3 ms·

> The real danger lies in their seductive nature - over how tempting it becomes to immediately reach for the nearest LLM to provide an answer rather than taking

> The real danger lies in their seductive nature - over how tempting it becomes to immediately reach for the nearest LLM to provide an answer rather than taking a few moments to quietly ponder the problem on your own. I get the point you're trying to make. However, quietly pondering the problem is only fruitful if you have the right information. If you don't, best case scenario you risk wasting time reinventing the wheel for no good reason. In this application, a LLM is just the same type of tool as Google: a way to query and retrieve information cor you to ingest. Like Google, the info you get from queries is not the end but the means. As the saying goes, a month in the lab saves you a week in the library. I would say it can also save you 10 minutes with Claude/ChatGPT/Copilot. Is hiring a private tutor also laziness?

abathur 2y ago
I'll stop short of asserting you don't, but I'm having a hard time convincing myself your reply does reflect that you get GP's point. If I were to reframe GP's point, it would be: having to figure out how to answer a question changes you a little. Over time, it changes you a lot. Yes, of course, there is a perspective from which a month spent in the lab to answer a question that's well-settled in the literature is ~wasted. But the GP is arguing for a utility function that optimizes for improving the questioner. Quietly pondering the problem with the wrong information can be fruitful in this context. (To be pragmatic, we need both of these. We'd get nowhere if we had to solve every problem and learn every lesson from first principles. But we'd also get nowhere if no one were well-prepared and motivated to solve novel problems without prior art.)
Arainach 2y ago
>wasting time reinventing the wheel for no good reason Nearly all of learning relies on reinventing the wheel. Most personal projects involve reinventing wheels, but improving yourself by doing so.
- aylmao 2y ago
  Very much this. Some of the most memorable moments I had in my learning were when I "reinvented" something. In high-school, our math teacher had us reinvent the derivative rules, and later had us derive Euler's identity through Taylor Series. They were big eureka moments. Going through all the work someone else did hundreds of years ago is very inspiring, and IMO gets you in the right mindset for discovery. I can't imagine where the joy of learning comes for someone who sees learning as a test —a question, an answer, nothing in between. In uni we built a CPU from scratch over the course of a few weeks. First building an small ALU, widening its bus, adding memory operations, etc. Beyond learning how things work, it makes you wonder how inventing this without a teacher to guide you must've been, and gives you an appreciation for it. It also makes you extrapolate and think about the things that haven't been invented or discovered yet. In theory LLMs could serve as a teacher guiding you as you reinvent things. In practice, people just get the answer and move on. A person with experience teaching, who sees how you're walking the path and compares it to how they walked theirs, will know when to give you an answer and when to have you find it yourself. One doesn't learn how to do lab-work in the library.

abathur 2y ago

I'll stop short of asserting you don't, but I'm having a hard time convincing myself your reply does reflect that you get GP's point. If I were to reframe GP's point, it would be: having to figure out how to answer a question changes you a little. Over time, it changes you a lot. Yes, of course, there is a perspective from which a month spent in the lab to answer a question that's well-settled in the literature is ~wasted. But the GP is arguing for a utility function that optimizes for improving the questioner. Quietly pondering the problem with the wrong information can be fruitful in this context. (To be pragmatic, we need both of these. We'd get nowhere if we had to solve every problem and learn every lesson from first principles. But we'd also get nowhere if no one were well-prepared and motivated to solve novel problems without prior art.)

Arainach 2y ago

>wasting time reinventing the wheel for no good reason Nearly all of learning relies on reinventing the wheel. Most personal projects involve reinventing wheels, but improving yourself by doing so.

aylmao 2y ago
Very much this. Some of the most memorable moments I had in my learning were when I "reinvented" something. In high-school, our math teacher had us reinvent the derivative rules, and later had us derive Euler's identity through Taylor Series. They were big eureka moments. Going through all the work someone else did hundreds of years ago is very inspiring, and IMO gets you in the right mindset for discovery. I can't imagine where the joy of learning comes for someone who sees learning as a test —a question, an answer, nothing in between. In uni we built a CPU from scratch over the course of a few weeks. First building an small ALU, widening its bus, adding memory operations, etc. Beyond learning how things work, it makes you wonder how inventing this without a teacher to guide you must've been, and gives you an appreciation for it. It also makes you extrapolate and think about the things that haven't been invented or discovered yet. In theory LLMs could serve as a teacher guiding you as you reinvent things. In practice, people just get the answer and move on. A person with experience teaching, who sees how you're walking the path and compares it to how they walked theirs, will know when to give you an answer and when to have you find it yourself. One doesn't learn how to do lab-work in the library.