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Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

To add: Reading is also thinking (ideally).

And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during students' formative time, they need to learn how to think in reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc.

Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you have a solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but first one ought to learn how to calculate mentally and using pen and paper. If for no other reason, to check whether we made a typo when entering our calculation, e.g. when the result is off by 100 because we did not press the decimal point firmly enough.

I am very concerned that young people delegate to LLMs before reaching that stage.

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Compare it with the invention of writing:

> To [Thamus] came Thoth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Thoth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, this, said Thoth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Thoth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

-- Plato, Phaedrus

We've been having this same conversation for over 2,000 years now. And while I actually think Thamus is probably correct, it doesn't change the reality that we are now using reading and writing for everything.

I think this exposes a pattern, but not necessarily on the subject or antithetical to OP's point. I interpret the above passage to implicate that we lose abilities as we adopt tools that can do it for us, but writing specifically stunts our ability to memorize facts. I would argue that this enabled us to spend less mental energy on memorization but on processing information instead, able to do more complex calculations. This doesn't negate OP's point that by using LLM's we give up another kind of ability to a tool, in the case reasoning.

Now whether or not this will in the abstract become leverage for another type of skill or multiplier is to be seen.

Or, from the perspective of memetics, writing has always been using us for everything.

Sounds profoundly anti-humanist.

What you mean by "humanist" does not seem to be what philosophers mean by it.

Sounds like "memetics" gives agency to writing as a thing independent of human beings doing writing, which is an interesting frame but also untrue.

Yeah, well, that's just how the humanism meme wants to instrumentalize you at this moment.

Ideas don't die. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/introductory-antimemetics

Skullface sends his regards. I kneel Hideo Kojima.

I recommend Havelock's Preface to Plato and Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy

IMO it's not the recording of ideas that is thinking, but rather the act of putting thoughts into language. To me there isn't a big cognitive difference between conversing about a topic (during which you put thoughts into words) and writing about it.

When you speak or write instead of just think, you create something that did not previously exist: new words and sentences. When you write instead of speak, you aren't exactly creating something new — you're often just recording words that just as well could have been spoken. Using an LLM is much closer to the first case. It's creating something that didn't previously exist (an expanded thesis on a brief thought provided by you), and therefore seems to possibly risk the user's ability to think atrophying.

> IMO it's not the recording of ideas that is thinking, but rather the act of putting thoughts into language.

I agree with you but that article itself says, "for example, handwriting can lead to widespread brain connectivity."

It doesn’t say anywhere that conversing doesn’t.

There is something much deeper going on when you force yourself to actually write things down. This is especially relevant in engineering. That is why "RFCs" are so prevalent in many tech companies. They are often just as useful to the writer as they are to the reviewers.

Reading is thinking someone else's thoughts.

Writing is thinking your own thoughts.

There's a big difference, and is why writing is so painful for so many people. It's also why writing is critically important.

edit: Likewise teaching is really important. Crystallization of thought is incredible valuable and difficult.

Reading is thinking someone else's thoughts => That is true if you are strictly reading passively. Typically what happens is that reading opens many doors that leads to your own thinking. Of course depends on the type of material you are reading as well. But often reading broadens your thinking relative to just putting your own on paper.

I think the best way to actively read is to write down your own thoughts as commentary.

Definitely a good point. I live in a college town and know many people that read all the time, but don't actually do anything active with what they've read. They just consume it continuously and think the understand many topics. Except when you talk to them, it comes out quickly that they didn't actually understand what they read on a deep level, they just went along for the "thinking ride".

And, as you point out, if you push yourself to read actively, it helps a lot!

I really think the effects of LLMs on thinking is the exact same as a calculator. It shortcuts some forms of thinking to open up other forms of thinking.

My thinking has increased with the use of LLMs, not decreased, most likely because LLMs take the edge off of grind work like reading a lot of noise to capture the 1% signal, formulating accurate statements for abstract ideas, and bringing together various domains that are beyond your area of expertise.

