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Comment by dudisubekti | Hacker News Reader

Black-and-white thinking like this is not healthy.

You can still do creative thinking while using AI as a powerful tool at your disposal.

Some mathematicians like Terence Tao are comfortable doing this, for example.

I feel like I use AI this way, but a majority of my peers lean too much into it. There used to be the sentence "we don't think, we google", and I see that with ai usage. As soon as a roadblock appears, the situation is pasted in GPT without further engaging with it, then they pick up the phone and open an app while GPT does its thing 0_o

I have a coworker like that too, my pet theory is that they're not passionate about their job to begin with. It's just something that can pay their bills.

While waiting for Claude to finish, we talked about our hobbies outside of work, and the same guy will go into deep details on how steroids and the HPG axis works, and even gave me a spreadsheet with several NCBI PubMed links on the topic.

I think we are all naturally be more creative and opinionated in things we are interested in.

We don't think - sounds like the same crowd as the people who think creativity doesn't exist.

An orthogonal observation: Bearblog seems to have become an anti-AI echo chamber. Their community responds very positively to posts exactly like this one [1] [2] [3]

I think it's just important context to keep in mind that these sorts of takes are very typical to top https://bearblog.dev/discover/ in the same way that certain types of posts are designed to rank well here. I considered migrating my blog there earlier this year and ended up deciding that, while I loved the product, the community was not healthy.

[1] https://forkingmad.blog/ai-summary-blog-post/

[2] https://blog.spu.io/you-dont-want-to-make-things-you-want-to...

[3] https://blog.happyfellow.dev/simulacrum-of-knowledge-work/

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Richard Stallman was unreasonable. So was Linus Torvalds. I'm hoping that something wonderful and entirely human-centered will come out of the anti-AI movement, up to and including a bifurcation of the internet.

> up to and including a bifurcation of the internet.

Enforced how?

But...

Take electricity adoption for example, with your adage then it means unreasonable pro-electricity people vs unreasonable anti-electricity people. We know how this turns out, I don't see a lot of people joining the Amish.

It's okay to have strong opinions (be "unreasonable"), but in the end humanity as a whole (the "reasonable" people) will judge whether your opinion is a good one or not. Only time will tell.

> I'm hoping that something wonderful and entirely human-centered will come out of the anti-AI movement

It will. That's why it's important to be a "Luddite" and to make our voices heard. Plenty are on the sidelines, plenty dislike AI, and plenty don't care to drink the kool aid and would rather exercise empathy towards fellow humans than welcome the era of the robotic overlords and their billionaire masters.

This place is an echo chamber and doesn't reflect the views of the vast majority.

People also used to say that Google or calculators will make you dumber. Neither happened. Won't happen with this either.

it clearly did make "people" dumber because now "people" believe in AI ;)

People are worse at mental arithmetic than they were in the recent past, so it's not clear that they aren't "dumber" in the sense people meant at the time.

Well, with anything, practice is key. When I was in school, I was in a math competition where you had to do everything in your head. There was no scratch paper, you could not modify your answer once written, and erasing was obviously not allowed either. I wasn't the greatest at it, but I didn't suck at it either. That was decades ago, and I no longer do math in my head that way. What I used to do in seconds for a result now takes a couple of seconds to think about what needs to be done and then the time to come up with the result.

And did our thinking about the importance of being good at arithmetic change in response? I think so.

We also used to be much better remembering things, when we relied on oral histories, our memory skills have degraded quite a bit. And there's a quote from Socrates criticizing how writing is a crutch that degrades our skill (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1... , the last bit). Over time, we've just moved to valuing other things more.

Students score lower on standardized tests in the 2020s than those in the 1990s. So your stance feels misguided. Although I don’t think Google and Calculators are the main culprits, I do think it’s due to larger technology/internet landscape.

> Although I don’t think Google and Calculators are the main culprits, I do think it’s due to larger technology/internet landscape.

That's extremely speculative, especially given there was a major event in 2020 which massively disrupted education worldwide.

It was declining since 1990s, not since 2020s.

I once worked for a guy who typed 7 + 4 into a calculator, after freezing for 1.5 secs trying to work it out in his head. It was in a "stressful" situation (not something extreme, we just were in a hurry), and I'm sure the guy could add those numbers in his head, generally... he owns his own business, after all. It took so much out of me to not move a face muscle.

Sounds like you haven't used it much. It starts small with you forgetting the arcane params to commonly used tools that you don't need to type anymore. Where it will stop nobody knows.

Well, I forget arcane params all the time before AIs too. I rely on terminal history search and google.

Once you write something and publish it, its just out there, it doesn't really get healthy or unhealthy. I do not think all writing is meant to be, or needs to be, the representation of someone's mind and its health. We write to have the opinion exist outside of ourselves. Why would we even read things if what we read didn't have strong beliefs or opinions? It sounds so boring!

Well I'm not saying that the blog writer shouldn't have written the article.

I've read the article and to me it reads like a very angry rant, which is why I commented with something akin to "bro calm down"

> You can still do creative thinking while using AI as a powerful tool at your disposal.

It remains the case that AI _erodes_ your ability to that.

So, eventually, after a few years, no, you can't.

Edit: meanwhile you're making yourself disposable. So, have fun with that.

Thanks for the warm wishes, stranger

I see no point in denying the technology, it's best to do what we humans do best: adapt with it.

Most people aren't anywhere close to Terence Tao on intelligence scale. Even most of HN commenters aren't that close to Terence Tao.

I don't think balancing AI use with creativity and thought is a matter of IQ. It comes down to how you use the tool.

In my practice, I found AI are more useful in adversarial mode ("criticize this concept, "find a possible bug in this code", "challenge me", "quiz me on the knowledge"), because the knowledge found adds up to your own skills.

100%. One of the things I use it for most is to steel-man an argument I hate or criticize a conviction I have.

You don't need super big brain IQ to be creative and expressive, all you need is simply a strong opinion on something, and you don't let AI (or other people) dictate otherwise.

Now the skill issue lies in whether your opinion is a good idea or not lol.

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