4 ms·

ChatGPT, please summarize in bullet points.

rsynnott 2y ago
Unwise. You don't want to bring it to the basilisk's attention that you know about the basilisk, just in case this lot are right ;)
alhadrad 2y ago
This is the start of modern illiteracy.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  Start... We are already very far advanced as far as I can see. You wouldn't know if you hang with university students; they seem, at least the ones I employ/talk to, far more knowledgeable than the young me was, however, when I talk to other young people, they don't want to and are not very good at processing textual information. They need to have it spoken and in a very information sparse format. It's somewhat depressing, so I hope it's just the people I meet and what I read online, but I don't think so.
  - slumberlust 2y ago
    Name a generation that didn't think the youth 'lost it.'
    - anonzzzies 2y ago
      Yep, like I said; I hope it's just me. That's fine too. It's just actively annoying that people just refuse to read stuff. It's very wasteful timewise for me.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  This is adblock for text.
- ryao 2y ago
  Such sentiments have been expressed so many times that I have lost track of all of the times variations on them have been expressed. I think it started with Socrates who claimed the written word would damage human recall. When nobody believed him and he became popular because of the written word, people inverted “literacy is bad” into “literacy is good”. In more recent times, I believe radio and TV were said to be the start of modern illiteracy. By the way, for what it is worth, only 2% of the population can read at a college level. It had been that way for so long that I heard that the category was merged into the high school level several years ago to make the literacy rate in the top bracket 4% instead of the prior 2%. i.e. “modern illiteracy” started a long time ago if we go by numbers.
  - dasil003 2y ago
    Maybe Socrates was correct? I certainly think Google has damaged my memory, or maybe just age, hard to say.
    - ryao 2y ago
      Who knows? The guy was not a really good teacher. His student Plato ignored the meaning of what he said about learning to write a book on it. A major point of the book was that reading the book was pointless because it was a form of sophism. Before I am downvoted into oblivion, the above text is half joking and half serious. Socrates in Plato’s Republic really does make the case that formal training via methods intended to teach is pointless by comparing education to training horses. I made that point in my college philosophy class hoping the professor would skip it on the basis that it was a bad book (my thoughts on a book that suggested you could not learn its material by being lead to it - see the cave analogy). The professor then stopped the entire class to try to make sure everyone understood the point and then continued as if the material was not criticizing him.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      Probably so. Socrates witnessed the end of the Athenian Golden Age during his lifetime.
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
- senectus1 2y ago
  I mean.. yeah, but.. I just fed this into grok and it did a fair job of summarising it (I know because I've done a fair bit of reading on the zizian nutters.)
- balamatom 2y ago
  No, just a way to say "tl;dr" which also somehow manages to be offensively classist.
pevey 2y ago
This is a non-fiction piece, not really a news story. So not everyone's cup of tea. Joan Didion style. I enjoyed it. I would summarize it as not being about AI per se. It's nominally about "rationalism," or the inclination to boil everything down to mathematics to an extreme degree. The story points out a growing subculture of rationalist who have become quite radicalized. For a community like HN, which (rightly, IMO) places high value on rational and critical thought, it can seem strange that there could be a degree at which that sort of thinking is harmful. But there are a lot of examples where taken to an extreme, it can allow people to "rationalize" all sorts of actions. And the article goes into detail about some of the pitfalls this small group fell into.
- pevey 2y ago
  A side note about my perspective: I studied economics as an undergrad at a time when the Northwestern "pure rationalism" school of thought completely dominated. Some of the conclusions from purely mathematical models built high on dubious assumptions were ridiculous on their face. But anything outside that dogma was heresy and treated as such. Academics were shunned, careers ruined. It was a few years later that "behavioral economics" began to make inroads. The moniker of "behavioral economics" itself was to distinguish it from "real economics." Alas (for the establishment), behavioral economics proved very popular, and the genie was out of the bottle. It turns out mathematic equations are not all-powerful when it comes to describing certain phenomena, especially when it comes to individual or collective human behavior. Collective blind faith in models built on dubious assumptions is what gave us the mortgage crisis.

