6 ms·

I’m not noticing the decline in my own abilities any more than I had before using them. I finished undergrad 20 years ago and my once sharp math skills had been

I’m not noticing the decline in my own abilities any more than I had before using them. I finished undergrad 20 years ago and my once sharp math skills had been severely diminished within only 5-10 years. Just simple arithmetic and percentages that I could rapidly do in my head became dependent on calculators/spreadsheets. For all other trivia type knowledge, my brain has offloaded it to the internet RAM in my pocket. It’s a familiar feeling of when some question comes up and I think “oh, I used to know that, let me look it up”. Maybe I just already hit my personal floor of stupidity before LLMs. However, I personally feel a huge mental burden of the state of communication. The contemporary version of it where I have a million threads and conversations im juggling at any given time. Emails, voicemail, chat, online, texts, personal, business, home, children, other family, friends, then there’s the variants like Messages, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. And as overwhelming as it is for me, I’m super under connected than everyone else I know. I quit following most news and all sports, as I just don’t have the bandwidth for it. My brain was molded preinternet and I feel like it’s reaching its max on the analog to digital conversion. Or at least it’s just a really lossy process.

noduerme 4mo ago
Yeah, I'm 45 and I'm like you - no social media, relatively under connected, and still feel swamped constantly by emails and calls and especially texts. They eat up half my productive time every day, and most of them are things I'm looped in on that I don't even need to respond to. Okay so let's say that's the new cognitive burden. The new escape hatch is "AI". Now you don't need to read your mail or write responses! Let an LLM handle that for you! And now your friends and coworkers will send you AI generated mail anyway, so if you're actually taking the time to read and respond to it yourself you're a chump, right? Noise machines. Humans are noise machines. Ever try to sleep till noon and notice that everyone else seems like they can't feel alive unless they wake up and make the maximum amount of noise and racket possible? What could be better for a gibbering species of ground dwelling apes than a miraculous machine that gibbers for them, to point back and forth at each other?
- princegift98 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- mywittyname 4mo ago
  > And now your friends and coworkers will send you AI generated mail anyway This hits close. I realized one of my friends was using AI to message me and I took it kind of hard. It's weird to be worth the effort for them to set up a chat bot to talk to me but not worth the 2-3mins a week to actually read/respond to my messages. Right now, I just basically ghosted him, but I have teh feeling this is the start of an emerging issue.
  - lukan 4mo ago
    Are you sure he is sending automated messages, or used LLM to polish up some writing? Would be a difference to me, but .. still weird.
    - svachalek 4mo ago
      I'm unconvinced of this "polishing" everyone seems to claim. Whenever someone dumps a load of slop on you, that's always the answer, oh this is totally my own work, but I used AI to "polish" it. Then why is it so clearly crap? What kind of "polishing" makes text bloated and empty? No, they were too lazy to write and let the machine do it.
      - lukan 4mo ago
        Well, I like writing. But I have friends who hate it .. but need to for work. So they enjoy LLM's to make professional drafts out of some notes (technical reports) without all their grammar misstakes etc. No fluff, just the document in a shape the target audience expects. But if they would do this to me .. I would object. I prefer their authentic ramblings ..
        rowyourboat 4mo ago
citrin_ru 4mo ago
I'm noticing some decline of skills I don't practice regularly and LLM is just one of reasons why one stops practicing. Switching to another area of work gives a comparable decline. If you want sharp skills you have to use them.
- Archer6621 4mo ago
  True. People don't do it though, because keeping skills sharp and using them takes effort, and we have a predisposition to be as efficient as possible with how we spend our effort; if there's an easier way to do it in our awareness, we will naturally gravitate towards that. LLMs are often a universal crutch or swiss-army-knife that significantly take away workload for many abstract tasks, so all kinds of atrophy in abstract thinking is to be expected. However, when looking at muscle, once you have it you don't need to use it as much in order to maintain it. I wonder if the same is true for skills; in that case, some kind of regiment where you still use the skill you delegate once a week or so could maybe help with avoiding this loss of skill for most part.
  - eueje 4mo ago
    “ However, when looking at muscle, once you have it you don't need to use it as much in order to maintain it” No.. this depends on how much muscle you have. The appropriate comparison is mass and density of knowledge/understanding vs muscle. There’s not a chance in hell you will retain mass and dense muscle without pushing the body hard. Just in the same way you will not retain very deep understanding of things unless a) you’ve been reciting it for over 10 yrs b) you go back and push the understanding continuously for it to remain as part of your being
    - cj 4mo ago
      Building muscle is much harder than maintaining muscle. And if you went 3 years without exercising, you'll be able to get your muscles back much quicker than had you never had the muscle before. It's pretty comparable to skills. You don't need to practice as hard to maintain a skill than you do to build it. And if you let the skill atrophy, it's much easier to recover the skill compared to building it from scratch.
