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Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

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Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#91

Post by TeMPOraL »

iib wrote: post #26
jkhdigital wrote: post #23

I started teaching undergraduate computer science courses a year ago, after ~20 years in various other careers. My campus has relatively low enrollment, but has seen a massive increase in CS majors recently (for reasons I won’t go into) so they are hiring a lot without much instructional support in place. I was basically given zero preparation other than a zip file with the current instructor’s tests and homeworks (w…

I found Geoffrey Hinton's hypothesis of LLMs interesting in this regard. They have to compress the world knowledge into a few billion parameters, much denser than the human brain, so they have to be very good at analogies, in order to obtain that compression.

I feel this has causality reversed. I'd say they are good at analogies because they have to compress well, which they do by encoding relationships in stupidly high-dimensional space.

Analogies then could sort of fall out naturally out of this. It might really still be just the simple (yet profound) "King - Man + Woman = Queen" style vector math.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#92

Post by iammjm »

I hate to be "that guy", but I think this text was at least partially written by AI:

"This is not a failure. It is how experience operates."

This bit is a clear sign to me, as I am repeatedly irritated by the AI I use that basically almost always defaults to this kind of phrasing each time I ask it something. I even asked it explicitly in my system prompt not to do it

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#93

Post by 1_08iu »

LowLevelBasket wrote: post #88

This guy is older than I am and writes much worse than I do. Maybe AI 'helps' but the writing of this post is terrible and I was left wondering if he has a learning disability and if AI can help with that

Writing is ultimately just a communication tool. I think the author communicated their ideas effectively. I don't think that it is necessary or appropriate to speculate whether or not they have a learning disability.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#94

Post by kranner »

simianwords wrote: post #87
kranner wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 billionair…

Really pessimistic and mostly incorrect understanding of LLMs. No they don’t flatter you, try using ChatGPT once. No they don’t hallucinate that much. Since paper this is one of the most important inventions. It has almost infinite knowledge and you can ask it anything mostly.

> No they don’t flatter you, try using ChatGPT once.

You're absolutely right!

On a more serious note, if it has almost infinite knowledge, is it even a cognitive-offloading tool in the same class as paper? Sounds more like something designed to stifle and make my thoughts conform to its almost infinite knowledge.

edit: I'll admit ChatGPT is a great search engine (and also very hallucinatory depending on how much you know about the subject) and maybe it helps some people think, sure. But beyond a point I find it actually harmful as a means to develop my own ideas.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#95

Post by simianwords »

kranner wrote: post #94
simianwords wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really pessimistic and mostly incorrect understanding of LLMs. No they don’t flatter you, try using ChatGPT once. No they don’t hallucinate that much. Since paper this is one of the most important inventions. It has almost infinite knowledge and you can ask it anything mostly.

> No they don’t flatter you, try using ChatGPT once. You're absolutely right! On a more serious note, if it has almost infinite knowledge, is it even a cognitive-offloading tool in the same class as paper? Sounds more like something designed to stifle and make my thoughts conform to its almost infinite knowledge. edit: I'll admit ChatGPT is a great search engine (and also very hallucinatory depending on how much you…

There’s no winning is there?

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#96

Post by jkhdigital »

normie3000 wrote: post #27
jkhdigital wrote: post #23

I started teaching undergraduate computer science courses a year ago, after ~20 years in various other careers. My campus has relatively low enrollment, but has seen a massive increase in CS majors recently (for reasons I won’t go into) so they are hiring a lot without much instructional support in place. I was basically given zero preparation other than a zip file with the current instructor’s tests and homeworks (w…

> I have strong opinions about good software design, some of them unconventional I'm jealous of your undergrads - can you share some of the unconventional opinions?

I’m required to teach DSA in Java, so I lay down a couple rules early in the course that prohibit 95% of the nonsense garbage that unconstrained OOP allows. Granted, neither of these rules is original or novel, but they are rarely acknowledged in educational settings:

1. All public methods must implement an interface, no exceptions. 2. The super implementation must be called if overriding a non-abstract method.

The end result of strict adherence to these rules is basically that every feature will look like a GoF design pattern. True creative freedom emerges through constraints, because the only allowable designs are the ones that are proven to be maximally extensible and composable.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#97

Post by Lwerewolf »

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…

Re: "yes men" - critical thinking always helps. I kind of treat their responses like a random written down shower thought - malicious without scrutiny. Same with anything that you haven't gone over properly, really.

The advantages that you listed make them worth it.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#98

Post by mrvmochi »

I wonder if we've conflated thinking with literacy for too long.

While I'm comfortable with text, I often feel that my brain runs much smoother when I'm talking with colleagues in front of a whiteboard compared to writing alone. It makes me suspect that for centuries, we've filtered out brilliance from people whose brains are effectively wired for auditory or spatial reasoning rather than symbolic serialization. They've been fighting an uphill battle against the pen and the keyboard.

I'm optimistic that LLMs (and multimodal models) will finally provide the missing interfaces for these types of thinkers.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#99

Post by attila-lendvai »

snek_case wrote: post #4
Klaster_1 wrote: post #2

This article matches my experience as well. Chatting with LLM has helped me to crystalize ideas I had before and explore relevant topics to widen the understanding. Previously, I wouldn't even know where to begin with when getting curious about something, but ChatGPT can tell you if your ideas have names, if they were explored previously, what primary sources there are. It's like a rabbit hole of exploring the world,…

In the early 2000s Wikipedia used to fill that role. Now it's like you have an encyclopedia that you can talk to. What I'm slightly worried about is that eventually they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more, and it's not going to be good, because they have the ability to steer the conversation towards trying to get you to buy stuff.

or more generally than just ads: make you believe stuff that makes you act in ways that is detrimental to you, but benefitial to them (whoever sits in the center and can control and shape the LLM).

i.e. the Nudge Unit on steroids...

care must be taken to avoid that.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#100

Post by attila-lendvai »

Klaster_1 wrote: post #18
snek_case wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the early 2000s Wikipedia used to fill that role. Now it's like you have an encyclopedia that you can talk to. What I'm slightly worried about is that eventually they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more, and it's not going to be good, because they have the ability to steer the conversation towards trying to get you to buy stuff.

One of the approaches to this that I haven't seen being talked about on HN at all is LLM as public infrastructure by the government. I think EU can pull this off. This also addresses overall alignment and compute-poverty issue. I wouldn't mind if my taxes paid for that instead of a ChatGPT subscription.

this assumes that "the government" is "us" and not "them"...
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