Unwise. You don't want to bring it to the basilisk's attention that you know about the basilisk, just in case this lot are right ;)

alhadrad 2y ago

This is the start of modern illiteracy.

anonzzzies 2y ago
Start... We are already very far advanced as far as I can see. You wouldn't know if you hang with university students; they seem, at least the ones I employ/talk to, far more knowledgeable than the young me was, however, when I talk to other young people, they don't want to and are not very good at processing textual information. They need to have it spoken and in a very information sparse format. It's somewhat depressing, so I hope it's just the people I meet and what I read online, but I don't think so.
- slumberlust 2y ago
  Name a generation that didn't think the youth 'lost it.'
  - anonzzzies 2y ago
    Yep, like I said; I hope it's just me. That's fine too. It's just actively annoying that people just refuse to read stuff. It's very wasteful timewise for me.
schmidtleonard 2y ago
This is adblock for text.
ryao 2y ago
Such sentiments have been expressed so many times that I have lost track of all of the times variations on them have been expressed. I think it started with Socrates who claimed the written word would damage human recall. When nobody believed him and he became popular because of the written word, people inverted “literacy is bad” into “literacy is good”. In more recent times, I believe radio and TV were said to be the start of modern illiteracy. By the way, for what it is worth, only 2% of the population can read at a college level. It had been that way for so long that I heard that the category was merged into the high school level several years ago to make the literacy rate in the top bracket 4% instead of the prior 2%. i.e. “modern illiteracy” started a long time ago if we go by numbers.
- dasil003 2y ago
  Maybe Socrates was correct? I certainly think Google has damaged my memory, or maybe just age, hard to say.
  - ryao 2y ago
    Who knows? The guy was not a really good teacher. His student Plato ignored the meaning of what he said about learning to write a book on it. A major point of the book was that reading the book was pointless because it was a form of sophism. Before I am downvoted into oblivion, the above text is half joking and half serious. Socrates in Plato’s Republic really does make the case that formal training via methods intended to teach is pointless by comparing education to training horses. I made that point in my college philosophy class hoping the professor would skip it on the basis that it was a bad book (my thoughts on a book that suggested you could not learn its material by being lead to it - see the cave analogy). The professor then stopped the entire class to try to make sure everyone understood the point and then continued as if the material was not criticizing him.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Probably so. Socrates witnessed the end of the Athenian Golden Age during his lifetime.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
senectus1 2y ago
I mean.. yeah, but.. I just fed this into grok and it did a fair job of summarising it (I know because I've done a fair bit of reading on the zizian nutters.)
balamatom 2y ago
No, just a way to say "tl;dr" which also somehow manages to be offensively classist.

pevey 2y ago

This is a non-fiction piece, not really a news story. So not everyone's cup of tea. Joan Didion style. I enjoyed it. I would summarize it as not being about AI per se. It's nominally about "rationalism," or the inclination to boil everything down to mathematics to an extreme degree. The story points out a growing subculture of rationalist who have become quite radicalized. For a community like HN, which (rightly, IMO) places high value on rational and critical thought, it can seem strange that there could be a degree at which that sort of thinking is harmful. But there are a lot of examples where taken to an extreme, it can allow people to "rationalize" all sorts of actions. And the article goes into detail about some of the pitfalls this small group fell into.

pevey 2y ago
A side note about my perspective: I studied economics as an undergrad at a time when the Northwestern "pure rationalism" school of thought completely dominated. Some of the conclusions from purely mathematical models built high on dubious assumptions were ridiculous on their face. But anything outside that dogma was heresy and treated as such. Academics were shunned, careers ruined. It was a few years later that "behavioral economics" began to make inroads. The moniker of "behavioral economics" itself was to distinguish it from "real economics." Alas (for the establishment), behavioral economics proved very popular, and the genie was out of the bottle. It turns out mathematic equations are not all-powerful when it comes to describing certain phenomena, especially when it comes to individual or collective human behavior. Collective blind faith in models built on dubious assumptions is what gave us the mortgage crisis.