spacebacon 4mo ago
It’s a really lossy process. Mostly due to most humans and all models treating sign meetings as determined at the moment of softmax crystallization. Signs (words included) are no more determined than the speed of light is. It’s all reflexive and we should stop lying to ourselves it can be determined.
kys11 4mo ago
[dead]
yonaguska 4mo ago
I don't think it's just you or your age, per your pre-internet comment. People that grew up in this just don't understand why they're overwhelmed. And I don't think they're even aware of what their missing out on in terms of focus or mental acuity.
- conductr 4mo ago
  Good point. I do have context and self awareness that it all seems unhealthy. Feels like a common sense evaluation to me but I can’t properly place myself in a younger generations experience.
getpokedagain 4mo ago
I too was and wanted to only blame communication overload. Especially with work the hardest thing in ai times seems to be the overload of stuff/shit to read that is too easy to write. The reality is I agree with the op and I see the loss of reasoning power in myself. I've been using native Emacs on android for a bit and finally have gotten serious about config for it. I got lazy and had Claude do some of it. Which was great untill things don't work because there's not going to be my crazy ask in the data. It was painful for me to sit down and think through my configuration and the problem but I did it. I am absolutely torn on the technology still two years after adopting it.
SoftTalker 4mo ago
Most/all of my university-level math knowledge is gone, atrophied from never having needed to use any of it professionally. I don't even really recall needing it for any of my CS coursework, honestly. It was just required for the degree.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- smcg 4mo ago
  I used linear algebra to implement PageRank in my Information Retrieval class. I also used it extensively in my AI and ML classes. You can't pass a ML class without a good foundation in linear algebra. Not to mention, discrete mathematics is the fundamental building blocks of CS. Surely you were using algorithms and graphs. I hope you computed an algorithm's efficiency with big O notation. I hope you have used probability before.
everforward 4mo ago
I think some people are okay with communication that’s less involved. Like meme-y BSing where everyone involved knows everyone else is putting like 12% of their thinking power into sending a response. I don’t really enjoy that, so I find having that many threads stressful and annoying. I just take a hard line and will unilaterally downgrade communications (while politely letting the other party know). I have all my family group chats muted because my mom uses “Send” the way you’d use Enter on a desktop. End of a sentence? Send text. Next bullet point in a list? Send text. I muted the chats and told her that I want my ringer on in case there’s an emergency, but I got 30 something notifications in 5 minutes during an interview and it’s unfair to the candidate or other people in the meeting. Internally I rationalize it as revoking someone’s ability to make noises on my phone at whim. They can still text me, they just can’t interrupt me anymore. It helps a lot, even if only temporary. I’ve muted people for a few hours or a couple days before when I’m already stressed and they’re really chatty.
- conductr 4mo ago
  Agree. I mute every group chat and notifications for almost everything. Same reasoning. My wife just talks to me when something reaches a point of me needing to know. Broader holiday planning or group travel planning chatter, it seems like any family gathering requires a minimum of 1000 messages.
  - everforward 4mo ago
    My SO does the same and it saves my butt sometimes, but I don't like it. It feels like I'm not really solving the issue and just making it her problem instead of mine, but she has a less strong response to the interruptions. She's certainly better at it though. I can't manage the interruptions, nor am I good about remembering to create calendar events and what not when events come up.
- abustamam 4mo ago
  As an aside to this I mute ALL notifications on my phone. I still get notifications of course, but they never ping or vibrate. For important threads like calls or messages from important people/group chats, I have my watch vibrate. Otherwise, I just go through my notifications once I have downtime.
HWR_14 4mo ago
There is a massive difference between remembering how to do something and learning how to do it.
reaperducer 4mo ago
I’m not noticing the decline in my own abilities …said every drunk person ever. That you don't notice it doesn't mean it isn't happening. By the time you notice it, it's too late. That's why elderly people who are worried about their brains play chess and do puzzles like mad.
- Rapzid 4mo ago
  I have never heard a recognized elite level anyone stop using their skills and say "I'm not noticing the decline in my own abilities" LOL
- conductr 4mo ago
  Perhaps read the rest of the sentence as it continues with "any more than I had before using them [AI/LLM]". We're all only using these tools for ~2 years at most, so if some people are noticing degradation, I am saying that I haven't yet. And so when you say "That you don't notice it doesn't mean it isn't happening.", I agree. But that's off topic, because we're discussing what we've noticed, not what we haven't noticed.
wil421 4mo ago
Congrats your getting older. Welcome to the club. Find hobbies and keep them, it doesn’t matter what they are it’s important as we age.

