7 ms·

This stands to reason. If you need the answer to a question, and you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going to learn muc

This stands to reason. If you need the answer to a question, and you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter approach than the former. You may be disciplined enough to do more research if the answer is directly presented to you, but most people will not do that, and most companies are not interested in that, they want quick 'efficient', 'competitive' solutions. They aren't considering the long term downside to this.

portaouflop 2y ago
What is the long term downside in your opinion?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- metalliqaz 2y ago
  I believe he implied by saying: > you're going to learn much more with the latter approach than the former that the downside is a lack of deep knowledge that would enable better solutions in the long term
  - roydivision 2y ago
    Yes, the downside is that we aren't really learning anything, just solving problems supported by machines that tell us the solutions. Any schmuck can do that.
    - reginald78 2y ago
      I think it is worse. Information will dry up (in a variety of ways) making it much harder to even learn the traditional way as we could in the past.
agumonkey 2y ago
that's why I mostly use chatgpt with platonic questions like - given context c, i tried idea a, b and c. where there other options that I miss ? - based on this plan, do you see missing efficiency ? etc etc i'm not seeking answers, i'm trying to avoid costly dead ends
- roydivision 2y ago
  I think you are in a minority, you WANT to learn.
  - agumonkey 2y ago
    probably, or should I say, I don't want to rot.. It's true that I love the feeling of learning mostly on my own, but i can be lazy too, it's just that I see a parallel with abusing chatgpt and never doing any physical activity.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- hb-robo 2y ago
  Same here. I never really consciously saw it as "defiance" against cognitive decline or anything. More to the point, the answers are much better on average
engineer_22 2y ago
We have accounts from the ancient Greeks of the old-school's attitude towards writing. In the deep past, they maintained an oral tradition, and scholars were expected to memorize everything. They saw writing/reading as a crutch that was ruining the youth's memory. We stand now at the edge of a new epoch, reading now being replaced by AI retrieval. There is concern that AI is a crutch, the youth will be weakened. My opinion: valid concern. No way to know how it turns out. No indication yet that use of AI is harming business outcomes. The meta argument "AGI will cause massive social change" is probably true.
- SecretDreams 2y ago
  > No way to know how it turns out. But one can speculate. > No indication yet that use of AI is harming business outcomes. Length scales to measure harm when it comes to policy/technology will typically require more time than we've had since LLMs really became prominent. > The meta argument "AGI will cause massive social change" is probably true. Agreed. Basically, in the absence of knowing how something will play out, it is prudent to talk through the expected outcomes and their likelihoods of happening. From there, we can start to build out a risk-adjusted return model to the societal impacts of LLM/AI integration if it continues down the current trajectory. IMO, I don't see the ROI for society of widespread LLM adoption unless we see serious policy shifts on how they are used and how young people are taught to learn. To the downside, we really run the risk of the next generation having fundamental learning deficiencies/gaps relative to their prior gen. A close anecdote might be how 80s/90s kids are better with troubleshooting technology than the generations that came both before and after them.
- anileated 2y ago
  It is much more recent than the Greeks. McLuhan, for example, had some good points* about how writing/reading is different (and indeed in some ways worse?) than oral tradition, and how it influences even our social interactions and mindset. Film is different yet again (partially has to do with its linearity IIRC). So it’s not like “kids these days”, no. To be honest, I don’t know how generative AI tools, which arguably take away most of the “create” and “learn” parts, are relevant to the question of differences between different mediums and how those mediums influence how we create and learn. (There are ML-based tools that can empower creativity, but they don’t tend to be advertised as “AI” because they are a mostly invisible part of some creative tool.) What is potentially relevant is how interacting with a particular kind of generative ML tool (the chatbot) for the purposes of understanding the world can be bringing some parts of human oral tradition (though lacking communication with actual humans, of course) and associated mental states. * See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Movable_type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Movable_type and his most famous work
alickz 2y ago
> If you need the answer to a question, and you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter approach than the former. Why not force everyone to start from first principles then? I think learning is tied to curiosity and curiosity is not tied to difficulty of research i.e. give a curious person a direct answer and they will go on to ask more questions, give an incurious person a direct answer and they won't go on to ask more questions We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and that is a _good_ thing, not bad Forcing us to forgo the giants and claw ourselves up to their height may have benefits, but in my eyes it is way less effective as a form of knowledge The compounding force of knowledge is awesome to behold, even if it can be scary
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Yes exactly. I think the concern here is totally valid. But for me personally, having LLMs unblock me more quickly on each question I have has allowed me to ask more questions, to research more things in the same amount of time. Which is great!
- dragon96 2y ago
  One of the values of doing your own research is it forces you to speak the "language" of what you're trying to do. It's like the struggle that we've all had when learning our first programming language. If we weren't forced to wrestle with compilation errors, our brains wouldn't have adapted to the mindset that the computer will do whatever you tell it to do and only that. There's a place for LLMs in learning, and I feel like it satisfies the same niche as pre-synthesized Medium tutorials. It's no replacement for reading documentation or finding answers for yourself though.
  - theoreticalmal 2y ago
    This seems like a difference between learning styles. You seem to champion learning by reading. I’d argue using an LLM to build a toy or tool and learning that way is just as valid.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
