9 ms·

Outsourcing thinking

• Isamu 9mo ago
  Surely we can do better than reading TFA and manually commenting on it.
• wut-wut 9mo ago
  Interesting read.. To his point: personally, I find it shifts 'where and when' I have to deal with the 'cognitive load'. I've noticed (at times) feeling more impatient, that I tend to skim the results more often, and that it takes a bit more mental energy to maintain my attention..
• camgunz 9mo ago
  This list of things not to use AI for is so quaint. There's a story on the front page right now from The Atlantic: "Film students who can no longer sit through films". But why? Aren't they using social media, YouTube, Netflix, etc responsibly? Surely they know the risks, and surely people will be just as responsible with AI, even given the enormous economic and professional pressures to be irresponsible.
  • pixl97 9mo ago
    We lose something when we give up horses for cars. Have too many of us outsourced our ability to raise horses for transport? Surely you're capable of walking all day without break?
    • andrepd 9mo ago
      It's a funnily relevant parallel you're making, because designing everything around the car has absolutely been one of the biggest catastrophes of 2nd half of the 20th century. Much like "AI" in the past couple years, the personal automobile is a useful tool but making anything and everything subservient towards its use has had catastrophic consequences.
      • galaxyLogic 9mo ago
        It is political. Designing everything around cars benefits the class of people called "Car Owners". Not so much people who don't have the money or desire to buy a car. Although, congestion pricing is a good counter-example. On the surface it looks like it is designed to benefit users of public transportation. But turns out it also benefits car-owners, because it reduces traffic jams and lets you get to your destination with your own car faster.
        • jatari 9mo ago
          >Designing everything around cars benefits the class of people called "Car Owners". Designing everything around cars hurts everyone including car owners. Having no option but to drive everywhere just sucks.
          • mlinhares 9mo ago
            But the AD for my Cadillac says I’m an incredible person for driving it, that cant be wrong.
        • zephen 9mo ago
          No, it benefits car manufacturers and sellers, and mechanics and gas stations. Network/snowball effects are not all good. If local businesses close because everybody drives to WalMart to save a buck, now other people around those local businesses also have to buy a car. I remember a couple of decades ago when some bus companies in the UK were privatized, and they cut out the "unprofitable" feeder routes. Guess what? More people in cars, and those people didn't just park and take the bus when they got to the main route, either.
          • b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
            >No, it benefits car manufacturers and sellers, and mechanics and gas stations. Everybody thinks they're customers when they buy a car, but they're really the product. These industries, and others, are the real customers
    • camgunz 9mo ago
      I am actually, we haven't owned car for years. We also rarely watch TV and eschew social media, so I can still pay attention and analyze things. But this makes me super weird! This is the whole point of social media bans for kids: if you make it optional, it'll still be prevalent and people making healthy choices will be social weirdos. Healthy paths need to be free and accessible, and things need to be built around them (eg don't assume everyone has a smartphone, etc)
  • hippo22 9mo ago
    What is the lesson in the anecdote about film students? To me, it’s that people like the idea of studying film more than they like actually studying film. I fail to see the connection to social media or AI.
    • tolerance 9mo ago
      AI performs strictly in the Platonic world, as is the social media experience. As is the film student.
      • mmorse1217 9mo ago
        Yikes, that was too real
    • camgunz 9mo ago
      Social media's rotted their attention span
  • squidbeak 9mo ago
    Perhaps the films were weren't worth sitting through?
  • awesome_dude 9mo ago
    Recently a side discussion came up - people in the Western world are "rediscovering" fermented, and pickled, foods that are still in heavy use in Asian cultures. Fermentation was a great way to /preserve/ food, but it can be a bit hit and miss. Pickling can be outright dangerous if not done correctly - botulism is a constant risk. When canning of foods came along it was a massive game changer, many foods became shelf stable for months or years. Fermentation and pickling was dropped almost universally (in the West).
    • achierius 9mo ago
      > Fermentation and pickling was dropped almost universally (in the West). What are you talking about? What do you think pickles are? Or sauerkraut, for that matter?
      • wiml 9mo ago
        Or cheese or beer?
      • awesome_dude 9mo ago
        They're making a (strong) comeback (although sauerkraut is still seen as "ethnic" in the anglosphere), sure How often have you made them yourself, how often does your friend at work make them (if ever?) Edit: I'm sure you can add to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733306
        • fragmede 9mo ago
          Pickles are in McDonald's burgers which is probably as mainstream across the globe as you can get.
