8 ms·

I read a fair amount and I actually do research as leisure all the time, but I can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and c

by awongh 2y ago

I read a fair amount and I actually do research as leisure all the time, but I can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler this person’s habits are than yours. >> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to everyone else. I actually deeply agree with the advice in the OP around curiosity but personally I end up implementing it in a totally different way than they do. Lately I’ve found that LLMs are an amazing tool for this free-floating “research”- for example “Summarize the top three theories about why suburbs exist and who said them”. The LLM as open ended semantic search engine / research tool is an amazing way to figure out the topology of a subject you want to dive deeper into. I usually work my way down a content ladder from there to podcasts, wikipedia and finally to books. The idea that somehow civilization is ending because of our media consumption habits and that “reading source material” will save us comes off as more an aesthetic fantasy than a real-world complaint about today’s culture. I was around before the internet and I’m so thankful that so much more information is accessible now than it was when there were only books.

aaron695 2y ago
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nluken 2y ago
I think you're generally right about the OP, but I don't see your alternative method as a tonic to the problem the author is discussing. I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong, and that the original post tends towards hierarchy in an almost reactionary way, yet at the same time I also see that many people tend to ingest information from other forms of media less critically than they might a book or written piece. I think this dichotomy derives from the different levels of focus we apply to different activities. Reading, even for leisure, demands a level of effort that forces you to focus and, in a way, analyze the information you're ingesting. By removing that barrier, you might fail to fully grasp the ideas that the primary source expressed. In your use case, the LLM can be a great tool to get a start, but it's much easier to accept that output uncritically, which is especially problematic because it bears the biases of the training corpus. Sure, you can mitigate that issue if you're driven by the intellectual curiosity to dig deeper, which it seems you are, but at that point aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway? You're just using the initial steps to discover the "foundational texts", as the original post puts it, of the field. The LLM step becomes less material to the follow-up reading you've done after the fact. Many, perhaps even most people will not make it to the second step. I see the lack of intellectual curiosity as a problem of focus more than anything else, and in my experience the overly rich media landscape of the internet does not concentrate that focus in most people.
- awongh 2y ago
  Yea, it's the classic conflation of the format of the media with other factors- it's not the fact that you're reading from a screen instead of a paper page that's making you intellectually incurious. But the disingenuous thing is that I don't think these arguments are really meant to examine why people might be less curious- it's just to sound cooler than people who read the OP and imagine the writer in some cafe pouring over a big stack of hardcover books. >> aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway? I would say the distinction is that I don't need to be precious about why I would look at foundational texts. Maybe foundational texts are a bit over-hyped- anything written 100 years ago was made for the context of that time, and even if the ideas are universal to a certain extent, it's better digested through a modern lens in light of how those ideas have affected everything since then. How much more do you get out of an idea reading it from the original? It feels like there's a bit of a diminishing return in a lot of cases.
- jll29 2y ago
  > I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong The good news is that not only does the "private researcher" (curious individual person without a research background or job) nowadays have the ability to read online in far-removed libraries, they are even empowered to download the data of many studies, fire up their Jupyter notebooks to replicate some work. The danger is that some wannabes create even more noise on the proper science channels that are already polluted by fraudsters generating fake papers via ChatGPT and friends... making it harder for the untrained eye to distinguish between respectable science and pseudo-science.
  - randomNumber7 2y ago
    It's already hard to sort out the bs that respectable science generates.
    - etiam 2y ago
      Splitting hairs maybe, but more like it's already hard to suppress enough of the bs to get at the respectable science...
_fat_santa 2y ago
Personally I still go on Wikipedia deep dives where you end up going from link to link for hours. I think the author is entirely incorrect with that quote, the whole idea of leasure research is that there are no rules, some will go ask an LLM, others will go read 'foundational text' while others will just browse Wikipedia.
- mmooss 2y ago