klodolph 2y ago
> They aren't considering the long term downside to this. This echoes sentiments from the 2010s centered around hiring. Companies generally don’t want to hire junior engineers and train them—this is an investment with risks of no return for the company doing the training. Basically, you take your senior engineers away from projects so they can train the juniors, and then the juniors now have the skills and credentials to get a job elsewhere. Your company ends up in the hole, with a negative ROI for hiring the junior. Tragedy of the commons. Same thing to day, different mechanism. Are we going to end up with a shortage of skilled software engineers? Maybe. IMO, the industry is so incredibly wasteful in how engineers are allocated and what problems they are told to work on that it can probably deal with shortages for a long time, but that’s a separate discussion.
- ohphysics 2y ago
  [dead]
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Engineers partly did this to themselves. The career advice during that time period was to change jobs every few years, demanding higher and higher salaries. So now, employers don't want to pay to train entry-level people, as they know they are likely going to leave, and at the salaries demanded they don't want to hire junior folks.
  - TeamDman 2y ago
    If incentives to stay outweighed leaving, people would stay.
  - Daishiman 2y ago
    This is only because companies don't want to raise salaries as engineers' skill levels increase. If companies put junior employees in higher salary bands as their skill levels increase there wouldn't be a problem.
    - kridsdale1 2y ago
idiotsecant 2y ago
I don't know if I agree here. When I ask an LLM a question it always leads to a whole lot of other questions with responses tailored to my current level of understanding. This usually results in a much more effective learning session than reading a bunch of material that I might not retain anyway because I'm scanning it looking for my answers.
- cma 2y ago
  Also challenging aspects of their explanations to get at something better is good for developing critical thinking.
awongh 2y ago
*but most people will not do that* LLMs will definitely be a technology that widens the knowledge gap at the same time that it improves access to knowledge. Just like the internet. 30 years ago people dreamed about how smart everyone would be with humanity's knowledge instantly accessible. We've had wikipedia for a while, but what's the take-up rate of this infinite amount of information? Most people prefer to scroll rage-bait videos on their phones (content that doesn't give them knowledge or even make them feel better, just that makes them angry) Of course it's amazing to hear every once in a while the guy who maintains a vim plugin by coding on his phone in Pakistan.... or whatever other thing that is enabled by the internet by people who suddenly have access to this stuff. That's not an effect of all humans on average, it's an effect on a few people who finally have a chance to take advantage of these tools. I heard in a YouTube interview a physicist saying that LLMs are helping physics research just because any physicist out there can now ask graduate-level questions about currently published papers, that is, have access to knowledge that would have been hard to come by before, sharing knowledge across sub-domains of physics by asking ChatGPT.
- yard2010 2y ago
  Anecdotal, but I for one despise the youtube/instagram etc. rabbidholes. When I'm in the mood for a good one I scroll wikipedia. I had the best random conversations about what I read there and it feels like I remember this forever
  - meindnoch 2y ago
    It's because Wikipedia is non-profit, and has very strict editorial control. YouTube and Instagram is the opposite in both.
    - theoreticalmal 2y ago
      The editorial fairness of Wikipedia is currently hotly debated.
      - meindnoch 2y ago
colechristensen 2y ago
>you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter A LOT of the time the things I ask LLMs for are to avoid metaphorically wading through a garbage dump looking for a specific treasure. Filtering through irrelevant data and nonsense to find what I'm looking for is not personal development. What the LLM gives back is often a very much better jumping off point for looking through traditional sources for information.
- strix_varius 2y ago
  Often when I ask LLM things about topics I was once reasonably expert in, but have spent a few months or years away from, its answers provide garbage as if it were treasure.
taeric 2y ago
I had thought I saw somewhere that learning is specifically better when you are wrong, if the feedback for that is rapid enough. That is, "guess and check" is the quickest path to learning. Specifically, asking a question and getting an answer is not a general path to learning. Being asked a question and you answering it is. Somewhat, this is regardless of if you are correct or not.
- matsemann 2y ago
  I hated when doing math homework and they didn't give me the answer sheet. If I could do an integral and verify if it's correct or not, I could either quickly learn from my mistake, or keep doing integrals with added confidence. Which is how I learned the best. Gatekeeping it because someone might use the answers wrong felt weird, you still had to show your work.
  - taeric 2y ago
    Yeah. I also felt it largely went at odds with the entire concept of flashcards. Which... are among the most effective tools that I did not take advantage of in grade school.
  - HappMacDonald 2y ago
    I imagine the thought process is that even when one must show their work, having a sneak peak at the answer allows a lazier student to work the problem forwards and backwards hoping to fudge through the middle plausibly well.
dumbfounder 2y ago
Sure, if I spend one hour researching a problem vs asking AI in 10 seconds, yes I will almost always learn more in the one hour. But if I spend an hour asking AI questions on the same subject I believe I can learn way more than by reading for one hour. I think the analogy could be comparing a lecture to a one-on-one tutoring session. Education needs to evolve to keep up with the tools that students have at their disposal.
anigbrowl 2y ago
I think you put your finger on it with the mention of discipline. I find AI tools quite useful for giving me a quick outline of things I want to play with or get up to speed on fast, but not necessarily get too invested in. But if you fin yourself so excited by a particular result that it sets your imagination whirling, it might be time to switch out of generative mode and use the AI as a tutor to deepen your actual understanding, ideally in combination with books or other static learning resources.
llelouch 2y ago
Actually, for most things (not PHD research level) you will learn more from the first approach. Getting answer directly means you can use the rest of the "free" time to integrate new knowledge into prior knowledge and review the information into long term memory.

