4 ms·

Soapbox time. They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising

• CuriouslyC 9mo ago
  Brains are adaptive. We're not getting dumber, we're just adapting to a new environment. Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse. As for the productivity paradox, this discounts the reality that we wouldn't even be able to scale the institutions we're scaling without the tech. Whether that scaling is a good thing is debatable.
  • discreteevent 9mo ago
    > Brains are adaptive. They are, but you go on to assume that they will adapt in a good way. Bodies are adaptive too. That didn't work out well for a lot of people when their environment changed to be sedentary.
    • ahoka 9mo ago
      Yes, that's like saying I'm not weak, just my muscles are adapted to the couch.
      • pixl97 9mo ago
        Weak is relative. All humans are weak compared to an elephant and strong compared to a mouse. If strength stops being a competitive advantage in humans then weakness isn't a signal that determines outcomes.
  • doublerabbit 9mo ago
    Brains are adaptive and as we adapt we are turning more cognitive unbalanced. We're absorbing potentially bias information at a faster rate. GPT can give you information of X in seconds. Have you thought about it? Is that information correct? Information can easily be adapted to sound real while masking the real as false. Launching a search engine and searching may spew incorrectness but it made you make judgement, think. You could have two different opinions one underneath each other; you saw both sides of the coin. We are no longer critical thinking. We are taking information at face value, marking it as correct and not questioning is it afterwards. The ability to evaluate critically and rationally is what's decaying. Who opens an physical encyclopedia nowadays? That itself requires resources, effort and time. Add in life complexity; that doesn't help us in evaluating and rejecting consumption of false information. The Wall-E view isn't wrong.
    • CuriouslyC 9mo ago
      I see a lot of people grinding and hustling in a way that would have crushed people 75 years ago. I don't think our lack of desire to crack an encyclopedia for a fact rather than rely on AI to serve up a probably right answer is down to laziness, we just have bigger fish to fry.
      • doublerabbit 9mo ago
        Valid point, amended my viewpoint to cater to that, thanks.
    • sersi 9mo ago
      > Who opens an physical encyclopedia nowadays? I know plenty of people who binge wikipedia and learn new things through that. While Wikipedia is not always perfect, it's not like older printed encyclopaedia like Britannica were perfect either. You have a point with trusting AI, but I'm starting to see people around me realising that LLMs tend to be overconfident even when wrong and verifying the source instead of just trusting. That's the way I use something like perplexity, I use it as an improved search engines and then tend to visit the sources it lists.
    • pixl97 9mo ago
  • titzer 9mo ago
    Brains are adaptive but skills are cumulative. You can't get good at what you don't practice.
  • wiseowise 9mo ago
    > Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse. It literally does. If your brain shuts down the moment you can't access your LLM overlord then you're objectively worse.
    • jondwillis 9mo ago
      The reality is that the LLM overlord stays accessible most of the time. Works until it doesn’t is kinda adaptivity’s motto.
      • vacuity 9mo ago
        So the real test is waiting until the LLMs are inaccessible and then seeing what happens. Empirical testing!
  • TaupeRanger 9mo ago
    > Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse. You think it's likely that we offload cognitive difficulty and complexity to machines, and our brains don't get worse at difficult, complex problems?
• UltraSane 9mo ago
  Instead of memorizing vasts amount of text modern people memorize the plots of vast amounts of books, moves, TV shows, and video games and pop culture. Computers are much better at remembering text.
• nindalf 9mo ago
  > Homer Simpson I can't stress this enough, Homer Simpson is a fictional character from a cartoon. I would not use him in an argument about economics any more than I would use the Roadrunner to argue for road safety.
  • mountainb 9mo ago
    No, it's useful evidence in the same way that contemporaneous fiction is often useful evidence. The first season aired from 1989-1990. The living conditions from the show were plausible. I know because I was alive during that time. My best friend was the son of a vacuum cleaner salesman with a high school education, and they owned a three bedroom house in a nice area, two purebred dogs, and always had new cars. His mom never worked in any capacity. My friend played baseball on a travel team and eventually he went to a private high school. A 2025 Homer is only plausible if he had some kind of supplemental income (like a military pension or a trust fund), if Marge had a job, if the house was in a depressed region, or he was a higher level supervisor. We can use the Simpsons as limited evidence of contemporary economic conditions in the same way that we could use the depictions of the characters in the Canterbury Tales for the same purpose.
    • nindalf 9mo ago
      I read this as "anything can be used as evidence if it confirms my preconceived notions". Your anecdotes about a friend or two are just that - anecdotes. This claim of "a single man could feed a whole family on one factory job" is misleading and untrue. It's usually the 1950s that people claim this was true and they wish we could go back to the 1950s. It's easy to show that that the 1950s were no picnic (https://archive.is/oH1Vx https://archive.is/oH1Vx). It's always some time in the past that the nation was great. They pick 1950s, you pick the 1990s. What you don't understand is that people are usually longing for a time when they weren't alive or when they were children. They want to go back to living the stress free life of a happy childhood, when your parents shielded you from all the vagaries of life. You cite cartoons, they cite memes. If you ask them how a meme could possibly be used as evidence, they say much the same as you - anecdotes about their grandparents.