  If that's what you like to do, of course that's fine. If we are going to talk with each other about what we like to do, we need to agree on meaning. In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth. As ultimate solutions to that goal, Wikipedia and LLM output lack sufficient accuracy and lack verifiability. Many find them useful as bibliographic tools that point us to accurate, verifiable sources. Also, research requires looking at the actual evidence - the primary sources; that's where the truth is, that's the foundation of the scientific method. Secondary sources filter the truth through someone else's interpretation, but for amateur researchers that may be all that's realistic - traveling to archives, building or using complex equipment is not realistic. Still, Wikipedia and (almost all) LLMs are tertiary or higher order sources: they are a combination of secondary or higher order sources - Wikipedia doesn't allow citing primary sources as far as I know (which would be necessary for Wikipedia to be a secondary source); LLM input is mostly secondary or higher order sources. I don't object if you call reading Wikipedia, 'research'. I don't at all object to you doing what you value. But we are talking about two different things.
  - awongh 2y ago
    > In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth > the primary sources; that's where the truth is I mentioned this elsewhere on the thread, but I also feel like the most influential primary sources are less important than secondary sources- if you read Marx, the social and political circumstances of his ideas are in the context of an industrial economy and just don't apply in the same way anymore. You can draw your own conclusions directly from what's written, but what's the point of that? I feel like it's more useful to engage with those ideas keeping in mind all of the thought and history that's happened since- in that case you would wait a pretty long time to work backwards until you read the original.
fastasucan 2y ago
>> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts Leisurely and "must include" sounds very contradicting.
mobilejdral 2y ago
The author also asks "If you were stranded on an island (or small hostile planetoid), what books would you want to have with you?" which I also can't answer. I would fall into the category of someone who does research as leisure. I have been slowly unraveling the genetics behind gender dysphoria. Yes I have borrowed a few biology books from libraries, but it has mostly been reading 70 years of research papers, piecing together all the evidence to make a hypothesis, comparing it to all the research data and iterating. In the last year I have also started getting a fair number of WGS (Whole Genome Sequenced) files, and I have a whole separate pile of anecdotal that just because it isn't published doesn't mean I can ignore it either. These are about as far from books as you can get. It is something I do for leisure, so my investigation has been somewhat random, following whatever I found interating at that time including dead ends. Been doing this very open ended research for years now and at this point we have a really solid understanding of it, so the edge cases are actually now the fun stuff. I never would have made anywhere near the progress I did if I had been forced to start with reading a bunch of random unrelated biology books.
- wasabi991011 2y ago
  Sounds interesting, do you have somewhere I can read some of what you've learned across your research?
  - mobilejdral 2y ago
    Sure, add a way to contact you to your account and I can send you over the current understanding.
    - weakfish 2y ago
      Also interested.
mmooss 2y ago
> can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler Aren't you saying the same thing, putting them down? You could both be curious about each other.
- awongh 2y ago
  I commented on the article so I suppose I'm engaging with the ideas. To be clear, I also think it's a shame that people don't read as many books these days, I don't read a huge amount but I feel like I'm at the higher-end of my social circle in terms of reading volume. Mostly, I don't like the trope that there's some kind of moral imperative to Read More Books and that Things Used to Be Better. Overall I'm philosophically disinclined to draw the conclusion that phones/attention/social media are bad and reading more will improve society. I also have TikTok but I don't think it makes me a worse person.
ozim 2y ago
Agree, OP is points to Thoreau, Sagan, Galileo - most people on the planet earth are not like that and those guys were heavily privileged. Doing personal fancy research was not available before as it is now. Even though one still has to be rather privileged to have time to dig through obscure details that don’t make him money.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  > Agree, OP is points to Thoreau, Sagan, Galileo - most people on the planet earth are not like that and those guys were heavily privileged. Sagan was heavily privileged? I mean, yes, he was born in the US and could afford to get a Bachelor's degree, but other than that, he was not particularly privileged.
kevinsync 2y ago
>> I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to everyone else. The older I get, the more I'm convinced that people do this less to actually feel superior to others and more as a desperate act of establishing an identity, ANY identity, to simply feel seen and validated in spite of just being yet another person on the planet. This uniquely-human trait seems to run counter to the natural order, where spotted leopards, panthers, elephants, myriad birds all just exist and go about their lives, despite their objective, innate individualities. We are curious creatures lol
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  Plenty of animals go out of their way to be seen. If it’s a pretty bird it’s most likely a male bird. Animals at play do appear to show off to each other. Orcas wear salmons as hats as if it was a fast fashion trend. I don’t think humans are unique in this regard at all.
  - woodson 2y ago
    These observations are interpretations of behavior viewed through human eyes. (What’s the concept of a “hat” to an orca?) Perhaps we interpret their behavior this way because it is our behavior.
    - cjbgkagh 2y ago
      Since it’s a trend it comes and goes, and the behavior spreads in a manner similar to fashion trends. Google pics for it, can you think of any other reason for an orca to wear a salmon on their head. Song birds also have similar fashions in what they choose to sing and that spreads much faster than evolution can explain.