          • awesome_dude 9mo ago
            Remind me how long after canning food became widespread in the USA was McDonalds created? Was it 50 years? 100?
  • ahazred8ta 9mo ago
    > surely people will be just as responsible with AI That's exactly what worries us.
  • hamasho 9mo ago
    > Surely they know the risks, and surely people will be just as responsible with AI I can't imagine even half of students can understand the short and long term risk of using social media and AI intensively. At least I couldn't when I was a student.
  • esperent 9mo ago
    > Film students who can no longer sit through films Everyone loves watching films until they get a curriculum with 100 of them along with a massive reading list, essays, and exams coming up.
    • mettamage 9mo ago
      I learned that when I decided to become a competitive Warcraft 3 player. Apparently, my competitiveness lasts for a month. Gaming is much more fun when you get to decide when to quit and how to play.
• jemiluv8 9mo ago
  Outsourcing to thinking is exactly what I tell our developers. They are hired to do the kind of thinking I’d rather not do.
• slfreference 9mo ago
  Distributed verification. 8 billions of us can divide up the topics and subjects and pool together our opinions and best conclusions.
  • JamesTRexx 9mo ago
    What is that saying again, a person is smart, a group is dumb? That's the risk involved with opinions and conclusions.
    • tines 9mo ago
      "A person is smart, people are dumb." I heard this for the first time from Men in Black, lol.
    • slfreference 9mo ago
      https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42041926-the-scout-mindset https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42041926-the-scout-minds... When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a soldier mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe--and shoot down those we don't. But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a scout mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout's goal isn't to defend one side over the other. It's to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what's actually true. In The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn't that they're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It's a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world--which anyone can learn. With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean, to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, to how superforecasters outperform CIA operatives, to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.
    • slfreference 9mo ago
      Linus's law is the assertion that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
• preston-kwei 9mo ago
  The “lump of cognition” framing misses something important. it’s not about how much thinking we do, but which thinking we stop doing. A lot of judgment, ownership, and intuition comes from boring or repetitive work, and outsourcing that isn’t free. Lowering the cost of producing words clearly isn’t the same as increasing the amount of actual thought.
  • gdulli 9mo ago
    I'm grateful that I spent a significant part of my life forced to solve problems and forced to struggle to produce the right words. In hindsight I know that that's where all the learning was. If I'd had a shortcut machine when I was young I'd have used it all the time, learned much less, and grown up dependent on it.
    • Terr_ 9mo ago
      I'd argue that choosing words is a key skill because language is one of our tools for examining ideas and linking together parts of our brains in new ways. Even just writing notes you'll never refer to again, you're making yourself codify vaguer ideas or impressions, test assumptions, and then compress the concept for later. It's an new external information channel between different regions of your head which seems to provide value.
  • zahlman 9mo ago
    Looking at the words that get produced at this lowered cost, and observing how satisfactory they apparently are to most people (and observing the simplicity of the heuristics people use to try to root out "cheap" words), has been quite instructive (and depressing).
  • tomjen3 9mo ago
    I think a good workflow is to use the llm as a minimum to fix typo and grammar issues. From there you can also go from first draft to feedback.
• reducesuffering 9mo ago
  See Scott Alexander’s The Whispering Earring (2012): https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yvain-thewhisperingearring.html https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva...
  • zahlman 9mo ago
    Wasn't there a follow-up to this where Scott denied that the story was "about" the obvious thing for it to be about?
• nsainsbury 9mo ago
  I actually wrote up quite a few thoughts related to this a few days ago but my take is far more pessimistic: https://www.neilwithdata.com/outsourced-thinking https://www.neilwithdata.com/outsourced-thinking My fundamental argument: The way the average person is using AI today is as "Thinking as a Service" and this is going to have absolutely devastating long term consequences, training an entire generation not to think for themselves.
  • jakubtomanik 9mo ago
    I believe that collectively we passed that point long before the onset of LLMs. I have a feeling that throughout the human history vast amounts of people ware happy to outsource their thinking and even pay to do so. We just used to call those arrangements religions.
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • junofan 9mo ago
      That’s a bit cynical. Religion is more like a technology. It was continuously invented to solve problems and increase capacity. Newer religions superseded older and survived based on productive and coercive supremacy.
