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Comment by gspr | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely not unthinkable! We're paid for exactly that in research, for example.

It's terrifying to hear that 5 hours of focused thinking is considered crazy. I can understand a budget battle if it's 5 months, but 5 hours?! Everyone, in every profession (or none), would be better off mentally if they "wasted" 5 hours thinking about something every now and then!

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If 5 hours of thinking time to solve a problem is unthinkable to some people does that mean they have some form of Attention Deficit Disorder, be it a natural thing or introduced by an over-dependence on LLMs? Like stopping for an hour to think through a problem is unfathomable and instead they would rather hit small dopamine spikes every few minutes from talking to a chatbot?

I think you're onto something. And we're on a fast path to normalizing, even encouraging, this kind of behavior, so I'm very worried.

I completely agree with you, but being "better off mentally" is really not valued very highly today.

Fast, visible progress and delivery is the melody.

If you were in need of legal services in a high-stakes case, or if you needed brain surgery, would you want "fast visible progress" or "I need to think this through"?

I'd say both relevant professions are highly regarded.

Why do you think that brain surgeons "think this through"? They just get on with the job, one brain after another. Same with legal services.

And "getting on with the job" in those professions involves stopping and thinking.

Just like my AI. They also think before and during a code refactoring. There is a gap between my prompt and them taking actions, you could call that "stopping and thinking".

A very good friend, who is not a brain surgeon, but designs and plans brain surgeries for clinical trials with the very brain surgeons doing the surgeries. So yes they do think it through and even do entire dry runs through every step.

But they just apply well-known methods. This type of thinking an AI can do, too.

Sometimes you gotta do things that others don’t value highly. A long career needs you to act with good judgment. Even - sometimes - when the optics are bad.

5 hours of focused thinking is crazy if your coworker can do it in 30 minutes.

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