Now will you make mistakes? Sure, but you would have made the same mistakes at a slower pace without LLMs anyways. Or more accurately, you just wouldn’t do the research or apply domains not in your area of expertise, and your thinking would be a lot more narrow.

The strawman is thinking that banning LLMs will induce rigorous thinking. Just like banning calculators does not make everyone good at math.

But allowing calculators WILL make those who like math reach much deeper into the field than without.

>> But allowing calculators WILL make those who like math reach much deeper into the field than without.

Have you ever run into any mathematician that praised the calculator for his/her career? I’d be really curious to read about that.

Calculators are taken for granted but many mathematicians use computers extesively in their careers.

Pure math people probably don’t reach for calculators. But engineers do all the time. Back of the envelope guesstimating is bread and butter.

The modern equivalent of a calculator is Excel.

> Back of the envelope guesstimating is bread and butter.

And that is not done with calculators, that is done quickly in your head by having practiced a lot of calculations manually. This is why engineer students still practice manual calculation in college in most places.

Google search has worsened so badly. That right know it's impossible to resist using one of those free for a taste LLM service.

And the feeling is similar to how using Google on the 2004-2014 web was.

It used to be Google would return a huge list or relevant links. Loading all of them was quick. Skimming the content was quick.

Now every search is a massive ad. Every site is slow to load full of ads and useless slop. Slop which was written manually at first, then accelerated with Markov chains, now at light speed with LLMs.

So an LLM is required to filter through the LLM slop to find the tiny bit of real content.

It's possible to not use Google for search. I switched to Perplexity many months ago. Almost never come back to Google. No one is forcing me to use a worse option, when a better one exists. Just use something else - easy.

it's like those kids will live in the future, where there's advanced AI

I think we should trust children enought that they'll also figure out a crazy changing technological world.

on the other hand, internet millenial ideals are fast dying. the digital dream of cultural and mediatic abundance is turning into a nightmare of redundant content as information wars saturate the figurative airwaves

Of course I trust my kids to make the most of the environment they are given, and given that their environment will differ from the one I am adapted for, they will likely surpass me in being well adapted to the environment of the future; it's still my responsibility to prepare them as best as I can for it.

You might put a baby in a pool so it can learn to swim, but you make sure their environment is such that drowning is an impossibility. A child destined to be an Olympian swimmer still requires guidance, even if their natural ability and inclinations outpace both their peers and their elders.

Yeah, I think there are environmental things for which our culture cannot prepare us, yet I also think many of our inherited behaviors and beliefs will help us because the environment may not change that much.

Nicolas Carr addresses this issue directly in his book "The Shallows" in which he brilliantly recounted how media has reshaped how humans think and communicate, especially how the word streams of other people increasingly reshaped our collective focus and our ability to focus, which alas, has NOT freed us to think more deeply.

Humans always have and always will use tech as a crutch -- to reduce time and effort (and energy expended). The 'physical enshittification' (PE) that has ensued from using mechanical crutches has made us lazy, fat, and sick. And now _mental_ crutches have arrived, which promise to replace our very thought processes, freeing us from all the annoying cognitive heavy lifting once done by our brains.

IMO, there's every reason to believe that the next step in human evolution will be driven by the continued misuse of tech as crutches, likely leading to widespread _mental_ enshittification (ME) -- doing to our minds what misuse of tech has already done to our culture and to our bodies.

Perhaps mankind can avoid this fate. But only if we insist on _thinking_ for ourselves.

Trusting kids to figure out the unfiltered Internet led to a massive mental health crisis.

No , reading is filling up your mind's LLM with the context given by someone else. Your thinking is what happens after reading.

I’d say reading is fine tuning. It changes your weights. That’s the whole point of doing it.

> To add: Reading is also thinking (ideally).

I've heard that some philosophers like Schopenhauer argue that reading can become a passive process, where we simply follow another person's thoughts without engaging our own critical thinking. It's interesting to consider that it's not just LLMs but we too would become like stochastic parrots under certain circumstances.

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