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I agree with your sentiment exactly. But your comment made me think about this an interesting way that I hadn’t thought about before, that made me better unders
by lumb63 4y ago
I agree with your sentiment exactly. But your comment made me think about this an interesting way that I hadn’t thought about before, that made me better understand why I am “anti-GPT search”.
All the same things that the model makes an effort to “understand” are things that can contribute to your own understanding. When it “understands”, you do not. You get the summary and miss out on a great amount of nuance that can come with learning and finding the right answer for yourself.
For instance, it is very common that in the search for why X is happening in my code, I will find tons of information that don’t answer my question but help me form an understanding of why it is happening, how the system is working, etc.
This is especially visible in science. Many papers outright conflict with each other. Some have better or worse methodologies than others. Some have better analyses. Some state outright falsehoods without citation or misinterpret citations. Having a GPT “understand” this to produce understanding in humans is going to end very badly. It takes several hours for a human (in my experience) to understand even a single academic paper on its own.
I suppose the appropriate cliche is “it’s the journey, not the destination”.
- ambicapter 4y agoA great quote from an article I read on HN recently > Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don’t learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out.
- moffkalast 4y agoAs opposed to the thing we did before, which is when kids asked something they were told something that's wrong and told to "stop talking back" and "go to your room". I think this is still an improvement.
- ambicapter 4y ago> As opposed to the thing we did before, which is when kids asked something they were told something that's wrong and told to "stop talking back" and "go to your room" Not everyone had your childhood.
- moffkalast 4y agoNot everyone, but lots of people.
- JohnMakin 4y agoThis is silly. You could extrapolate the same argument to use against Libraries.
- sorokod 4y agoNot silly, it's a quantity into quality thing.
- Dalewyn 4y agoMost of the people here know and understand computers because we had to tear everything apart and figure out how everything worked just so we could play some video games. Contrast kids of today who can just go and play video games, no disecting of computers required. Naturally, most of them don't understand or appreciate computers as anything more than just another appliance.
- jraph 4y agoDo you have concrete examples of stuff you figure out instead of looking it up? I'm not going to figure out the population of the Liechtenstein, I'm going to look it up.
- ipaddr 4y agoWhat chatGPT misses is I want many sources of information conflicting or not so I can form a more informed opinion. I want to know every side not the correct one.