      • noduerme 9mo ago
        If religion is a technology, it's inarguably one that prevented the development of a lot of other technologies for long periods of time. Whether that was a good thing is open to interpretation.
        • kjkjadksj 9mo ago
          On the other hand it produced a lot of related technology. Calendars, mathematics, writing, agricultural practices, government and economic systems. Most of this stuff emerged as an effort to document and proliferate spiritual ideas.
• nine_k 9mo ago
  Thinking developed naturally as a tool that helps our species to stay dominant on the planet, at least on land. (Not by biomass but by the ability to control.) If outsourcing thought is beneficial, those who practice it will thrive; if not, they will eventually cease to practice it, one way or another. Thought, as any other tool, is useful when it solves more problems than it creates. For instance, an ability to move very fast may be beneficial if it gets you where you want to be, and detrimental, if it misses the destination often enough, and badly enough. Similarly, if outsourced intellectual activities miss the mark often enough, and badly enough, the increased speed is not very helpful. I suspect that the best results would be achieved by outsourcing relatively small intellectual acts in a way that guarantees very rare, very small errors. That is, AI will become useful when AI becomes dependable, comparable to our other tools.
  • risyachka 9mo ago
    Outsourcing thinking is not a skill. It is the same as skipping gym. Nothing to practice here
    • nine_k 9mo ago
      A lot of people practice not going to a gym! I bet it reflects e.g. on their dating outcomes, at least statistically. I suspect that outsourcing thinking may reflect on quite some outcomes, too. We just need time to gather the statistics.
  • add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago
    > If outsourcing thought is beneficial, those who practice it will thrive It makes them prey to and dependent on those who are building and selling them the thinking. > I suspect that the best results would be achieved by outsourcing relatively small intellectual acts in a way that guarantees very rare, very small errors. That is, AI will become useful when AI becomes dependable, comparable to our other tools. That's like saying ultra processed foods provide the best results when eaten sparingly, so it will become useful when people adopt overall responsible diets. Okay, sure, but what does that matter in practice since it isn't happening?
• lighthouse1212 9mo ago
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• gemmarate 9mo ago
  The interesting axis here isn’t how much cognition we outsource, it’s how reversible the outsourcing is. Using an LLM as a scratchpad (like a smarter calculator or search engine) is very different from letting it quietly shape your writing, decisions, and taste over years. That’s the layer where tacit knowledge and identity live, and it’s hard to get back once the habit forms. We already saw a softer version of this with web search and GPS: people didn’t suddenly forget how to read maps, but schools and orgs stopped teaching it, and now almost nobody plans a route without a blue dot. I suspect we’ll see the same with writing and judgment: the danger isn’t that nobody thinks, it’s that fewer people remember how.
  • Insanity 9mo ago
    Yet it does feel different with LLMs compared to your examples. Yes, people can’t navigate without Apple/Google maps, but that’s still very different from losing critical thinking skills. That said, LLMs are perhaps accelerating that but aren’t the only cause (lack of reading, more short form content, etc)
    • joshoink 9mo ago
      How is navigation not critical thinking? Anyone Should! Be able to use a map to plan a route. Navigation is critical to survival imo
  • esperent 9mo ago
    > it’s hard to get back once the habit forms. Humans are highly adaptable. It's hard to go back while the thing we're used to still exists, but if it vanished from the world we'd adapt within a few weeks.
• jfengel 9mo ago
  Social media has given me a rather dim view of the quality of people's thinking, long before AI. Outsourcing it could well be an improvement.
  • bigbadfeline 9mo ago
    > Social media has given me a rather dim view of the quality of people's thinking, long before AI. Outsourcing it could well be an improvement. Cogito, ergo sum The corollary is: absence of thinking equals non-existence. I don't see how that can be an improvement. Improvement can happen only when it's applied to the quality of people's thinking.
    • jfengel 9mo ago
      The converse need not hold. Cognition implies existence; it is sufficient but not necessary. Plenty of things exist without thinking. (And that's not what the Cogito means in the first place. It's a statement about knowledge: I think therefore it is a fact that I am. Descartes is using it as the basis of epistemology; he has demonstrated from first principles that at least one thing exists.)