    - paulgerhardt 2y ago
      “Faction” and “fashion” are etymological doublets. We wear trends as much to establish which tribe we are apart of as to impress potential mates. The trend of Orcas wearing hats feels very much the same: https://archive.is/2024.12.15-213212/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/orcas-puget-sound-salmon-hats-killer-whales https://archive.is/2024.12.15-213212/https://www.nationalgeo...
BoredPositron 2y ago
It really reads like he would like to be a British country parson in the 19th century.
deegles 2y ago
Yes, because of course I have 20 extra hours per week to dedicate to focused research
somethingsome 2y ago
I didn't read the post yet, but >> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts It completely depends on the depth at which you are researching for leisure. If you like to do it to learn some stuff, just using LLMS, wiki and books is perfectly fine! If you're trying to make a breakthrough in human understanding, it is useful to understand very very well the foundations. It is not required, sometime, another background is enough to see clearly some research issue. But as you're doing research for fun, if you want to push the boundaries, having very strong foundational knowledge is awesome and very empowering. Take for example the LLMs, you have many levels of comprehension that you may aim for (just an example): - simply using occasionally (existance awareness) - experimenting with prompts engineering (exploratory research) - studying the neural architectures (understanding better what's going on) - understanding how the architectures are validated (if they are...) - finding limiting cases (deeper exploratory research) - thinking about in under the perspective of bayesian/classical statistics (research at the normal mathematical/engineering level) - going deep into characterizing the architectures in terms of manifolds, or any other suitable structure that you believe is true (deep fundamental research) - opening up new questions about what can be learned and why (leading to another research field) The first 3 are available inside a LLM, on Wikipedia and in books. The rest you need to fetch some papers. The more you go down the path, the more obscure the papers gets. Up to the end, the last point, where you land in survey papers for the other field, and then you can start again with new questions. The good thing is that most of the fundamental research can be readily applied to understand the new field! It's like a jump start. But at the end of the day, depending on which depth you want to do your leisure research, the deeper you go, the more foundation papers become important, not just from their content, but also the powerful ideas that can be transferred in other research projects. Maybe.. One thing that is missing from what I say is that it's not about the quantity, or even the quality of the material you read. But it depends on engaging in deep thinking about it! Someone can spend his life reading and not become smarter, maybe only more knowledgeable. I my opinion, deep thinking is maybe the most fun and useful skill in leisure research, as in paid research.
mistermann 2y ago
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citizenpaul 2y ago
I've been finding that digital only sources have been declining in quality for probably 5 years now. I have actually greatly reduced my reliance on them due to the fact that anytime HTTP is involved you add a layer of potential marketing obscuring the goal. I've been finding especially lately that I would have been better just getting a book. In fact I've greatly increased by personal library after years of stagnation as the online source quality has decreased. Books are dense on info (assuming its not a churned out book which are also a problem now with self publishing) the internet tends to be full of fluff and greatly increases the time that I spend sifting rather than just learning and researching. My best purchase in the last couple years is a 10.3" ebook reader. Technical subject books don't work well on smaller readers and it makes a huge difference in quality of my personal development/research/learning. I do agree that right now LLM's can help you a lot when you are starting on especially on a subject you know little about. However this will absolutely be poisoned over time because marketing will always creep in until it dominates the HTTP source. There is simply too much money to be made jamming a product in someones face no matter how subtle over providing impartial information when it comes to HTTP. The subtle ads are the most insidious because they can often waste lots of your time without you realizing it. Sometimes for years if you don't realize you were evangelized rather than educated.
- SamPatt 2y ago
  The majority of online content can decrease in quality while LLMs can increase in quality. If the decrease in quality is noticeable to you, then it can be accounted for by future model makers. We already know that quantity isn't everything. The average coming down only creates a stronger contrast for the high-quality work. As a writer, I'm excited about having LLMs available to help me. They're already indispensable.
  - citizenpaul 2y ago
    I'll give an example a while ago I wanted to learn a new'ish tech. I did some research LLM and search which led me to an online course. I figure eh $20 is probably worth it to hear from someone that has used it. After a couple of chapters I realized the author had no idea what they were doing and were literally reading page for page word for word from the official documentation. Valueless Trash masquerading as information. We've only just started down this forever merry-go-round of AI slop regurgitating and obscuring the often free source material for nothing more than profit off other peoples work.
