4 ms·

Trying this with books I was familiar with yielded extremely disappointing and off-base results.

• wenc 3y ago
  I’m curious as to how?
  • ethanbond 3y ago
    It lost all the rhetorical force of the argument, got factual things wrong, and failed to point out important misunderstandings on my part. IMO good books are ones that collide with your priors and compel you to reconfigure your worldview. I can only describe this GPT exercise as allowing me to mold the book around my priors as opposed to helping (or even allowing) the book to really impact them head-on, how the author knew they ought to be attacked. I think it’s really insidious for someone to do this and come out thinking their prior worldview survived collision with the book.
    • wenc 3y ago
      Interesting. Curious if you were using GPT 4 or the free tier? I have a different experience. GPT4 has enhanced my reading by allowing me to correlate it with history, sociology etc. I don’t have the explicit objective of having my priors challenged — I have very complex priors. I seek more new connections that I never made before. GPT4 has been able to do both for me. Take Malthus — I asked it for the historical positions for and against Malthusian hypothesis and asked it to speculate what would happen in a reality where people believed it. It’s a purely intellectual exercise but I was able to see more perspectives than what I could imagine.