Comment by dcre
5 days ago
This is just not true. I have wasted many hours looking for answers to hard-to-phrase questions and learned very little from the process. If an LLM can get me the same result in 30 seconds, it's very hard for me to see that as a bad thing. It just means I can spend more time thinking about the thing I want to be thinking about. I think to some extent people are valorizing suffering itself.
Learning means friction, it's not going to happen any other way.
Some of it is friction, some of it is play. With AI you can get faster to the play part where you do learn a fair bit. But in a sense I agree that less is retained. I think that is not because of lack of friciton, instead is the fast pace of getting what you want now. You no longer need to make a conscious effort to remember any of it because it's effortless to get it again with AI if you ever need it. If that's what you mean by friction then I agree.
I agree! I just don’t think the friction has to come from tediously trawling through a bunch of web pages that don’t contain the answer to your question.
"What an LLM is to me is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equivalent of a e-bike for our minds"
Which is about as useful as a bike for our airplanes.