jbverschoor 2y ago
It’s all the same duplicated/ copied information. No fact checks, no references. It’s exhausting to read the same stuff over and over again Long live LLMs
wisty 2y ago
I don't think it's a silver bullet, but reading source material is often quite informative. Did he say anything else was important? I'd have to read the source material. Why did he say you should read the source material? Did he consider counter-arguments? Was his overall argument more nuanced? How did he come to the conclusion that you should read source material? Was this his main point, or a secondary point in a list of several different arguments? Honestly, a lot of academia seems like social media. People take a one-line summary and argue over the merits, often without any real idea of the source material.
rottc0dd 2y ago
But, media consumption habits to a certain degree, do dictate our thinking and how much and how long we can actually concentrate, no? I also agree that we need not do everything the same way we have done before and there are different ways to achieve the end. >> I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to everyone else. We all have our bias. We settle with and swear by a way we end up finding to work for us for right reasons. I notice this a lot while doing math. I would normally start with books because they already have predefined structure and have all the topics a person would normally need. I buy 3 or 4 books for which solutions are available. I start with book and then I would listen to lectures. If I do not understand, I would read some other book on same topic. I would have one book which I can understand better than other. Then try to solve many problems from all the books and look up solutions. Though this is so time consuming and demanding with a full time job, when I engage with learning, I try to engage in this manner. If somebody asks me, I would recommend this because for fairly technical topics because other ways have left me with vague understanding but not good enough mental model to make me relate to problems in terms of the abstractions from those topics. That does not mean this is the only way and each might have to find thier own path. LLM has been godsend for me too here, particularly when I am trying to fill my gaps in understanding while reading technical books. And it is much more easier to listen or see, than to read. So, given our current landscape and how much time is spent with work, it is true that it is getting harder and harder to read and almost not feasible for many of us.
LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago
If I have to use an LLM, then I don't want to learn it. I have no interest in having my "food" chewed for me. I'll do it the way I always have - read, cogitate, experiment. That's not to say I don't think others should use LLMs by the way, knock yourself out.
ants_everywhere 2y ago
I use LLMs quite a bit (as you can see, for example, on my stream). I also consume a lot of podcasts, YouTube videos, Wikipedia articles, and books. My personal take is LLMs and podcasts are not great for research. Wikipedia is generally outstanding for science and related topics, although it's clearly astroturfed on topics about companies and some political topics. Podcasts typically cover things very shallowly but can sometimes be useful if there's a topic well served by the interview-a-day format. YouTube has a lot of treasure but you need to be able to search and not get distracted by clickbait. LLMs function exceptionally as next generation search engines. But their knowledge for research bottoms out very quickly unless you know a lot about the subject and are able to prompt it effectively. For example, I asked ChatGPT o1 your question about suburbs and its answer was basically total nonsense. The third theory it mentions was white flight and the post WWII era, which can't possibly explain why suburbs exist internationally and have since ancient times. There's probably a better prompt where you define what a suburb is and why you're interested in it and otherwise give it some good parameters and it gives you some more relevant information. BTW I more or less agree that foundational texts can be very important to read. Not always, of course, but often enough that if you read a lot you should consider it. Often I find they bring considerable clarity to a subject.
- awongh 2y ago
  I thought I got a pretty good response- not o1: https://chatgpt.com/share/67db7ea5-f770-800e-bd6f-67945f584250 https://chatgpt.com/share/67db7ea5-f770-800e-bd6f-67945f5842... Maybe you meant that it immediately went to USA specific, but you can always change your question to clarify. Basically, if I'm unfamiliar with the topic this gives me a solid basis to ask begin to ask follow-up questions that use the terminology of the field, or start to find out what is regarded as important. I actually find it quite easy to go deep into a topic in a way that would be impossible in wikipedia, simply because if the topic becomes too dense for me it's hard to navigate your way back out- the wiki article begins to read like gibberish. With an LLM you can simply ask it to rephrase or clarify something.
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    Yeah I mean that it went USA specific and also time specific. If you know enough to ask clarification that's great. But the problem with research is I don't know what I don't know, so when it puts me in a very small part of the problem space it's hard for me to see how little knowledge I've gained. In this example, I wouldn't personally consider any of these theories for why suburbs exist. They're all important reasons for the expansion of US suburbs during one time period. But that doesn't answer the question of why, for example, there aren't forces that pin everyone either to an urban or rural existence without suburbs. The answer to that question would involve rather different concepts than the answer it gave IMO.

