Comment by ilc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilc | Hacker News Reader

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There is a reason I didn't draw a hard parallel.

I use AI day to day. I see what it can do and can't.

But when you see pages, and pages, and pages of GPT spam all over the place. Finding the nuggets of wisdom will be much harder than before, the "bomb" was dropped.

Thus actually leading to the whole FO4 main plot.

Yes, life will always find a way. And yes humanity can not put the genie in a bottle, we are much more likely to put it on a Fat Man catapult.

But it means, that in a sense... that we will all have to accept this background radiation of AI shit, as part of our new norm.

And this isn't the first time I've thought in similar ways. I remember reading older math texts (way pre-computer works in things like diffeq and PDE) and often thinking the explanations were clearer. Probably because of the increased effort to actually print something.

Who knows... maybe I'm just an old coot seeing patterns where there are none.

> "I remember reading older math texts (way pre-computer works in things like diffeq and PDE) and often thinking the explanations were clearer."

This is 100% the case in chess as well. The books before and after the computer era are orders of magnitude different in terms of readability. I think a major shift in society has been in motivation. In the past if you were studying advanced mathematics, let alone writing about it, it was solely and exclusively because you absolutely loved the field. And you were also probably several sigmas outside the mean intellectually. Now? It's most often because of some vague direction such as wanting a decent paying job, which may through the twists and turns of fate eventually see you writing books in a subject you don't particularly have much enthusiasm for.

And the much more crowded 'intellectual market', alongside various image crafting or signaling motivations, also creates a really perverse incentive. Exceptional competence and understanding within a subject makes it easy to explain things, even the esoteric and fabulously complex. See: Richard Feynman. But in modern times there often seems to be a desire to go the other direction - and make things sound utterly complex, even when they aren't. I think Einstein's paper on special relativity vs many (most?) modern papers is a good example. Einstein's writing was such that anybody with a basic education could clearly understand the paper, even if they might not fully follow the math. By contrast, so many modern papers seem to be written as if the author had a well worn copy of the Thesaurus of Incomprehensibility at his bedside table.

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