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Comment by lordofgibbons | Hacker News Reader

People have been afraid of the public getting dumber since the start of mass book printing and has happened with every following new technology since then.

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The IQ in the US started declining since the start of the Internet:

"Leading up to the 1990s, IQ scores were consistently going up, but in recent years, that trend seems to have flipped. The reasons for both the increase and the decline are sill [sic!] very much up for debate."

The Internet is relatively benign compared to cribbing directly from an AI. At least you still read articles, RFCs, search for books etc.

As someone who grew up reading encyclopedias, LLMs are the most interesting invention ever. If Wikipedia had released the first chat AI we'd be heralding a new age of knowledge and democratic access and human achievement.

It just so happens unimaginative programmers built the first iteration so they decided to automate their own jobs. And here we are, programmers, worrying about the dangers of it all not one bit aware of the irony.

As someone who grew up reading encyclopedias, I find LLM:s profoundly hard to find a use for besides crude translations of mainly formal documents and severely unreliable transcriptions.

I like structured information and LLM:s output deliberately unstructured data that I then have to vet and sift out and structure information from. Sure, they can fake structure to some extent, I sometimes get XML or JSON that I want, but it's not really either of those and also common that they inject subtle, runny shit into the output that take longer to clean out than it would have to write a scraper against some structured data source.

I get that some people don't like reading documentation or talking to other people as much as having a fake conversation, or that their editors now suggest longer additions to their code, but for me it's like hanging out with my kids except the LLM is absolutely inhuman, disgustingly subservient and doesn't learn. I much prefer having interns and other juniors around that will also take time to correct but actually learn and grow from it.

As search engines I dislike them. When I ask for a subset of some data I want to be sure that the result is exhaustive without having to beg for it or make threats. Index and pattern matching can be understood, and come with guarantees that I don't just get some average or fleeting subset of a subset. If it's structured I can easily add another interactive filter that renders immediately. They're also too slow for the kind of non-exhaustive text search you might use e.g. Manticore or some vector database for, things like product recommendations where you only want fifteen results and it's fine if they're a little wonky.

Yeah doesn’t matter what you prefer. New hardware will boot strap models and eliminate the layers of syntax sugar devs use to write and ship software.

Hardware makers aren’t living some honorific quest to provide for SWEs. They see a path to claim more of the tech economy by eliminating as many SWE jobs as possible. They’re gonna try to capitalize on it.

I know that the power of technology fashion is held by a few people with interests that don't align with mine. They also know it, that's why they are investing billions and billions into changing the minds of "developers, developers, developers", because they want to keep it that way and don't want to contend with developers resisting collectively.

It doesn't mean it's good and beautiful, or even correct.

Bwahaha. This is about as likely (in practice) as the whole ‘speech to text software means you’ll never need to type again’ fad.

Before you jump to conclusions, you should make a reasonable claim that IQ is still a reasonable measure for an individual's intellectual abilities in this context.

One could very much say that people's IQ is bound to decline if schooling decided to prioritize other skills.

You would also have to look into the impact of factors unrelated to the internet, like the evolution of schooling and its funding.

Pretty good chance that this is the impact of a generation of lead poisoned children growing up with stunted brains.

IQ scores may be declining, but it's far from certain that the thing they're trying to measure (g, or general intelligence) have actually declined.

https://open.substack.com/pub/cremieux/p/the-demise-of-the-f...

That's an article apparently from a white nationalist, Jordan Lasker, a collaborator of Emil Kirkegaard's. For a fun, mathematical take (by Cosma Shalizi) on what statistics tells us about "g" itself:

http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html

  That's an article apparently from a white nationalist, Jordan Lasker, a collaborator of Emil Kirkegaard's.

Do you have any comments about the article itself?

  http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html

Thanks! I read the introduction, and will add it to my weekend reading list.

The author objects to treating 'g' as a causal variable, because it doesn't help us understand how the mind works. He doesn't deny that 'g' is useful as a predictive variable.

I highly recommend reading the whole piece.

I will! Weekend starts soon!

The Borsboom and Glymour papers he links to are worth a skim too. It's a really dense (in a good way!) piece. Also shook up the way I think about other psych findings (the "big 5" in particular).

Unfortunately research shows that nowadays we're actually getting dumber, literacy rates are plummeting in developed countries.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/ad...

Is this culture based or reproduction based?

Do you mean developed? OECD are all rich western countries.

Yes, sorry, corrected

Plato wrote in Phaedrus

This invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

He was not wrong. We forget stuff all the time and in huge quantities. I can't even remember my own phone number half of the time.

Those guys could recite substantial portions of the Homeric epics. It's just that there is more to intelligence than rote memorization. That's the good news.

The bad news is that this amorphous "more" was "critical thinking" and we are starting to outsource it.

Writing had existed for 3000 years by then, alphabetic writing in Greek had existed for several centuries. The quote about "the invention of writing" is Socrates telling a story where a mythical Egyptian king says that.

Socrates also says in this dialogue:

"Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing."

The essence of his admonishment is that having access to written text is not enough to produce understanding, and I not only tend to agree, I think it is more relevant than ever now.

I’m inclined to believe he was right? There’s other benefits to writing (and the act of writing) that weren’t well understood at the time though.

That’s okay, we’re moving to post reading :)

What did you say?

I'll have an AI make a tiktok video to summarize my post just for you!

Thanks! I'll ask NotebookLM to make a podcast out of it!

We’ve probably compensated by ease of information dissemination. We’ve pretty much reached the peak of that now, so the only thing we can do is dumb shit down further?

Maybe someone can write one of those AI apocalypse novels in which the AI doesn’t go off the rails at all but is instead integrated into the humans such that they become living drones anyhow.

Previous technologies did lessen us in some way: agricultural and industrial revolution did lower the physical requirements to do most jobs. Writing tech lower the human memory requirements for knowledge acquisition. While we increased our output as a result of these technologies we have afforded ourselves the privilege of being physically weaker and having shorter memories as outsource that to the new technology of the day.

Fast forward to 202x, and the thing being outsourced to LLMs is our ability to think (to a certain extent). We should expect on average to see a decline in the ability to think critically by your average citizen.

"In the age of endless books, we risk outsourcing our thinking. Instead of grappling with ideas ourselves, we just regurgitate what we read. Books should be fuel, not crutches—read less, think more."

Or even: "In the age of cave paintings, we risk outsourcing our memory. Instead of remembering or telling stories, we just slap them on walls. Art should be expression, not escape—paint less, live more."

Cave paintings were made by AI robots trained on the IP of real painters?

How they are made is irrelevant to the point.

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