I'd love to see an empirical study that actually dives into this and attempts to show one way or another how true it is. Otherwise it's just all anecdotes.
Like kids who are never taught to do things for themselves.
People have worried with every single new technology that it will enfeeble the masses, rather than empower them, and yet in the end, we usually find ourselves better off.
Yeah when I was learning in school we weren't allowed electronics for division, and I think I absolutely would be dumber if I had never done that
> People have worried with every single new technology that it will enfeeble the masses, rather than empower them, and yet in the end, we usually find ourselves better off.
If you're posting this from America, you're living in a society that is fatter than ever thanks to cars. So there's surely some nuance here, not every technology upgrade is strictly better with no downsides
Cars are an essential part of modern life, but the sweetspot for car adoption isn't on either of the extremes
So the smart get smarter and the dumb get dumber?
Well, not exactly, but at least for now with AI "highly jagged", and unreliable, it pays to know enough to NOT trust it, and indeed be mentally capable enough that you don't need to surrender to it, and can spot the failures.
I think the potential problems come later, when AI is more capable/reliable, and even the intelligentsia perhaps stop questioning it's output, and stop exercising/developing their own reasoning skills. Maybe AI accelerates us towards some version of "Idiocracy" where human intelligence is even less relevant to evolutionary success (i.e. having/supporting lots of kids) than it is today, and gets bred out of the human species? Maybe this is the inevitable trajectory: species gets smarter when they develop language and tool creation, then peak, and get dumber after having created tools that do the thinking for them?
Pre-AI, a long time ago, I used to think/joke we might go in the other direction - evolve into a pulsating brain, eyes, genitalia and vestigial limbs, as mental works took over from physical, but maybe I got that reversed!
Current status: partially solved.
Problem: System 2 is supposed to be rational, but I found this to be far from the case. Massive unnecessary suffering.
Solution (WIP): Ask: What is the goal? What are my assumptions? Is there anything I am missing?
--
So, I repeatedly found myself getting into lots of trouble due to unquestioned assumptions. System 2 is supposed to be rational, but I found this to be far from the case.
So I tried inventing an "actually rational system" that I could "operate manually", or with a little help. I called it System 3, a system where you use a Thinking Tool to help you think more effectively.
Initial attempt was a "rational LLM prompt", but these mostly devolve into unhelpful nitpicking. (Maybe it's solvable, but I didn't get very far.)
Then I realized, wouldn't you get better results with a bunch of questions on pen and paper? Guided writing exercises?
So here are my attempts so far:
reflect.py - https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/d54bc03b0ceeb06b4cd61ed173...
unstuck.py - https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/d54bc03b0ceeb06b4cd61ed173...
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I'm not sure what's a good way to get yourself "out of a rut" in terms of thinking about a problem. It seems like the longer you've thought about it, the less likely you are to explore beyond the confines of the "known" (i.e. your probably dodgy/incomplete assumptions).
I haven't solved System 3 yet, but a few months later found myself in an even more harrowing situation which could have been avoided if I had a System 3.
The solution turned out to be trivial, but I missed it for weeks... In this case, I had incorrectly named the project, and thus doomed it to limbo. Turns out naming things is just as important in real life as it is in programming!
So I joked "if being pedantic didn't solve the problem, you weren't being pedantic enough." But it's not a joke! It's about clear thinking. (The negative aspect of pedantry is inappropriate communication. But the positive aspect is "seeing the situation clearly", which is obviously the part you want to keep!)
gmuslera•1h ago
But, we still have the System 1, and survived and reached this stage because of it, because even a bad guess is better than the slowness of doing things right. It have its problems, but sometimes you must reach a compromise.
HPsquared•1h ago