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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Learning and suffering seem to be linked to some degree. It takes a lot of up front pain to get to a point where you can become an effective autodidact. You have to develop an appreciation for the game. AI can accelerate aspects of this, but it often alleviates too much suffering for a novice to develop the fundamentals.

If you go into AI as a way to get your school work done more quickly, you won't experience the friction you need to. AI should be used to make the work longer and deeper. More engaging and adapted to the individual. Not quicker and easier.

The problem is that AI is the most effective dual use technology we have ever created with regard to education and cheating at education. The monkey brain doesn't like to suffer, so on average I think we find most people tend toward the shittier use case.

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One could have said the same things when calculators were invented. Is routine suffering by adding numbers by hand required? Or is it more important to delegate simpler things and focus on complex problems.

Certainly practising mental arithmetic helps in capability of doing mental arithmetic. Doing adding by hand probably also improves mental arithmetic.

The again we are not that far off from time when your AI glasses will read the price label. And then automatically add up total for you. Hopefully you then each time ask what does that total mean in context of your finances...

The point is not to make the suffering permanent. It is a temporary phase. A lesson. Once you complete it you can go on to do the automated thing without as much concern.

Yes agreed

I learned math long after the advent of the calculator and went on to study math-heavy fields (physics, mechanical engineering, and data science).

I wasn't ever able to really develop deep intuition about/understanding of a calculation until I did it by hand once or twice. I often just plugged in new models and algos just to see if performance was above a threshold, but when I wanted to productionize a new winner, I'd have to run through the algo by hand for a few steps to understand and tune it. And through doing it by hand, the complex became the simple.

I am not expert, but I heard brains learn way better when we actually use our hands to write stuff out.

like the logic sticks deeper in your head that way... using computer is fast, but sometimes it just goes in one ear and out the other

Materializing thoughts takes a concept out of "superposition"

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