Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

philipotoole.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 154 posts

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#71

Post by survirtual »

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.

Recursive self-questioning predates external tools and is already well known. What is new is broad access to a low cost, non retaliatory dialogic interface that removes many social, sexual, and status pressures. LLMs do not make people think. They reduce interpersonal distortions that often interfere with thinking. That reduction in specific social biases (while introducing model encoded priors) is what can materially improve cognition for reflective and exploratory tasks.

Simply, when thinking hits a wall, we can now consult a machine via conversation interface lacking conventional human social biases. That is a new superpower.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#72

Post by CurleighBraces »

I find talking to LLMs both amazing and frustrating, a computer that can understand my plain text ramblings is incredible, but it's inability to learn is frustrating.

A good example, with junior developers I create thorough specs first and as I saw their skills and reasoning abilities progress my thoroughness drops as my trust in them grows. You just can't do that with LLMs

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#73

Post by muchfriction »

my_throwaway23 wrote: post #51

Your writing disagree - "This is not . This is how ." "When or , is not . It is ." "That alignment is what produces the sense of recognition. I already had the shape of the idea. The model supplied a clean verbal form." It's all LLM's. Nobody writes like this.

I was having a similar odd sense of something being off, then got to

> This is not new. Writing has always done this for me. What is different is the speed. I can probe half-formed thoughts, discard bad formulations, and try again without much friction. That encourages a kind of thinking I might have otherwise skipped.

This is a mess. The triple enumeration, twice in a row, right in the middle of a message that warranted a more coherent train of thought. That is, they want to say they already experienced similar gains before from writing as an activity, but the llm conversations are better. Better in what way? Faster, and "less friction". What? What is even the friction in... writing? What made it slow as well, like, are you not writing prompts?

The LLM-ness of the formatting is literally getting in the way of the message. Maybe OOP didn't notice before publishing, but they successfully argued the opposite. Their communication got worse.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#74

Post by wuti999 »

john01dav wrote: post #58
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.

In my experience LLMs offer two advantages over private thinking: 1) They have access to a vast array of extremely well indexed knowledge and can tell me about things that I'd never have found before. 2) They are able to respond instantly and engagingly, while working on any topic, which helps fight fatigue, at least for me. I do not know how universal this effect is, but using them often means that I can focus for l…

[flagged]

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#75

Post by libraryofbabel »

peepee1982 wrote: post #64
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.

Exactly. As distributed systems legend Leslie Lamport puts it: “Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.” (He added: “Mathematics is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your writing is.”)

I still have a lot of my best ideas in the shower, no paper and pen, no LLM to talk to. But writing them down is the only way to iron out all the ambiguity and sort out what’s really going to work and what isn’t. LLMs are a step up from that because they give you a ready-made critical audience for your writing that can challenge your assumptions and call out gaps and fuzziness (although as I said in my other comment, make sure you tell them to be critical!)

Thinking is great. I love it. And there are advantages to not involving LLMs too early in your process. But it’s just a first step and you need to write your ideas down and submit them to external scrutiny. Best of all for that is another person who you trust to give you a careful and honest reading, but those people are busy and hard to find. LLMs are a reasonable substitute.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#76

Post by arctic-true »

normie3000 wrote: post #24
gradus_ad wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best existing "product" analogy for LLM's is coffee. Coffee is a universally available, productivity enhancing commodity. There are some varieties certainly, but at the end of the day, a bean is a bean. It will get the job done. Many love it, many need it, but it doesn't really cost all that much. Where people get fancy is in all the fancy but unnecessary accoutrements for the brewing of coffee. Some choo…

Enjoyable analogy. > Some choose to spend a lot on appliances that let you brew at home rather than relying on some external provider. This makes it sound like buying brewed coffee is the budget option. But the real budget option I've seen is to brew at home. Almost any household will have an appliance to boil water. Then add instant coffee. I don't understand why, but in my experience instant coffee seems to be the…

I think the idea is that there are higher startup costs to brew at home. Even a cheap coffee machine is going to cost more than a cup of coffee at a diner, in the same way that a computer that can run a local LLM is going to cost more than a bunch of API calls to a commercial model. Eventually, those diner coffees add up, but you’re stuck with them if you can’t afford the coffee machine.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#77

Post by appsoftware »

I agree with the authors observations here. I think rather than it being purely language related, there's a link to the practice of 'rubber ducking', where when you start to explain your problem to someone else it forces you to step through the problem as you start to explain the context, the steps you've tried and where you're stuck. I think LLMs can be that other person for us sometimes, except that other person has a great broad range of expertise.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#78

Post by dartharva »

teiferer wrote: post #70
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.

Of course due diligence and validation is needed if you intend to use the information for something, but if your aim is just to satisfy your curiosity with questions you don't have anyone else to ask, it's a great medium.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#79

Post by huflungdung »

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.

[dead]
Post reply on HN