      • bigbadfeline 9mo ago
        I know the trivialities. I didn't intend to make a general or formal statement, we're talking about people. In a competitive world, those who've been reduced to idiocracy won't survive, AI not only isn't going to help them, it will be used against them. > Plenty of things exist without thinking. Existence in an animal farm isn't human existence.
• andsoitis 9mo ago
  Some of humanity’s most significant inventions are language (symbolic communication), writing, the scientific method, electricity, the computer. Notice something subtle. Early inventions extend coordination. Middle inventions extend memory. Later inventions extend reasoning. The latest inventions extend agency. This suggests that human history is less about tools and more about outsourcing parts of the mind into the world.
  • ZenoArrow 9mo ago
    If an AI thinks for you, you're no longer "outsourcing" parts of your mind. What we call "AI" now is technically impressive but is not the end point for where AI is likely to end up. For example, imagine an AI that is smart enough to emotionally manipulate you, at what point in this interaction do you lose your agency to "outsource" yourself instead of acting as a conduit to "outsource" the thoughts of an artificial entity? It speaks to our collective hubris that we seek to create an intellectually superior entity and yet still think we'll maintain control over it instead of the other way around.
    • Terr_ 9mo ago
      There's a parallel there to drugs. They are most definitely not "intelligent", yet they can still destroy our agency or free-will.
    • zahlman 9mo ago
      > we seek to create an intellectually superior entity and yet still think we'll maintain control over it instead of the other way around. Intellect is not the same thing as volition.
      • ZenoArrow 9mo ago
        > Intellect is not the same thing as volition. Two questions... 1. Do you think it's impossible for AI to have it's own volition? 2. We don't have full control over the design of AI. Current AI models are grown rather than fully designed, the outcomes of which are not predictable. Would you want to see limits placed on AI until we had a better grasp of how to design AI with predictable behaviour?
• beaker52 9mo ago
  I still read the LLMs output quite critically and I cringe whenever I do. LLMs are just plain wrong a lot of the time. They’re just not very intelligent. They’re great at pretending to be intelligent. They imitate intelligence. That is all they do. And I can see it every single time I interact with them. And it terrifies me that others aren’t quite as objective.
  • sidrag22 9mo ago
    I usually feed my articles to it and ask for insight into whats working. I usually wait to initiate any sort of AI insight until my rough draft is totally done... Working in this manner, it is so painfully clear it doesnt really follow the flow of the article even. It misses on so many critical details and just sorta fills in its own blanks wrong... When you tell it that its missing a critical detail, it treats you like some genius, every single time. It is hard for me to try to imagine growing up with it, and using it to write my own words for me. The only time i copy paste words to a fellow human that is ai generated, is for totally generic customer service style replies, for questions i dont totally consider worthy of any real time. AI has kinda taken away my flow state for coding, rare as it was... I still get it when writing stuff I am passionate about, and I can't imagine I'll ever wanna outsource that.
    • zephen 9mo ago
      > When you tell it that its missing a critical detail, it treats you like some genius, every single time. Yeah, or as I say, Uriah Heep. To be fair, telling everybody they are geniuses is the obvious next step after participation awards. Because people have figured out that participation awards are worthless, so let's give them all first place.
  • zahlman 9mo ago
    > And it terrifies me that others aren’t quite as objective. I have been reminded constantly throughout this that a very large fraction of people are easily impressed by such prose. Skill at detecting AI output (in any given endeavour), I think, correlates with skill at valuing the same kind of work generally. Put more bluntly: slop is slop, and it has been with us for far longer than AI.
• techblueberry 9mo ago
  A lot of this stuff depends on how a person chooses to engage, but my contrarian take is that actually throughout history whenever anyone said X technology will lead to the downfall of humanity for y reasons, that take was usually correct. The article he references gives this example: “Is it lazy to watch a movie instead of making up a story in your head?” Yes, yes it is, this was a worry when we transitioned from oral culture to written culture, and I think it was probably prescient. For many if not most people cultural or technological expectations around what skills you _have_ to learn probably have an impact on total capability. We probably lost something when Google Maps came out and the average person didn’t have to learn to read a map. When we transitioned from paper and evening news to 24 hour partisan cable news, I think more people outsourced their political opinions to those channels.
  • sidrag22 9mo ago
    > We probably lost something when Google Maps came out and the average person didn’t have to learn to read a map. Even in my mid 30s I see this issue with people around my age. Even for local areas, it seems like no one really understands what direction they are heading, they just kinda toggle on the GPS and listen for what to do... forever? On pretty much every modern GPS, there is a button to show the full route instead of the current step the user is on(as well as keeping it in a static orientation). I feel like just that being the default most of the time, would help a ton of people.