noduerme 4mo ago

Yeah, I'm 45 and I'm like you - no social media, relatively under connected, and still feel swamped constantly by emails and calls and especially texts. They eat up half my productive time every day, and most of them are things I'm looped in on that I don't even need to respond to. Okay so let's say that's the new cognitive burden. The new escape hatch is "AI". Now you don't need to read your mail or write responses! Let an LLM handle that for you! And now your friends and coworkers will send you AI generated mail anyway, so if you're actually taking the time to read and respond to it yourself you're a chump, right? Noise machines. Humans are noise machines. Ever try to sleep till noon and notice that everyone else seems like they can't feel alive unless they wake up and make the maximum amount of noise and racket possible? What could be better for a gibbering species of ground dwelling apes than a miraculous machine that gibbers for them, to point back and forth at each other?

princegift98 4mo ago
[flagged]
mywittyname 4mo ago
> And now your friends and coworkers will send you AI generated mail anyway This hits close. I realized one of my friends was using AI to message me and I took it kind of hard. It's weird to be worth the effort for them to set up a chat bot to talk to me but not worth the 2-3mins a week to actually read/respond to my messages. Right now, I just basically ghosted him, but I have teh feeling this is the start of an emerging issue.
- lukan 4mo ago
  Are you sure he is sending automated messages, or used LLM to polish up some writing? Would be a difference to me, but .. still weird.
  - svachalek 4mo ago
    I'm unconvinced of this "polishing" everyone seems to claim. Whenever someone dumps a load of slop on you, that's always the answer, oh this is totally my own work, but I used AI to "polish" it. Then why is it so clearly crap? What kind of "polishing" makes text bloated and empty? No, they were too lazy to write and let the machine do it.
    - lukan 4mo ago
      Well, I like writing. But I have friends who hate it .. but need to for work. So they enjoy LLM's to make professional drafts out of some notes (technical reports) without all their grammar misstakes etc. No fluff, just the document in a shape the target audience expects. But if they would do this to me .. I would object. I prefer their authentic ramblings ..
      - rowyourboat 4mo ago

citrin_ru 4mo ago

I'm noticing some decline of skills I don't practice regularly and LLM is just one of reasons why one stops practicing. Switching to another area of work gives a comparable decline. If you want sharp skills you have to use them.

Archer6621 4mo ago
True. People don't do it though, because keeping skills sharp and using them takes effort, and we have a predisposition to be as efficient as possible with how we spend our effort; if there's an easier way to do it in our awareness, we will naturally gravitate towards that. LLMs are often a universal crutch or swiss-army-knife that significantly take away workload for many abstract tasks, so all kinds of atrophy in abstract thinking is to be expected. However, when looking at muscle, once you have it you don't need to use it as much in order to maintain it. I wonder if the same is true for skills; in that case, some kind of regiment where you still use the skill you delegate once a week or so could maybe help with avoiding this loss of skill for most part.
- eueje 4mo ago
  “ However, when looking at muscle, once you have it you don't need to use it as much in order to maintain it” No.. this depends on how much muscle you have. The appropriate comparison is mass and density of knowledge/understanding vs muscle. There’s not a chance in hell you will retain mass and dense muscle without pushing the body hard. Just in the same way you will not retain very deep understanding of things unless a) you’ve been reciting it for over 10 yrs b) you go back and push the understanding continuously for it to remain as part of your being
  - cj 4mo ago
    Building muscle is much harder than maintaining muscle. And if you went 3 years without exercising, you'll be able to get your muscles back much quicker than had you never had the muscle before. It's pretty comparable to skills. You don't need to practice as hard to maintain a skill than you do to build it. And if you let the skill atrophy, it's much easier to recover the skill compared to building it from scratch.

