don’t have an inner voice. I assume thinking step by step in their head doesn’t work like most people.

I’m glad LLMs help these people. But I’m not gonna trade society because a subset of people can’t write things down.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#66

Post by kranner »

rand846633 wrote: post #56
kranner wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed; also a kind of recursive placebo tends to happen in my experience: 10 You recognise your thinking (or some other desirable activity) has improved 20 You're excited about it 30 You engage more with the thinking (or other activity) 40 You get even better results 50 Even more excitement 60 GOTO 30 You definitely don't need LLMs for this.

But you also do not need paper to think, but surely much of modern physics would not have happened without paper or blackboards…

As cognitive-offloading devices go, paper is completely neutral. It doesn't flatter you into believing you are a genius when you're not; it doesn't offer to extend your reasoning or find references in the research literature and then hallucinate and lead you astray; it will never show you advertisements for things you don't need; it will never leak your ideas and innermost thoughts to corporations owned by billionaires and totalitarian governments... I could go on but you get the drift, I'm sure. Paper wins by a mile.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#68

Post by sublinear »

firefoxd wrote: post #42

Not to dismiss other people's experience, but thinking improves thinking. People tend to forget that you can ask yourself questions and try to answer them. There is such thing as recursive thinking where you end up with a new thought you didn't have before you started. Don't dismiss this superpower you have in your own head.

I almost entirely agree with you, but the issue is that the information you currently have might not be enough to get the answers you want through pure deduction. So how do you get more information?

I think chatbots are a very clumsy way to get information. Conversations tend to be unfocused until you, the human, take an interest in something more specific and pursue it. You're still doing all the work.

It's also too easy to believe in the hype and think it's at least better than talking to another person with more limited knowledge. The fact is talking has always sucked. It's slow, but a human is still better because they can deduce in ways LLMs never will. Deduction is not mere pattern matching or correlation. Most key insights are the result of walking a long tight rope of deductions. LLMs are best at summarizing and assisting with search when you don't know where to start.

And so we are still better off reading a book containing properly curated knowledge, thinking about it for a while, and then socializing with other humans.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#69

Post by firefoxd »

johnfn wrote: post #54
firefoxd wrote: post #42

Not to dismiss other people's experience, but thinking improves thinking. People tend to forget that you can ask yourself questions and try to answer them. There is such thing as recursive thinking where you end up with a new thought you didn't have before you started. Don't dismiss this superpower you have in your own head.

I'm mystified by this comment. Do people really forget that they can think in their own mind?

@grok is this true?

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#70

Post by teiferer »

dartharva wrote: post #6

Of course it has, I doubt this is uncommon. All my childhood I dreamed of a magic computer that could just tell me straightforward answers to non-straightforward questions like the cartoon one in Courage the Cowardly Dog. Today it's a reality; I can ask my computer any wild question and get a coherent, if not completely correct, answer.

You are in for a rude awakening when you realize that those answers tend to be subtly to blatently wrong especially when the questions are tricky and non-obvious. Once that blind initial trust is shattered and you stary to question the accuracy of what AI gives you back, you see the BS everywhere.
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