portaouflop 2y ago

What is the long term downside in your opinion?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
metalliqaz 2y ago
I believe he implied by saying: > you're going to learn much more with the latter approach than the former that the downside is a lack of deep knowledge that would enable better solutions in the long term
- roydivision 2y ago
  Yes, the downside is that we aren't really learning anything, just solving problems supported by machines that tell us the solutions. Any schmuck can do that.
  - reginald78 2y ago
    I think it is worse. Information will dry up (in a variety of ways) making it much harder to even learn the traditional way as we could in the past.

agumonkey 2y ago

that's why I mostly use chatgpt with platonic questions like - given context c, i tried idea a, b and c. where there other options that I miss ? - based on this plan, do you see missing efficiency ? etc etc i'm not seeking answers, i'm trying to avoid costly dead ends

roydivision 2y ago
I think you are in a minority, you WANT to learn.
- agumonkey 2y ago
  probably, or should I say, I don't want to rot.. It's true that I love the feeling of learning mostly on my own, but i can be lazy too, it's just that I see a parallel with abusing chatgpt and never doing any physical activity.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
hb-robo 2y ago
Same here. I never really consciously saw it as "defiance" against cognitive decline or anything. More to the point, the answers are much better on average

engineer_22 2y ago

We have accounts from the ancient Greeks of the old-school's attitude towards writing. In the deep past, they maintained an oral tradition, and scholars were expected to memorize everything. They saw writing/reading as a crutch that was ruining the youth's memory. We stand now at the edge of a new epoch, reading now being replaced by AI retrieval. There is concern that AI is a crutch, the youth will be weakened. My opinion: valid concern. No way to know how it turns out. No indication yet that use of AI is harming business outcomes. The meta argument "AGI will cause massive social change" is probably true.