by awongh 2y ago

aaron695 2y ago

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nluken 2y ago

I think you're generally right about the OP, but I don't see your alternative method as a tonic to the problem the author is discussing. I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong, and that the original post tends towards hierarchy in an almost reactionary way, yet at the same time I also see that many people tend to ingest information from other forms of media less critically than they might a book or written piece. I think this dichotomy derives from the different levels of focus we apply to different activities. Reading, even for leisure, demands a level of effort that forces you to focus and, in a way, analyze the information you're ingesting. By removing that barrier, you might fail to fully grasp the ideas that the primary source expressed. In your use case, the LLM can be a great tool to get a start, but it's much easier to accept that output uncritically, which is especially problematic because it bears the biases of the training corpus. Sure, you can mitigate that issue if you're driven by the intellectual curiosity to dig deeper, which it seems you are, but at that point aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway? You're just using the initial steps to discover the "foundational texts", as the original post puts it, of the field. The LLM step becomes less material to the follow-up reading you've done after the fact. Many, perhaps even most people will not make it to the second step. I see the lack of intellectual curiosity as a problem of focus more than anything else, and in my experience the overly rich media landscape of the internet does not concentrate that focus in most people.

awongh 2y ago
Yea, it's the classic conflation of the format of the media with other factors- it's not the fact that you're reading from a screen instead of a paper page that's making you intellectually incurious. But the disingenuous thing is that I don't think these arguments are really meant to examine why people might be less curious- it's just to sound cooler than people who read the OP and imagine the writer in some cafe pouring over a big stack of hardcover books. >> aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway? I would say the distinction is that I don't need to be precious about why I would look at foundational texts. Maybe foundational texts are a bit over-hyped- anything written 100 years ago was made for the context of that time, and even if the ideas are universal to a certain extent, it's better digested through a modern lens in light of how those ideas have affected everything since then. How much more do you get out of an idea reading it from the original? It feels like there's a bit of a diminishing return in a lot of cases.
jll29 2y ago
> I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong The good news is that not only does the "private researcher" (curious individual person without a research background or job) nowadays have the ability to read online in far-removed libraries, they are even empowered to download the data of many studies, fire up their Jupyter notebooks to replicate some work. The danger is that some wannabes create even more noise on the proper science channels that are already polluted by fraudsters generating fake papers via ChatGPT and friends... making it harder for the untrained eye to distinguish between respectable science and pseudo-science.
- randomNumber7 2y ago
  It's already hard to sort out the bs that respectable science generates.
  - etiam 2y ago
    Splitting hairs maybe, but more like it's already hard to suppress enough of the bs to get at the respectable science...

_fat_santa 2y ago

Personally I still go on Wikipedia deep dives where you end up going from link to link for hours. I think the author is entirely incorrect with that quote, the whole idea of leasure research is that there are no rules, some will go ask an LLM, others will go read 'foundational text' while others will just browse Wikipedia.

mmooss 2y ago
If that's what you like to do, of course that's fine. If we are going to talk with each other about what we like to do, we need to agree on meaning. In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth. As ultimate solutions to that goal, Wikipedia and LLM output lack sufficient accuracy and lack verifiability. Many find them useful as bibliographic tools that point us to accurate, verifiable sources. Also, research requires looking at the actual evidence - the primary sources; that's where the truth is, that's the foundation of the scientific method. Secondary sources filter the truth through someone else's interpretation, but for amateur researchers that may be all that's realistic - traveling to archives, building or using complex equipment is not realistic. Still, Wikipedia and (almost all) LLMs are tertiary or higher order sources: they are a combination of secondary or higher order sources - Wikipedia doesn't allow citing primary sources as far as I know (which would be necessary for Wikipedia to be a secondary source); LLM input is mostly secondary or higher order sources. I don't object if you call reading Wikipedia, 'research'. I don't at all object to you doing what you value. But we are talking about two different things.
- awongh 2y ago
  > In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth > the primary sources; that's where the truth is I mentioned this elsewhere on the thread, but I also feel like the most influential primary sources are less important than secondary sources- if you read Marx, the social and political circumstances of his ideas are in the context of an industrial economy and just don't apply in the same way anymore. You can draw your own conclusions directly from what's written, but what's the point of that? I feel like it's more useful to engage with those ideas keeping in mind all of the thought and history that's happened since- in that case you would wait a pretty long time to work backwards until you read the original.

