Comment by jacquesm

I think that's too easy an analogy, though.

Calculators are deterministically correct given the right input. It does not require expert judgement on whether an answer they gave is reasonable or not.

As someone who uses LLMs all day for coding, and who regularly bumps against the boundaries of what they're capable of, that's very much not the case. The only reason I can use them effectively is because I know what good software looks like and when to drop down to more explicit instructions.

If you hand a broken calculator to someone who knows how to do math, and they entered 123 + 765 which produced an answer of 6789; they should instantly know something is wrong. Hand that calculator to someone who never understood what the tool actually did but just accepted whatever answer appeared; and they would likely think the answer was totally reasonable.

Catching an LLM hallucinating often takes a basic understanding of what the answer should look like before asking the question.

The calculator analogy is wrong for the same reason. Knowing and internalizing arithmetic, algebra, and the shape of curves, etc. are mathematical rungs to get to higher mathematics and becoming a mathematician or physicist. You can't plug-and-chug your way there with a calculator and no understanding.

The people who make the calculator analogy are already victims of the missing rung problem and they aren't even able to comprehend what they're lacking. That's where the future of LLM overuse will take us.

> People would have said the same about graphing calculators or calculators before that.

As it happens, we generally don't let people use calculators while learning arithmetic. We make children spend years using pencil and paper to do what a calculator could in seconds.

> People would have said the same about graphing calculators or calculators before that. Socrates said the same thing about the written word.

Well, we still make people calculate manually for many years, and we still make people listen to lectures instead of just reading.

But will we still have people to go through years of manual coding? I guess in the future we will force them, at least if we want to keep people competent, just like the other things you mentioned. Currently you do that on the job, in the future people wont do that on the job so they will be expected to do it as a part of their education.

What do people mean exactly when they bring up “Socrates saying things about writing”? Phaedrus?

> “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; [275a] and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.

> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

Sounds to me like he was spot on.

> The determining factor is always "did I come up with this tool". Somehow, subsequent generations always manage to find their own competencies (which, to be fair, may be different).

In a sense, I think you are right. We are currently going through a period of transition that values some skills and devalues others. The people who see huge productivity gains because they don't have to do the meaningless grunt work are enthusiastic about that. The people who did not come up with the tool are quick to point out pitfalls.

The thing is, the naysayers aren't wrong since the path we choose to follow will determine the outcome of using the technology. Using it to sift through papers to figure out what is worth reading in depth is useful. Using it to help us understand difficult points in a paper is useful. On the other hand, using it as a replacement for reading the papers is counterproductive. It is replacing what the author said with what a machine "thinks" an author said. That may get rid of unnecessary verbosity, but it is almost certainly stripping away necessary details as well.

My university days were spent studying astrophysics. It was long ago, but the struggles with technology handling data were similar. There were debates between older faculty who were fine with computers, as long as researchers were there to supervise the analysis every step of the way, and new faculty, who needed computers to take raw data to reduced results without human intervention. The reason was, as always, productivity. People could not handle the massive amounts of data being generated by the new generation of sensors or systematic large scale surveys if they had to intervene any step of the way. At a basic level, you couldn't figure out whether it was a garbage-in, garbage-out type scenario because no one had the time to look at the inputs. (I mean no time in an absolute sense. There was too much data.) At a deeper level, you couldn't even tell if the data processing steps were valid unless there was something obviously wrong with the data. Sure, the code looked fine. If the code did what we expected of it, mathematically, it would be fine. But there were occasions where I had to point out that the computer isn't working how they thought it was.

It was a debate in which both sides were right. You couldn't make scientific progress at a useful pace without sticking computers in the middle and without computers taking over the grunt work. On the other hand, the machine cannot be used as a replacement for the grunt work of understanding, may that involves reading papers or analyzing the code from the perspective of a computer scientist (rather than a mathematician).

We notably teach people how to do arithmetics by hand before we hand them calculators.

We still expect high school students to learn to use graph paper before they use their TI-83, grade school students to do arithmetic by hand before using a calculator. This is essentially the post's point, that LLMs are a useful tool only after you have learned to do the work without them.

When doing college we can only start using those tools when we understand the principles behind them.

Socrates does not say this about the written word. Plato has Socrates say it about writing in the beginning sections of the Phaedrus, but it is not Socrates opinion nor the final conclusion he arrives at.

And yes yes you can pull up the quote or ask your AI, but they will be wrong. The quote is from Socrates reciting a "myth", as is pretty typical in a middle late dialogue like this.

But here, alas we can recognize the utter absurdity, that this just points out why writing can be bad, as Socrates does pose. Because you get guys 2000 years in future using you and misquoting you for their dumb cause! No more logos, only endless stochastic doxa. Truly a future of sophists!

Do they need to write maintainable code? I think probably not, it's the research and discovering the new method that is important.

They can’t write maintainable code because they don’t have real world experience of getting your hands dirty in a company. The only way to get startup experience is to build a startup or work for one