Druids used to decry that literacy caused people to lose their ability to memorize sacred teachings. And they’re right! But literacy still happened and we’re all either dumber or smarter for it.
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It's more complex than that. The three pillars of learning are theory (finding out about the thing), practice (doing the thing) and metacognition (being right, or more importantly, wrong. And correcting yourself.). Each of those steps reinforce neural pathways. They're all essential in some form or another.
Literacy, books, saving your knowledge somewhere else removes the burden of remembering everything in your head. But they don't come into effect into any of those processes. So it's an immensely bad metaphor. A more apt one is the GPS, that only leaves you with practice.
That's where LLMs come in, and obliterate every single one of those pillars on any mental skill. You never have to learn a thing deeply, because it's doing the knowing for you. You never have to practice, because the LLM does all the writing for you. And of course, when it's wrong, you're not wrong. So nothing you learn.
There are ways to exploit LLMs to make your brain grow, instead of shrink. You could make them into personalized teachers, catering to each student at their own rhythm. Make them give you problems, instead of ready-made solutions. Only employ them for tasks you already know how to make perfectly. Don't depend on them.
But this isn't the future OpenAI or Anthropic are gonna gift us. Not today, and not in a hundred years, because it's always gonna be more profitable to run a sycophant.
If we want LLMs to be the "better" instead of the "worse", we'll have to fight for it.
> Make them give you problems, instead of ready-made solutions
Yes, this is one of my favorite prompting styles.
If you're stuck on a problem, don't ask for a solution, ask for a framework for addressing problems of that type, and then work through it yourself.
Can help a lot with coming unstuck, and the thoughts are still your own. Oftentimes you end up not actually following the framework in the end, but it helps get the ball rolling.
I feel as though this analysis only makes sense in hindsight; in the past, when people used to say using books as a way to store knowledge outside your brain would make a similar argument, but would add a fourth pillar of memorization. Even now, a lot of people in different professions (such as law, and medicine) still absolutely drill memorization as the first step in building a strong knowledge base before getting into more practical, day-to-day used information. When people are forced to memorize a large amount of things in a cohesive subject, it forces your brain to make connections between ideas out of necessity to keep the information in your head. This definitely has an effect on metacognition and practice. So I wouldn't argree with you that the analogy with books=brain rot isn't valid.
I don't buy your "theory" at all. Learning requires curiosity. If you want to know how something works you will do all those things irregardless if you saw it in a book or an AI spat it out. If you don't you won't.
There is no free lunch, if you use writing to "scaffold" your learning, you trade learning speed for a limited "neural pathways" budget that could connect two useful topics. And when you stop practicing your writing (or coding, as reported by some people who stopped coding due to AI) you feel that you are getting dumber. Since you scaffolded your knowledge of a topic with writing or coding, rather than doing the difficult work of learning it from more pervasive conceptions.
The best thing AI taught us is to not tie your knowledge to some specific task. It's overly reactionary to recommended task/action based education (even from an AI) in response to AI.
If you don't buy into the acquired, existing knowledge of neuroscience and the role of lymph nodes in learning, you can do whatever you want in your free time, but don't call it my theory, because it's neither mine nor a theory.
For the rest, maybe you're the chosen one, who doesn't need to expend any cognitive load to learn a subject, and just glide on your curiosity. Good for you. There are, to a degree of approximation, zero other people who work this way.
Right, nobody gains much of anything by memorizing logarithm tables. But letting the machine tell you what even you can do with a logarithm takes away from your set of abilities, without other learning to make up for it.
Smartphones I think did the most damage. Used to be you had to memorize people's phone numbers. I'm sure other things like memorizing how to get from your house to someone else is also less cognitive when the GPS just tells you every time, instead of you busting out a map, and thinking about your route. I've often found that if I preview a route I'm supposed to take, and use Google Street Maps to physically view key / unfamiliar parts of my route, I am drastically less likely to get lost, because "oh this looks familiar! I turn right here!"
My wife had a similar experience, she had some college project where they had to drive up and down some roads and write about it, it was a group project, and she bought a map, and noticed that after reading the map she was more knowledgeable about the area than her sister who also grew up in the same area.
I think AI is a great opportunity for learning more about your subjects in question from books, and maybe even the AI themselves by asking for sources, always validate your intel from more authoritative sources. The AI just saved you 10 minutes? You can spend those 10 minutes reading the source material.
About the phone numbers thing: I am now 35yo. Do I still remember the phone number of one of my best friends from primary school back then? Hell yeah, I do! These days though, I am struggling a bit with phone numbers, mostly because I don't even try. If the number is important, I will save it somewhere. Memorizing it? Nahhh... But sometimes my number brain still does that and it seems some weird pattern in the number. Stuff like
"+4 and then -2 and then +6 and then -3. Aha! All makes sense! Cannot repeat the digit differences, and need to be whole numbers, so going to the next higher even number, which is 6, which is 3 when halved!"
And then I am kinda proud my brain still works, even if the found "pattern" is hilariously arbitrary.
Same. Somehow there tends to be some "pattern" that stands out, but I guess it's just a mix of the likelihood of "something interesting" and our minds being tuned to pick out "anything interesting". I've memorized a few SSNs and license plate numbers this way, and some digits of pi. I like it; it feels like normal memorization with a twist, without having to resort to "hardcore" techniques.
I finally learned my wife's number last year because I got tired of being asked what her number is when picking things up for her and what not and not actually knowing it, and I've been texting her since 2007. When I learned I could just save phone numbers on my cell phone, I didn't make it a point to ever remember a phone number outside of my own number.
The worst part about smart phones is their browser/social media. Technically, even dumb phones like the nokia 3310 had contact lists so you didn't have to memorize phone numbers. And land lines had speed dial. And my family used a phonebook with a rotary dial telephone. It's not like people had memorized as many numbers as they now have stored in their telephones.
The ability is still there. My son dutifully memorizes all the lyrics of his favorite band’s songs.
What the druids/piests were really decrying was that people spent less time and attention on them. Religion was the first attention economy.
This comment sounds like distraction from the topic. Analogy is plausible but is not the real thing.
Druids? Socrates was famously against books far earlier.
Funny enough, the reason he gave against books has now finally been addressed by LLMs.
Or, irony was being employed and Socrates wasn’t against books, but was instead noting it’s the powerful who are against them for their facilitating the sharing of ideas across time and space more powerfully than the spoken word ever could. The books are why we even know his name, let alone the things said.