spacebacon 4mo ago

It’s a really lossy process. Mostly due to most humans and all models treating sign meetings as determined at the moment of softmax crystallization. Signs (words included) are no more determined than the speed of light is. It’s all reflexive and we should stop lying to ourselves it can be determined.

kys11 4mo ago

[dead]

yonaguska 4mo ago

I don't think it's just you or your age, per your pre-internet comment. People that grew up in this just don't understand why they're overwhelmed. And I don't think they're even aware of what their missing out on in terms of focus or mental acuity.

conductr 4mo ago
Good point. I do have context and self awareness that it all seems unhealthy. Feels like a common sense evaluation to me but I can’t properly place myself in a younger generations experience.

getpokedagain 4mo ago

I too was and wanted to only blame communication overload. Especially with work the hardest thing in ai times seems to be the overload of stuff/shit to read that is too easy to write. The reality is I agree with the op and I see the loss of reasoning power in myself. I've been using native Emacs on android for a bit and finally have gotten serious about config for it. I got lazy and had Claude do some of it. Which was great untill things don't work because there's not going to be my crazy ask in the data. It was painful for me to sit down and think through my configuration and the problem but I did it. I am absolutely torn on the technology still two years after adopting it.

SoftTalker 4mo ago

Most/all of my university-level math knowledge is gone, atrophied from never having needed to use any of it professionally. I don't even really recall needing it for any of my CS coursework, honestly. It was just required for the degree.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
smcg 4mo ago
I used linear algebra to implement PageRank in my Information Retrieval class. I also used it extensively in my AI and ML classes. You can't pass a ML class without a good foundation in linear algebra. Not to mention, discrete mathematics is the fundamental building blocks of CS. Surely you were using algorithms and graphs. I hope you computed an algorithm's efficiency with big O notation. I hope you have used probability before.

everforward 4mo ago

I think some people are okay with communication that’s less involved. Like meme-y BSing where everyone involved knows everyone else is putting like 12% of their thinking power into sending a response. I don’t really enjoy that, so I find having that many threads stressful and annoying. I just take a hard line and will unilaterally downgrade communications (while politely letting the other party know). I have all my family group chats muted because my mom uses “Send” the way you’d use Enter on a desktop. End of a sentence? Send text. Next bullet point in a list? Send text. I muted the chats and told her that I want my ringer on in case there’s an emergency, but I got 30 something notifications in 5 minutes during an interview and it’s unfair to the candidate or other people in the meeting. Internally I rationalize it as revoking someone’s ability to make noises on my phone at whim. They can still text me, they just can’t interrupt me anymore. It helps a lot, even if only temporary. I’ve muted people for a few hours or a couple days before when I’m already stressed and they’re really chatty.

conductr 4mo ago
Agree. I mute every group chat and notifications for almost everything. Same reasoning. My wife just talks to me when something reaches a point of me needing to know. Broader holiday planning or group travel planning chatter, it seems like any family gathering requires a minimum of 1000 messages.
- everforward 4mo ago
  My SO does the same and it saves my butt sometimes, but I don't like it. It feels like I'm not really solving the issue and just making it her problem instead of mine, but she has a less strong response to the interruptions. She's certainly better at it though. I can't manage the interruptions, nor am I good about remembering to create calendar events and what not when events come up.
abustamam 4mo ago
As an aside to this I mute ALL notifications on my phone. I still get notifications of course, but they never ping or vibrate. For important threads like calls or messages from important people/group chats, I have my watch vibrate. Otherwise, I just go through my notifications once I have downtime.

HWR_14 4mo ago

There is a massive difference between remembering how to do something and learning how to do it.

reaperducer 4mo ago

I’m not noticing the decline in my own abilities …said every drunk person ever. That you don't notice it doesn't mean it isn't happening. By the time you notice it, it's too late. That's why elderly people who are worried about their brains play chess and do puzzles like mad.

Rapzid 4mo ago
I have never heard a recognized elite level anyone stop using their skills and say "I'm not noticing the decline in my own abilities" LOL
conductr 4mo ago
Perhaps read the rest of the sentence as it continues with "any more than I had before using them [AI/LLM]". We're all only using these tools for ~2 years at most, so if some people are noticing degradation, I am saying that I haven't yet. And so when you say "That you don't notice it doesn't mean it isn't happening.", I agree. But that's off topic, because we're discussing what we've noticed, not what we haven't noticed.

wil421 4mo ago

Congrats your getting older. Welcome to the club. Find hobbies and keep them, it doesn’t matter what they are it’s important as we age.