• smokel 9mo ago
  > Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts It seems more likely that there were only a handful of people who could. There still are a handful of people who can, and they are probably even better than in the olden times [1] (for example because there are simply more people now than back then.) [1] https://oberlinreview.org/35413/news/35413/ https://oberlinreview.org/35413/news/35413/ (random first link from Google)
  • giraffe_lady 9mo ago
    Yes, there is some actual technique to learn and then with moderate practice it's possible to accurately memorize surprisingly long passages, especially if they have any consistent structure. Reasonable enough to guess that this is a normally distributed skill, talent, domain of expertise.
• ctoth 9mo ago
  > People will risk their life in a horribly janky self driving car if it means they can swipe on social media instead of watching the road - acceptance doesn't mean it's good. People will risk their and others' lives in a horribly janky car if it means they can swipe on social media instead of watching the road - acceptance doesn't mean it's good. FTFY
• iambateman 9mo ago
  You’re currently using the internet.
  • Capricorn2481 9mo ago
    That doesn't contradict anything they wrote.
    • jama211 9mo ago
      To be fair all they wrote was just a rant based on some very unsubstantiated claims, I think the burden of proof is on them a little bit
• woah 9mo ago
  Used to be, Tony Soprano could afford a mansion in New Jersey, buy furs for his wife, and eat out at the strip club for lunch every day, all on a single income as a waste management specialist.
• GuB-42 9mo ago
  I certainly can't memorize Homer's work, and why would I? In exchange I can do so much more. I can find an answer to just about any question on any subject better than the most knowledgeable ancient Greek specialist, because I can search the internet. I can travel faster and further than their best explorers, because I can drive and buy tickets. I have no fighting experience, but give me a gun and a few hours of training and I could defeat their best champions. I traded the ability to memorize the equivalent of entire books to a set of skills that combined with modern technological infrastructure gives me what would be godlike powers at the time of the ancient Greeks. In addition to these base skills, I also have specialized skills adapted to the modern world, that is my job. Combined with the internet and modern technology I can get to a level of proficiency that no one could get to in the ancient times. And the best part: I am not some kind of genius, just a regular guy with a job. And I still have time to swipe on social media. I don't know what kind of brainless activities the ancient Greeks did, but they certainly had the equivalent of swiping on social media. The general idea is that the more we offload to machines, the more we can allocate our time to other tasks, to me, that's progress, that some of these tasks are not the most enlightening doesn't mean we did better before. And I don't know what economist mean by "productivity", but we can certainly can buy more stuff than before, it means that productivity must have increased somewhere (with some ups and downs). It may not appear in GDP calculations, but to me, it is the result that counts. I don't count home ownership, because you don't produce land. In fact, that land is so expensive is a sign of high global productivity. Since land is one of the few things that we need and can't produce, the more we can produce the other things we need, the higher the value of land is, proportionally.
• BurningFrog 9mo ago
  > They were arguably right I think they were right that something was lost in each transition. But something much bigger was also gained, and I think each of those inventions were easily worth the cost. But I'm also aware that one cost of the printing press was a century of very bloody wars across Europe.
• jama211 9mo ago
  That’s a lot of assumptions.
• throwup238 9mo ago
  > They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising reasonably large texts was common. See, e.g. the book Memory Craft. > We're becoming increasingly like the Wall E people, too lazy and stupid to do anything without our machines doing it for us, as we offload increasing amounts onto them. You're right about the first part, wrong about the second part. Pre-Gutenberg people could memorize huge texts because they didn't have that many texts to begin with. Obtaining a single copy cost as much as supporting a single well-educated human for weeks or months while they copied the text by hand. That doesn't include the cost of all the vellum and paper which also translated to man-weeks of labor. Rereading the same thing over and over again or listening to the same bard tell the same old story was still more interesting than watching wheat grow or spinning fabric, so that's what they did. We're offloading our brains onto technology because it has always allowed us to function better than before, despite an increasing amount of knowledge and information. > Yes, it's too early to be sure, but the internet, Google and Wikipedia arguably haven't made the world any better (overall). I find that to be a crazy opinion. Relative to thirty years ago, quality of life has risen significantly thanks to all three of those technologies (although I'd have a harder time arguing for Wikipedia versus the internet and Google) in quantifiable ways from the lowliest subsistence farmers now receiving real time weather and market updates to all the developed world people with their noses perpetually stuck in their phones. You'd need some weapons grade rose tinted glasses and nostalgia to not see that.
  • wisty 9mo ago
    Economists suggest we are in many ways no more productive now than when Homer Simpson could buy a house and raise a family on a single income - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
    • throwup238 9mo ago
      I don’t care if “we” are more productive and I certainly don’t care what western economists think about pre-industrial agriculture. I care that the two billion people living in households dependent on subsistence farming have a better quality of life than they did before the internet or mobile phones, which they undeniably have. That much was obvious fifteen to twenty years ago when mobile networks were rolling out all over over Africa en masse and every village I visited on my continental roadtrip had at least one mobile phone that everybody shared to get weather forecasts and coordinate trips to the nearest market town. Anyone in a developed country who bases their opinions on the effects of technology on their and their friends’ social media addictions is a complete fool. Life has gotten so much better for BILLIONS of people in the last few decades that it’s not even a remotely nuanced issue.
• MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
  There are still people that memorise the entire Quran word for word. But it’s a complete waste of time. What is the point spending years memorising a book? You seem like the kind of person that would still be eating rotten carcasses on the plains while the rest of us are sitting around a fire.
• piyh 9mo ago
  > Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts Pre literate peole HAD TO memorise vast texts