• 0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
  How many of you know how to do home improvement? Fix your own clothes? Grow your own food? Cook your own food? How about making a fire or shelter? People used to know all of those things. Now they don't, but we seem to be getting along in life fine anyway. Sure we're all frightened by the media at the dangers lurking from not knowing more, but actually our lives are fine. The things that are actually dangerous in our lives? Not informing ourselves enough about science, politics, economics, history, and letting angry people lead us astray. Nobody writes about that. Instead they write about spooky things that can't be predicted and shudder. It's easier to wonder about future uncertainty than deal with current certainty.
  • Terr_ 9mo ago
    Executive function is not the same as weaving or carpentry. The scary problem comes from people who are trying to abdicate their entire understand-and-decide phase to an outside entity. What's more, that's not fundamentally a new thing, it's always been possible for someone to helplessly cling to another human as their brain... but we've typically considered that to be a mental-disorder and/or abuse.
    • 0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
      What you described is what people do every single day. Every decision we make, choice, piece of information we think, has been selected for us by others. And we don't even stop to think about that, we just accept it. Here's another cooking example: try to look up a recipe right now. It should contain meat, veggies, fiber. What will you get? A recipe that is generic and tailored to the masses in your general location. It's genuinely hard to find a recipe for food that isn't extremely familiar to the culture assigned to you (even if you're actually 1st generation Chinese, if you're browsing from Ohio with Google using English language, you aren't gonna get authentic Chinese dishes back). Because whatever system of systems is looking up recipes for you, is designed to do that; to think for you, and provide you a set of basic, canned responses. The entire world is that. Nearly every part of our world, we abdicate. Our decisions are not really ours; they're a constructed set of possible decisions defined by other people, programmed into our brains by osmosis. And you go with it, because otherwise the world would be too hard to deal with. This causes you to not only "lose" information and skills people had in the past, it defines who you are now and what you do. And it's been happening since civilization started. Actually before, since it's about your ecosystem, and systems of systems. AI is now a part of our ecosystem and will define who we are, and we don't really have a choice in the matter, because it's systemic.
• b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
  What I am worried about (and it's something about regular internet search that has worried me for the past ~10 years or so) is that, after they've trained a generation of folks to rely on this tech, they're going to start inserting things into the training data (or whatever the method would be) to bias it towards favoring certain agendas wrt the information it presents to the users in response to their queries.
  • human_llm 9mo ago
    Absolutely. Like most things on the Internet, it will get enshittified. I think it is very likely that at some point there will be "ads" in the form of the chat bot giving recommendations that favor certain products and services.
  • chii 9mo ago
    > after they've trained a generation of folks to rely on this tech ... bias it towards favoring certain agendas previously, this happened with print media. Then it happened with the airwaves. It only makes logical sense that the trend continues with LLMs. Basically, the fundamental issue is that the source of information is under someone else's control, and that someone will always have an agenda. But with LLMs, it's crucial to try change the trend. IMHO, it should be possible for a regular person to own their computing - this should include the LLM capability/hardware, as well as the model(s). Without such capabilities, the exact same will happen as has in the past with new technologies.
    • yetihehe 9mo ago
      > it should be possible for a regular person to own their computing And regular persons will not care about this and will select a model with biases of anyone who they deem "works better for me at this one task that I needed". Just like you said: > previously, this happened with print media. Then it happened with the airwaves. It only makes logical sense that the trend continues with LLMs. I wish it wasn't so, but I have no idea how to make people care about not being under someone's control.
  • Gud 9mo ago
• 3371 9mo ago
  Ever since Google experimented LLM in Gmail it bothers me alot. I firmly believe every word and the way you put them together portrays who you are. Using LLM for direct communication is harmful to human connections.
  • nullsanity 9mo ago
    This comment has made me glad for LLM in Gmail. If someone is going to over analyze my every word because he firmly believes it portrays who I am, I'd appreciate the layer obfuscation between me and this creepazoid.
    • flyinglizard 9mo ago
      Assuming you did not use an LLM to craft your comment, I’d say “case in point”.
    • johnfn 9mo ago
      If your words don’t portray who you are, what does?