fastasucan 2y ago

>> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts Leisurely and "must include" sounds very contradicting.

mobilejdral 2y ago

The author also asks "If you were stranded on an island (or small hostile planetoid), what books would you want to have with you?" which I also can't answer. I would fall into the category of someone who does research as leisure. I have been slowly unraveling the genetics behind gender dysphoria. Yes I have borrowed a few biology books from libraries, but it has mostly been reading 70 years of research papers, piecing together all the evidence to make a hypothesis, comparing it to all the research data and iterating. In the last year I have also started getting a fair number of WGS (Whole Genome Sequenced) files, and I have a whole separate pile of anecdotal that just because it isn't published doesn't mean I can ignore it either. These are about as far from books as you can get. It is something I do for leisure, so my investigation has been somewhat random, following whatever I found interating at that time including dead ends. Been doing this very open ended research for years now and at this point we have a really solid understanding of it, so the edge cases are actually now the fun stuff. I never would have made anywhere near the progress I did if I had been forced to start with reading a bunch of random unrelated biology books.

wasabi991011 2y ago
Sounds interesting, do you have somewhere I can read some of what you've learned across your research?
- mobilejdral 2y ago
  Sure, add a way to contact you to your account and I can send you over the current understanding.
  - weakfish 2y ago
    Also interested.

mmooss 2y ago

> can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler Aren't you saying the same thing, putting them down? You could both be curious about each other.

awongh 2y ago
I commented on the article so I suppose I'm engaging with the ideas. To be clear, I also think it's a shame that people don't read as many books these days, I don't read a huge amount but I feel like I'm at the higher-end of my social circle in terms of reading volume. Mostly, I don't like the trope that there's some kind of moral imperative to Read More Books and that Things Used to Be Better. Overall I'm philosophically disinclined to draw the conclusion that phones/attention/social media are bad and reading more will improve society. I also have TikTok but I don't think it makes me a worse person.

ozim 2y ago

Agree, OP is points to Thoreau, Sagan, Galileo - most people on the planet earth are not like that and those guys were heavily privileged. Doing personal fancy research was not available before as it is now. Even though one still has to be rather privileged to have time to dig through obscure details that don’t make him money.

BeetleB 2y ago
> Agree, OP is points to Thoreau, Sagan, Galileo - most people on the planet earth are not like that and those guys were heavily privileged. Sagan was heavily privileged? I mean, yes, he was born in the US and could afford to get a Bachelor's degree, but other than that, he was not particularly privileged.

kevinsync 2y ago

>> I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to everyone else. The older I get, the more I'm convinced that people do this less to actually feel superior to others and more as a desperate act of establishing an identity, ANY identity, to simply feel seen and validated in spite of just being yet another person on the planet. This uniquely-human trait seems to run counter to the natural order, where spotted leopards, panthers, elephants, myriad birds all just exist and go about their lives, despite their objective, innate individualities. We are curious creatures lol

cjbgkagh 2y ago
Plenty of animals go out of their way to be seen. If it’s a pretty bird it’s most likely a male bird. Animals at play do appear to show off to each other. Orcas wear salmons as hats as if it was a fast fashion trend. I don’t think humans are unique in this regard at all.
- woodson 2y ago
  These observations are interpretations of behavior viewed through human eyes. (What’s the concept of a “hat” to an orca?) Perhaps we interpret their behavior this way because it is our behavior.
  - cjbgkagh 2y ago
    Since it’s a trend it comes and goes, and the behavior spreads in a manner similar to fashion trends. Google pics for it, can you think of any other reason for an orca to wear a salmon on their head. Song birds also have similar fashions in what they choose to sing and that spreads much faster than evolution can explain.
  - paulgerhardt 2y ago
    “Faction” and “fashion” are etymological doublets. We wear trends as much to establish which tribe we are apart of as to impress potential mates. The trend of Orcas wearing hats feels very much the same: https://archive.is/2024.12.15-213212/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/orcas-puget-sound-salmon-hats-killer-whales https://archive.is/2024.12.15-213212/https://www.nationalgeo...

