Comment by gretch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gretch | Hacker News Reader

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> Do we actually have any measurements of if AI helps you learn something better?

To me this is intuitively true based on anecdata. 2 examples

1) learning spanish - when I hear or read a phrase I don't know, I type it into the LLM and I learn a new word/phrase. Sure, I could have cracked open a spanish language dictionary, but tbh, I wasn't going to do that. Not to mention that dictionaries are translating word by word and not phrase by phrase.

2) growing vegetables in the garden. I literally watched YT tutorials and did what they did, and now I have vegetables that I didn't before. Yes, I could have probably could have gotten this from a botany book, but once again, I probably was not going to do this. I also was trouble shooting a lot in gemini

Here are the problems I traversed: - How much water should I give these per day? what's the watering schedule? - how much sun vs shade? - when do I move seedling to the ground outside? - Is trimming good? which parts and when do I trim? - [take a picture of weird growth] - Is this a disease on the plant? Or part of the plant naturally?

I also have one anecdote - I (think) I understood basics of quantum mechanics intuitively for the first time. Of course it's probably superficial and maybe not 100% correct, but it is better than every time I tried to understand it before.

It definitely wasn't a single prompt, but two hours of back and forth, with a lot of time spent thinking (me, not LLM) in between. There were multiple times where I misunderstood something, so if I just read a book I'd probably get stuck many times.

Do you retain that information? Or are you just constantly relying on having access to an llm to re-look things up. The amount of information I retain when using llms to learn is far less than other methods, not sure why, you'd think it would be just as effective as reading a book, but it's definitely not. Probably for the same reason that learning math and always using a calculator does not make you great at math.

I've wasted a ton of my life already trying to make llms work for learning over the last few years, I'm especially bitter about it. I think this technology is a scam made to make us reliant on a think-for-me machines.

I definitely retain it. In the case of the gardening - I pretty much immediately go outside and practice it.

In other words, how I get the info doesn’t matter (book, video, llm) because I’m locking in the skill by doing the thing in the garden.

And sometimes it is kinda wrong/suboptimal, but not more than e.g. asking a friend for gardening tips. Usually this is based on lack of context, like eg im growing cherry tomatoes and the AI assumed I had full size tomatoes

I dont think you are getting the topic - sure if knowledge gleamed from llms is immediately practiced repeatedly, it stays, why would anybody question that.

Now add 30 or 50 or 100 other topics you dip into on any given day. No way in hell you do same technique of repetition till you learn it. This is gist of problem to me. Most students these days fall into this category and the amount of time/energy to properly learn something has stayed the same or even increased (due to distractions and pushing through mental barrier of 'I know it well enough')

> Now add 30 or 50 or 100 other topics you dip into on any given day.

In a world without YouTube/LLMs, you weren't going to learn these things anyway. Today, you also don't learn them. So how can you argue that something is lost?

> the amount of time/energy to properly learn something has stayed the same or even increased

The whole point of my post is that LLMs, YouTube, and other internet resources which are easy to access have lowered activation energy to where learning something is at least possible.

I can tell you for sure I would never even try to learn a second language if I had to go to a class physically, or carry a book with me in my pocket to translate as I traverse the real world.

I think it depends on how much time you spend learning something and "engaging" with LLM.

I have many times asked it something I was slightly curious about, got the answer after the first or 2nd-3rd prompt, spent 3 minutes in total and forgot it after 15 minutes probably.

But a few times I've spent an hour or more on a topic, asking many questions, thinking between responses, and I actually learned something.

For me it depends, if I simply take the answer from the LLM it goes straight into the shortest memory neurons my brain has.

Now, if I go back and forth with the LLM to say, taking the language learning example, to explore the etymology of the word (which for me is far more interesting than the translation itself), then I learn a ton more.

I'd add that this is also how it used to work with Google search too: there's been facts that would show up as the first result, then you'd just forget it 10 minutes later and have to re-google it. I know this happened to me many times.

For better or worse, there's less friction now for seeing an answer to a question you have. You can ask in more arbitrary ways than Google required, and something will still come up. For looking up factoids, it's much faster. For picking up more complex topics, I'd say it's more or less the same, because you still have to spend time ruminating on the topic.

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