      • ako 9mo ago
        People make mistakes in the words they use, I often think “oops, I shouldn’t have said it like that”.
        • rcMgD2BwE72F 9mo ago
          If said once, yes.
        • dingnuts 9mo ago
          [dead]
      • jaggederest 9mo ago
        Actions? I generally judge people by what they do, not what they say - though of course I have to admit that saying things does fall under "doing something", if it's impactful.
• MORPHOICES 9mo ago
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• keepamovin 9mo ago
  One perspective I’m circling right now about this topic is that maybe we’re coming to realize as a society that what we considered intelligence (or symbolic intelligence whatever you wanna call that thing that we measure with traditional IQ tests, verbal fluency, etc) is actually a far less essential cognitive aspect to us as humans then we had previously assumed and is in fact, far more mechanical in nature than we had formerly believed. This ties with how I sometimes describe current generation AI as a form of mechanized intelligence: like Babbage’s calculating machine, but scaled up to be able to represent all kinds of classes of things. And in this perspective that I’m circling these days where I’m currently coming down on it is maybe the effect of this realization will be something like the dichotomy outlined in the Dune series: namely, that between mechanized intelligence embodied by mentats and the more intuitive and prescient aspects of cognition embodied by the Benni Jessarit and Paul’s lineage. A simple but direct way to describe this transition in perspective may be that we come to see what we formally thought of as intelligence in the West/reductive tradition as a form of mechanized calculation that it’s possible to outsource to automatic non-biological processes, and we start to lean in more deeply to the more intuitive and prescient aspects of cognition. One thing I’m reminded of is how Indian yogic texts describe various aspects of mind. I’m not sure if it’s a one-to-one mapping because I’m not across that material but merely the idea of distinguishing between different aspects of mind is something with precedent; and central to that is the idea of removing association between self identity and the aspects of mind. And so maybe one of the effects for us as a society will be something akin to that.
• pveierland 9mo ago
  One bothersome aspect of generative assistance for personal and public communication not mentioned is that it introduces a lazy hedge, where a person can always claim that "Oh, but that was not really what I meant" or "Oh, but I would not express myself in that way" - and use it as a tool to later modify or undo their positions - effectively reducing honesty instead of increasing it.
  • chii 9mo ago
    > where a person can always claim that "Oh, but that was not really what I meant" that already happens today - they claim autocorrect or spell checks instead of ai previously. I don't accept these as excuses as valid (even if it was real). It does not give them a valid out to change their mind regardless of the source of the text.
    • pveierland 9mo ago
      Yep! However the problem will increase by many orders of magnitude as the volume of generated content far surpasses the content created by autocorrect mechanisms, in addition to autocorrect being a far more local modification that does not generate entire paragraphs or segments of content, making it harder to excuse large changes in meaning. I agree that they make for poor excuses - but as generative content seeps into everything I fear it will become more commonly invoked.
      • chii 9mo ago
        > I fear it will become more commonly invoked. yep, but invoking it doesnt force you to accept it. The only thing you get to control is your own personal choices. That's why i am telling you not to accept it, and i hope that people reading this will consider this their default stance.
    • Mordisquitos 9mo ago
      Arguably, excusing oneself because of autocorrect is comparable to the classic "Dictated but not read" [0] disclaimer of old. Excusing oneself because an LLM wrote what was ostensibly your own text is more akin to confessing that your assistant wrote the whole thing and you tried to pass it off as your own without even bothering to read it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictated_but_not_read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictated_but_not_read
• OsamaJaber 9mo ago
  This is something I noticed myself. I let AI handle some of my project and later realized I didn't even understand my own project well enough to make decisions about it :)
  • written-beyond 9mo ago
    But that's exactly what you should be doing, technically. Human in the loop is a dead concept, you should never need to understand your code or even know what changes to make. All you should be concerned about is having the best possible harness so your LLM can do everything as efficiently as possible. If it gets stuck, use another LLM as the debugger. If that gets stuck then use another LLM. Turtles all the way down. /s
    • puelocesar 9mo ago
      No thinking allowed! Only vibes (I don’t have the link to the video, but hopefully someone else remembers this joke)
      • OsamaJaber 9mo ago
        I didn't get it (Cat felling high and looking around meme)
• kaffekaka 9mo ago
  Great blog post, and I fully agree. The human touch in communication and reflection can not be emphasized enough.