SecretDreams 2y ago
> No way to know how it turns out. But one can speculate. > No indication yet that use of AI is harming business outcomes. Length scales to measure harm when it comes to policy/technology will typically require more time than we've had since LLMs really became prominent. > The meta argument "AGI will cause massive social change" is probably true. Agreed. Basically, in the absence of knowing how something will play out, it is prudent to talk through the expected outcomes and their likelihoods of happening. From there, we can start to build out a risk-adjusted return model to the societal impacts of LLM/AI integration if it continues down the current trajectory. IMO, I don't see the ROI for society of widespread LLM adoption unless we see serious policy shifts on how they are used and how young people are taught to learn. To the downside, we really run the risk of the next generation having fundamental learning deficiencies/gaps relative to their prior gen. A close anecdote might be how 80s/90s kids are better with troubleshooting technology than the generations that came both before and after them.
anileated 2y ago
It is much more recent than the Greeks. McLuhan, for example, had some good points* about how writing/reading is different (and indeed in some ways worse?) than oral tradition, and how it influences even our social interactions and mindset. Film is different yet again (partially has to do with its linearity IIRC). So it’s not like “kids these days”, no. To be honest, I don’t know how generative AI tools, which arguably take away most of the “create” and “learn” parts, are relevant to the question of differences between different mediums and how those mediums influence how we create and learn. (There are ML-based tools that can empower creativity, but they don’t tend to be advertised as “AI” because they are a mostly invisible part of some creative tool.) What is potentially relevant is how interacting with a particular kind of generative ML tool (the chatbot) for the purposes of understanding the world can be bringing some parts of human oral tradition (though lacking communication with actual humans, of course) and associated mental states. * See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Movable_type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Movable_type and his most famous work

alickz 2y ago

> If you need the answer to a question, and you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter approach than the former. Why not force everyone to start from first principles then? I think learning is tied to curiosity and curiosity is not tied to difficulty of research i.e. give a curious person a direct answer and they will go on to ask more questions, give an incurious person a direct answer and they won't go on to ask more questions We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and that is a _good_ thing, not bad Forcing us to forgo the giants and claw ourselves up to their height may have benefits, but in my eyes it is way less effective as a form of knowledge The compounding force of knowledge is awesome to behold, even if it can be scary

sanderjd 2y ago
Yes exactly. I think the concern here is totally valid. But for me personally, having LLMs unblock me more quickly on each question I have has allowed me to ask more questions, to research more things in the same amount of time. Which is great!
dragon96 2y ago
One of the values of doing your own research is it forces you to speak the "language" of what you're trying to do. It's like the struggle that we've all had when learning our first programming language. If we weren't forced to wrestle with compilation errors, our brains wouldn't have adapted to the mindset that the computer will do whatever you tell it to do and only that. There's a place for LLMs in learning, and I feel like it satisfies the same niche as pre-synthesized Medium tutorials. It's no replacement for reading documentation or finding answers for yourself though.
- theoreticalmal 2y ago
  This seems like a difference between learning styles. You seem to champion learning by reading. I’d argue using an LLM to build a toy or tool and learning that way is just as valid.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

klodolph 2y ago

> They aren't considering the long term downside to this. This echoes sentiments from the 2010s centered around hiring. Companies generally don’t want to hire junior engineers and train them—this is an investment with risks of no return for the company doing the training. Basically, you take your senior engineers away from projects so they can train the juniors, and then the juniors now have the skills and credentials to get a job elsewhere. Your company ends up in the hole, with a negative ROI for hiring the junior. Tragedy of the commons. Same thing to day, different mechanism. Are we going to end up with a shortage of skilled software engineers? Maybe. IMO, the industry is so incredibly wasteful in how engineers are allocated and what problems they are told to work on that it can probably deal with shortages for a long time, but that’s a separate discussion.

ohphysics 2y ago
[dead]
SoftTalker 2y ago
Engineers partly did this to themselves. The career advice during that time period was to change jobs every few years, demanding higher and higher salaries. So now, employers don't want to pay to train entry-level people, as they know they are likely going to leave, and at the salaries demanded they don't want to hire junior folks.
- TeamDman 2y ago
  If incentives to stay outweighed leaving, people would stay.
- Daishiman 2y ago
  This is only because companies don't want to raise salaries as engineers' skill levels increase. If companies put junior employees in higher salary bands as their skill levels increase there wouldn't be a problem.
  - kridsdale1 2y ago

idiotsecant 2y ago

I don't know if I agree here. When I ask an LLM a question it always leads to a whole lot of other questions with responses tailored to my current level of understanding. This usually results in a much more effective learning session than reading a bunch of material that I might not retain anyway because I'm scanning it looking for my answers.