BoredPositron 2y ago

It really reads like he would like to be a British country parson in the 19th century.

deegles 2y ago

Yes, because of course I have 20 extra hours per week to dedicate to focused research

somethingsome 2y ago

I didn't read the post yet, but >> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts It completely depends on the depth at which you are researching for leisure. If you like to do it to learn some stuff, just using LLMS, wiki and books is perfectly fine! If you're trying to make a breakthrough in human understanding, it is useful to understand very very well the foundations. It is not required, sometime, another background is enough to see clearly some research issue. But as you're doing research for fun, if you want to push the boundaries, having very strong foundational knowledge is awesome and very empowering. Take for example the LLMs, you have many levels of comprehension that you may aim for (just an example): - simply using occasionally (existance awareness) - experimenting with prompts engineering (exploratory research) - studying the neural architectures (understanding better what's going on) - understanding how the architectures are validated (if they are...) - finding limiting cases (deeper exploratory research) - thinking about in under the perspective of bayesian/classical statistics (research at the normal mathematical/engineering level) - going deep into characterizing the architectures in terms of manifolds, or any other suitable structure that you believe is true (deep fundamental research) - opening up new questions about what can be learned and why (leading to another research field) The first 3 are available inside a LLM, on Wikipedia and in books. The rest you need to fetch some papers. The more you go down the path, the more obscure the papers gets. Up to the end, the last point, where you land in survey papers for the other field, and then you can start again with new questions. The good thing is that most of the fundamental research can be readily applied to understand the new field! It's like a jump start. But at the end of the day, depending on which depth you want to do your leisure research, the deeper you go, the more foundation papers become important, not just from their content, but also the powerful ideas that can be transferred in other research projects. Maybe.. One thing that is missing from what I say is that it's not about the quantity, or even the quality of the material you read. But it depends on engaging in deep thinking about it! Someone can spend his life reading and not become smarter, maybe only more knowledgeable. I my opinion, deep thinking is maybe the most fun and useful skill in leisure research, as in paid research.

mistermann 2y ago

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citizenpaul 2y ago

I've been finding that digital only sources have been declining in quality for probably 5 years now. I have actually greatly reduced my reliance on them due to the fact that anytime HTTP is involved you add a layer of potential marketing obscuring the goal. I've been finding especially lately that I would have been better just getting a book. In fact I've greatly increased by personal library after years of stagnation as the online source quality has decreased. Books are dense on info (assuming its not a churned out book which are also a problem now with self publishing) the internet tends to be full of fluff and greatly increases the time that I spend sifting rather than just learning and researching. My best purchase in the last couple years is a 10.3" ebook reader. Technical subject books don't work well on smaller readers and it makes a huge difference in quality of my personal development/research/learning. I do agree that right now LLM's can help you a lot when you are starting on especially on a subject you know little about. However this will absolutely be poisoned over time because marketing will always creep in until it dominates the HTTP source. There is simply too much money to be made jamming a product in someones face no matter how subtle over providing impartial information when it comes to HTTP. The subtle ads are the most insidious because they can often waste lots of your time without you realizing it. Sometimes for years if you don't realize you were evangelized rather than educated.

SamPatt 2y ago
The majority of online content can decrease in quality while LLMs can increase in quality. If the decrease in quality is noticeable to you, then it can be accounted for by future model makers. We already know that quantity isn't everything. The average coming down only creates a stronger contrast for the high-quality work. As a writer, I'm excited about having LLMs available to help me. They're already indispensable.
- citizenpaul 2y ago
  I'll give an example a while ago I wanted to learn a new'ish tech. I did some research LLM and search which led me to an online course. I figure eh $20 is probably worth it to hear from someone that has used it. After a couple of chapters I realized the author had no idea what they were doing and were literally reading page for page word for word from the official documentation. Valueless Trash masquerading as information. We've only just started down this forever merry-go-round of AI slop regurgitating and obscuring the often free source material for nothing more than profit off other peoples work.