• oktcho 9mo ago
  We are going to be able to think plenty about other things than what we are doing, yes. That is called anxiety.
• Animats 9mo ago
  The author says it's too long. So let's tighten it up. A criticism of the use of large language models (LLMs) is that it can deprive us of cognitive skills. Are some kinds of use are better than others? Andy Masley's blog says "thinking often leads to more things to think about", so we shouldn't worry about letting machines do the thinking for us — we will be able to think about other things. My aim is not to refute all his arguments, but to highlight issues with "outsourcing thinking". Masley writes that it's "bad to outsource your cognition when it:" - Builds tacit knowledge you'll need in future. - Is an expression of care for someone else. - Is a valuable experience on its own. - Is deceptive to fake. - Is focused in a problem that is deathly important to get right, and where you don't totally trust who you're outsourcing it to. How we choose to use chatbots is about how we want our lives and society to be. That's what he has to say. Plus some examples, which help make the message concrete. It's a useful article if edited properly.
  • theodric 9mo ago
    This here is why I always read the comments /first/ on HN
  • vages 9mo ago
    I think that this summary is oversimplifying: The rest of the blog post elaborates on how the author and Masley has a completely different interpretation of that bullet point list. The rest of the text is not only examples; it provides elaborations of what thought processes led him to his conclusions. I found the nuancing of the two opposing interpretations, not the conclusion, the most enjoyable part of the post. (This comment could also be shortened to “that’s oversimplifying”. I think my longer version is both more convincing and enjoyable.)
    • sebasv_ 9mo ago
      I feel like your comment is in itself a great analogy for the "beware of using LLMs in human communication" argument. LLMs are in the end statistical models that regress to the mean, so they by design flatten out our communication, much like a reductionist summary does. I care about the nuance that we lose when communicating through "LLM filters", but others dont apparently. That makes for a tough discussion unfortunately. I see a lot of value lost by having LLMs in email clients, and I dont observe the benefit; LLMs are a net time sink because I have to rewrite its output myself anyway. Proponents seem to not see any value loss, and they do observe an efficiency gain. I am curious to see how the free market will value LLM communication. Will the lower quality, higher quantity be a net positive for job seekers sending applications or sales teams nursing leads? The way I see it either we end up in a world where eg job matching is almost completely automated, or we find an effective enough AI spam filter and we will be effectively back to square one. I hope it will be the latter, because agents negotiating job positions is bound to create more inequality, with all jobs getting filled by applicants hiring the most expensive agent. Either way, so much compute and human capital will go wasted.
• simianwords 9mo ago
  Not to nitpick but I find his point on automating vacation planning on AI so silly. Apparently he think of planning a vacation as some artistic expression.
  • pseufaux 9mo ago
    I really enjoyed and agree with the majority of the article, but this was my nit as well. My hatred of vacation planning is often the reason I don't go on more vacations. It seems like automating a task that is experienced by the individual as completely monotonous ( and only affects that individual) would be a great example of something worth handing off to a text generator.
    • simianwords 9mo ago
      For me there’s a lot of risk in vacationing in a new area I have no idea about. ChatGPT helps me here. It all comes down to people who have comfort in their own workflows and it takes mental load to change it. And then find reasons to work backwards to justify not liking AI.
    • nzgrover 9mo ago
      You might want to read this then: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/top/585370/ai-on-australian-travel-company-website-sends-tourists-to-nonexistent-hot-springs https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/top/585370/ai-on-australian-trave...
      • simianwords 9mo ago
        edge case that is not too relevant here.
• newzino 9mo ago
  [flagged]
• jonmagic 9mo ago
  I really liked this piece, and I share the concern, but I think “outsourcing thinking” is slightly the wrong frame. In my own work, I found the real failure mode wasn’t using AI, it was automating the wrong parts. When I let AI generate summaries or reflections for me, I lost the value of the task. Not because thinking disappeared, but because the meaning-making did. The distinction that’s helped me is: - If a task’s value comes from doing the thinking (reflection, synthesis, judgment), design AI as a collaborator, asking questions, prompting, pushing back. - If the task is execution or recall, automate it aggressively. So the problem isn’t that we outsource thinking, it’s that we sometimes bypass the cognitive loops that actually matter. The design choice is whether AI replaces those loops or helps surface them. I wrote more about that here if useful: https://jonmagic.com/posts/designing-collaborations-not-just-automations/ https://jonmagic.com/posts/designing-collaborations-not-just...
