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Comment by godelski

10 hours ago

What concerns me is that learning depth is more discouraged than ever. For a long time it's been discouraged, which is natural as we have a preference for simple things rather than difficult/complex things. But we're pushing much harder than ever before. From the way we have influencer education videos to the way people push LLMs ("you can just vibe code, no thinking required"). We've advanced enough that it's easy to make things look good enough but looks can be deceiving. It's impossible to know what's good enough without depth of knowledge, without mastery.

No machine will ever be sufficient to overcome the fundamental problem: a novice is incapable of properly evaluating a system. No human is capable of doing this either, nor can they (despite many believing they can). It's a fundamental information problem. The best we can do is match our human system, where we trust the experts, who have depth. But we even see the limits of that and how frequently they get ignored by those woefully unqualified to evaluate. Maybe it'll be better as people tend to trust machines more. But for the same reason it could be significantly worse. It's near impossible to fix a problem you can't identify.

Ironically, when machine learning is getting “deeper & deeper”, human learning is getting more and more impatient and shallow.

I have been searching “Vibe coding” videos on YouTube that are not promoting something. And I found this one and sat down and watched the whole three hours. It does take a lot of real effort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL7Au1tzNxE

  • I'm a machine learning researcher myself and one of the things that frustrates me is that many of my peers really embrace the "black box" notion of ML models. There are plenty of deep thinkers too, but like with any topic the masters are a much smaller proportion. Just a bit of a shame given that I'm talking about a bunch of people with PhDs...

    As for my experience vibe coding is that it is not so much vibing but needing to do a lot of actual work too. I haven't watched that video you linked but that sounds to reflect my actual experience and that of people I know offline.