jbverschoor 2y ago

It’s all the same duplicated/ copied information. No fact checks, no references. It’s exhausting to read the same stuff over and over again Long live LLMs

wisty 2y ago

I don't think it's a silver bullet, but reading source material is often quite informative. Did he say anything else was important? I'd have to read the source material. Why did he say you should read the source material? Did he consider counter-arguments? Was his overall argument more nuanced? How did he come to the conclusion that you should read source material? Was this his main point, or a secondary point in a list of several different arguments? Honestly, a lot of academia seems like social media. People take a one-line summary and argue over the merits, often without any real idea of the source material.

rottc0dd 2y ago

But, media consumption habits to a certain degree, do dictate our thinking and how much and how long we can actually concentrate, no? I also agree that we need not do everything the same way we have done before and there are different ways to achieve the end. >> I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to everyone else. We all have our bias. We settle with and swear by a way we end up finding to work for us for right reasons. I notice this a lot while doing math. I would normally start with books because they already have predefined structure and have all the topics a person would normally need. I buy 3 or 4 books for which solutions are available. I start with book and then I would listen to lectures. If I do not understand, I would read some other book on same topic. I would have one book which I can understand better than other. Then try to solve many problems from all the books and look up solutions. Though this is so time consuming and demanding with a full time job, when I engage with learning, I try to engage in this manner. If somebody asks me, I would recommend this because for fairly technical topics because other ways have left me with vague understanding but not good enough mental model to make me relate to problems in terms of the abstractions from those topics. That does not mean this is the only way and each might have to find thier own path. LLM has been godsend for me too here, particularly when I am trying to fill my gaps in understanding while reading technical books. And it is much more easier to listen or see, than to read. So, given our current landscape and how much time is spent with work, it is true that it is getting harder and harder to read and almost not feasible for many of us.

LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago

If I have to use an LLM, then I don't want to learn it. I have no interest in having my "food" chewed for me. I'll do it the way I always have - read, cogitate, experiment. That's not to say I don't think others should use LLMs by the way, knock yourself out.

ants_everywhere 2y ago

I use LLMs quite a bit (as you can see, for example, on my stream). I also consume a lot of podcasts, YouTube videos, Wikipedia articles, and books. My personal take is LLMs and podcasts are not great for research. Wikipedia is generally outstanding for science and related topics, although it's clearly astroturfed on topics about companies and some political topics. Podcasts typically cover things very shallowly but can sometimes be useful if there's a topic well served by the interview-a-day format. YouTube has a lot of treasure but you need to be able to search and not get distracted by clickbait. LLMs function exceptionally as next generation search engines. But their knowledge for research bottoms out very quickly unless you know a lot about the subject and are able to prompt it effectively. For example, I asked ChatGPT o1 your question about suburbs and its answer was basically total nonsense. The third theory it mentions was white flight and the post WWII era, which can't possibly explain why suburbs exist internationally and have since ancient times. There's probably a better prompt where you define what a suburb is and why you're interested in it and otherwise give it some good parameters and it gives you some more relevant information. BTW I more or less agree that foundational texts can be very important to read. Not always, of course, but often enough that if you read a lot you should consider it. Often I find they bring considerable clarity to a subject.

awongh 2y ago
I thought I got a pretty good response- not o1: https://chatgpt.com/share/67db7ea5-f770-800e-bd6f-67945f584250 https://chatgpt.com/share/67db7ea5-f770-800e-bd6f-67945f5842... Maybe you meant that it immediately went to USA specific, but you can always change your question to clarify. Basically, if I'm unfamiliar with the topic this gives me a solid basis to ask begin to ask follow-up questions that use the terminology of the field, or start to find out what is regarded as important. I actually find it quite easy to go deep into a topic in a way that would be impossible in wikipedia, simply because if the topic becomes too dense for me it's hard to navigate your way back out- the wiki article begins to read like gibberish. With an LLM you can simply ask it to rephrase or clarify something.
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  Yeah I mean that it went USA specific and also time specific. If you know enough to ask clarification that's great. But the problem with research is I don't know what I don't know, so when it puts me in a very small part of the problem space it's hard for me to see how little knowledge I've gained. In this example, I wouldn't personally consider any of these theories for why suburbs exist. They're all important reasons for the expansion of US suburbs during one time period. But that doesn't answer the question of why, for example, there aren't forces that pin everyone either to an urban or rural existence without suburbs. The answer to that question would involve rather different concepts than the answer it gave IMO.