• js8 9mo ago
  I think we can make an analogy with our own brains, which have evolutionary older parts (limbic system) and evolutionary younger parts (neocortex). Now AI, I think it will be our new neocortex, another layer to our brain. And you can see limbic system didn't "outsource" thinking to neocortex - it's still doing it; but it can take (mostly good) advice from it. Applying this analogy to human relationships - neocortex allowed us to be more social. Social communication with limbic system was mostly "you smell like a member of our species and I want to have sex with you". So having neocortex expanded our social skills to having friends etc. I think AI will have a similar effect. It will allow us to individually communicate with large amount of other people (millions). But it will be a different relationship than what we today call "personal communication", face to face, driven by our neocortex. It will be as incomprehensible for our neocortex as our language is incomprehensible for the limbic system.
• jsattler 9mo ago
  Very interesting, thanks for sharing this. After reading Karpathy's recent tweet about "A few random notes from claude coding quite [...]" it got me thinking a lot about offloading thinking and more specifically failure. Failure is important for learning. When I use AI and they make mistakes, I often tend to blame the AI and offload the failure. I think this post explores similar thoughts, without talking much about failure. It will be interesting to see the long-term effects.
• throwaway2037 9mo ago
  For those unaware, this phrase: "The lump of cognition fallacy" is a derivative of the classic economic fallacy: Lump of Labor Fallacy (or Lump of Jobs) Google AI describes it as: This is the most common form, often used in debates about technology, immigration, or retirement. Definition: The belief that there is a set, finite amount of work to be done in an economy. The Fallacy: Assuming that if one person works more, or if a machine does a job, there is less work left for others. Reality: An increase in labor or technology (like AI or automation) can increase productivity, lower costs, and boost economic activity, which actually creates more demand for labor. Examples: "If immigrants come to this country, they will take all our jobs" (ignoring that immigrants also consume goods and create demand for more jobs). "AI will destroy all employment" (ignoring that technology typically shifts the nature of work rather than eliminating it).
• sumul 9mo ago
  This part really caught my attention (along with the rest of the preceding paragraph): > Our inability to see opportunities and fulfillment in life as it is, leads to the inevitable conclusion that life is never enough, and we would always rather be doing something else. I agree with the article completely, as it effectively names an uneasy feeling of hesitation I’ve had all along with how I use LLMs. I have found them tremendously valuable as sounding boards when I’m going in circles in my own well-worn cognitive (and sometimes even emotional) ruts. I have also found them valuable as research assistants, and I feel grateful that they arrived right around the time that search engines began to feel all but useless. I haven’t yet found them valuable in writing on my behalf, whether it’s prose or code. During my formal education, I was very much a math and science person. I enjoyed those subjects. They came easily to me, which I also enjoyed. I did two years of liberal arts in undergrad, and they kicked my butt academically in a way that I didn’t realize was possible. I did not enjoy having to learn how to think and articulate those thoughts in seminars and essays. I did not enjoy the vulnerability of sharing myself that way, or of receiving feedback. If LLMs had existed, I’m certain I would have leaned hard on them to get some relief from the constant feeling of struggle and inadequacy. But then I wouldn’t have learned how to think or how to articulate myself, and my life and career would have been significantly less meaningful, interesting, and satisfying.
  • port11 9mo ago
    As the quotes go, before you judge others make sure your affairs are in order. I’m not judging the young that are now trying to make sense of this hectic and overwhelming world. But… I do agree with you, that had these things been there, I/we’d all be leaning on them. It’s the manageable hardship of life that makes it worth it, we better ourselves through the pain. My 18-year old self would complain, as would any me up to mid-30s. I’d have to insist to him that things will get better, but that he must work on what needs improving. Can’t just ask a language model for validation.
• acedTrex 9mo ago
  > The category of writing that I like to call "functional text", which are things like computer code and pure conveyance of information (e.g., recipes, information signs, documentation), is not exposed to the same issues. I hate this take, computer code is just as rich in personality as writing. I can tell a tremendous amount about what kind of person someone is solely based off their code. Code is an incredibly personal expression of ones mental state, even if you might not realize it. LLMs have dehumanized this and the functional outcomes become FAR more unpredictable.
• artur_oliver 9mo ago
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