cma 2y ago
Also challenging aspects of their explanations to get at something better is good for developing critical thinking.

awongh 2y ago

*but most people will not do that* LLMs will definitely be a technology that widens the knowledge gap at the same time that it improves access to knowledge. Just like the internet. 30 years ago people dreamed about how smart everyone would be with humanity's knowledge instantly accessible. We've had wikipedia for a while, but what's the take-up rate of this infinite amount of information? Most people prefer to scroll rage-bait videos on their phones (content that doesn't give them knowledge or even make them feel better, just that makes them angry) Of course it's amazing to hear every once in a while the guy who maintains a vim plugin by coding on his phone in Pakistan.... or whatever other thing that is enabled by the internet by people who suddenly have access to this stuff. That's not an effect of all humans on average, it's an effect on a few people who finally have a chance to take advantage of these tools. I heard in a YouTube interview a physicist saying that LLMs are helping physics research just because any physicist out there can now ask graduate-level questions about currently published papers, that is, have access to knowledge that would have been hard to come by before, sharing knowledge across sub-domains of physics by asking ChatGPT.

yard2010 2y ago
Anecdotal, but I for one despise the youtube/instagram etc. rabbidholes. When I'm in the mood for a good one I scroll wikipedia. I had the best random conversations about what I read there and it feels like I remember this forever
- meindnoch 2y ago
  It's because Wikipedia is non-profit, and has very strict editorial control. YouTube and Instagram is the opposite in both.
  - theoreticalmal 2y ago
    The editorial fairness of Wikipedia is currently hotly debated.
    - meindnoch 2y ago

colechristensen 2y ago

>you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter A LOT of the time the things I ask LLMs for are to avoid metaphorically wading through a garbage dump looking for a specific treasure. Filtering through irrelevant data and nonsense to find what I'm looking for is not personal development. What the LLM gives back is often a very much better jumping off point for looking through traditional sources for information.

strix_varius 2y ago
Often when I ask LLM things about topics I was once reasonably expert in, but have spent a few months or years away from, its answers provide garbage as if it were treasure.

taeric 2y ago

I had thought I saw somewhere that learning is specifically better when you are wrong, if the feedback for that is rapid enough. That is, "guess and check" is the quickest path to learning. Specifically, asking a question and getting an answer is not a general path to learning. Being asked a question and you answering it is. Somewhat, this is regardless of if you are correct or not.

matsemann 2y ago
I hated when doing math homework and they didn't give me the answer sheet. If I could do an integral and verify if it's correct or not, I could either quickly learn from my mistake, or keep doing integrals with added confidence. Which is how I learned the best. Gatekeeping it because someone might use the answers wrong felt weird, you still had to show your work.
- taeric 2y ago
  Yeah. I also felt it largely went at odds with the entire concept of flashcards. Which... are among the most effective tools that I did not take advantage of in grade school.
- HappMacDonald 2y ago
  I imagine the thought process is that even when one must show their work, having a sneak peak at the answer allows a lazier student to work the problem forwards and backwards hoping to fudge through the middle plausibly well.

dumbfounder 2y ago

Sure, if I spend one hour researching a problem vs asking AI in 10 seconds, yes I will almost always learn more in the one hour. But if I spend an hour asking AI questions on the same subject I believe I can learn way more than by reading for one hour. I think the analogy could be comparing a lecture to a one-on-one tutoring session. Education needs to evolve to keep up with the tools that students have at their disposal.

anigbrowl 2y ago

I think you put your finger on it with the mention of discipline. I find AI tools quite useful for giving me a quick outline of things I want to play with or get up to speed on fast, but not necessarily get too invested in. But if you fin yourself so excited by a particular result that it sets your imagination whirling, it might be time to switch out of generative mode and use the AI as a tutor to deepen your actual understanding, ideally in combination with books or other static learning resources.

llelouch 2y ago

Actually, for most things (not PHD research level) you will learn more from the first approach. Getting answer directly means you can use the rest of the "free" time to integrate new knowledge into prior knowledge and review the information into long term memory.