In the long run, LLMs make us dumber • Hacker News Board

Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber

#91

Post by enneantic » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

cabacon wrote: post #2

Plato's _Phaedrus_ features Socrates arguing against writing; "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." I have heard people argue that the use of calculators (and later, specifically graphing calculators) would make people worse at math; quick searching found papers like https://files…

This is a great illustration.

The bit of the dialogue you quote is Plato telling a story.

On another bit he says directly: anyone can plainly see there is nothing detrimental about writing itself.

And further down the line he warns against relying on text solely to learn and not other learned people because you might lose context and internalize the wrong interpretation.

Much like you did.

Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber

#92

Post by toss1 » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 3:27 PM UTC

cabacon wrote: post #20

toss1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>What makes LLMs different? Good question! Writing or calculators likely do reduce our ability memorize vast amounts of text or do arithmetic in our heads; but to write or do math with writing and calculation, we still must fully load those intermediate facts into our brain and fully understand what was previously written down or calculated to wield and wrangle it into a new piece of work. In contrast, LLMs (unless…

I have a kid in high school who uses LLMs to get feedback on essays he has written. It will come back with responses like "you failed to give good evidence to support your point that [X]", or "most readers prefer you to include more elaboration on how you changed subject from [Y] to [Z]". You (and another respondent) both cite the case where someone unthinkingly generates a large swath of text using the LLM, but that…

YES, fully agree, and your kid is definitely doing it right!

I've also found LLMs to be very helpful in proofreading to find inconsistencies, missing items, stray edits, etc..

Here's one variant of prompt I've used with ChatGPT-4o that worked well:

"Focus particularly on inconsistencies and editing errors (stray words or characters, etc.). Be exact and do not include compliments to the author. Please ignore apparent duplicate listings of part numbers and dimensions which are under the illustrations, and single stray or inconsistent spaces."

I'm quite sure that LLMs used in the right way can be amazing for teaching, and I've used them to learn quite a few things. In fact, it seems this is one of the strengths of LLMs — they are not so good at 'reasoning' about unusual content at the edge of a field of knowledge, but are fantastic for compiling info that is commonly used by humans but not yet familiar to a particular human.

And yes, the "They will make us dumb!" response kind of depends if you are starting out dumb — just as a hammer will make you smarter if you use it to pound nails to build a house and a school, but dumber if you hit yourself in the head with it...

Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber

#93

Post by devmor » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 6:53 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #78

devmor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does everyone who thinks horse paste cures covid.

Does that seem like a compelling argument to you?

Yes. If you believe you are the exception in the face of overwhelming evidence, you are most likely wrong.