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Comment by poemxo | Hacker News Reader

As a lifelong learner, experientially it feels like a big chunk of time spent studying is actually just searching. AI seems like a good tool to search through a large body of study material and make that part more efficient.

The other chunk of time, to me anyway, seems to be creating a mental model of the subject matter, and when you study something well you have a strong grasp on the forces influencing cause and effect within that matter. It's this part of the process that I would use AI the least, if I am to learn it for myself. Otherwise my mental model will consist of a bunch of "includes" from the AI model and will only be resolvable with access to AI. Personally, I want a coherent "offline" model to be stored in my brain before I consider myself studied up in the area.

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>big chunk of time spent studying is actually just searching.

This is a good thing in many levels.

Learning how to search is (was) a good skill to have. The process of searching itself also often leads to learning tangentially related but important things.

I'm sorry for the next generations that won't have (much of) these skills.

Searching is definitely a useful skill, but once you've been doing it for years you probably don't need the constant practice and are happy to avoid it.

Yeah, I don’t have the nuanced ability to find something in a library my parents probably have, and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything for it.

That was relevant when you were learning to search through “information” for the answer to your question, eg the digital version of going through the library or digging through a reference book.

I don’t think it’s so valuable now that you’re searching through piles of spam and junk just to try find anything relevant. That’s a uniquely modern-web thing created by Google in their focus of profit over user.

Unless Google takes over libraries/books next and sells spots to advertisers on the shelves and in the books.

> searching through piles of spam and junk

In the same way that I never learnt the Dewey decimal system because digital search had driven it obsolete. It may be that we just won't need to do as much sifting through spam in the future, but being able to finesse Gemini into burping out the right links becomes increasingly important.

>I don’t think it’s so valuable now that you’re searching through piles of spam and junk just to try find anything relevant.

my 20 years of figuring out how to find niche porn has paid off in spades, thank you very much. I click recklessly in that domain and I end up with viruses. Very high stakes research.

I think properly searching is more important than ever in such a day and age of enshittification. You need to quickly recognize what is adspam or blogspam and distill out useful/valuable information. You need to understand how to preview links before you click on them. What tools to filter out dangerous websites. What methods and keywords to trust or be wary of.

And all that is before the actual critical thinking of "is this information accurate/trustworthy?".

Of course, I'm assuming this is a future where you aren't stuck in the search spaces of 20 website hubs who pull from the same 5 AI databases to spit out dubious answers at you. I'd rather not outsource my thinking (and media consumption) in such a way.

yeah this is literally why I built -- app.ubik.studio -- searching is everything, and understanding what you are reading is more important than conversing with a chatbot. i cannot even imagine being a student in 2025, especially at 14 years old omg would be so hard not to just cheat on everything

This is just good intellectual hygiene. Delegating your understanding is the first step toward becoming the slave of some defunct fact broker.

Spaced repetition systems would be the perfect complement to your approach - they're specifically designed to help build that "offline" mental model by systematically moving knowledge from AI-assisted lookup to permanent memory.

I think this account is a bot.

Isn’t the goal of Study Mode exactly that, though? Instead of handing you the answers, it tries to guide you through answering it on your own; to teach the process.

Most people don’t know how to do this.

Or just to dig up things you’ve never would’ve considered that are related, but you don’t have to keywords for.

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