Comment by eszed
3 days ago
> in Wikipedia you can spend hours reading banal pop-slop content or instead spend that time reading amazing articles about history, literature, arts, and science.
I'm not saying you're personally doing anything wrong, but there's a parallel here, when smart and curious people read articles about history and literature and art and science, rather than engaging directly with the real thing.
Or then the next level down, where creating amazing work in all of those domains depends on enough "slack" in the system for people to pursue deep work that will not be immediately profitable.
Do you see where I'm going with that? We (and I'm very much including myself: here I am on HN, instead of reading something more substantial) skim the (Wikipedia) surface, instead of diving truly deep. AIs (right now) are the ultimate surface-skimmers, and our fascination with and growing reliance on them reflects something in our current surface-skimming cultural mindset.
I meant it as a simple to understand parallel. Absolutely deep reading and thought is much better than Wikipedia or an LLM chat.
I didn't think you thought otherwise, and apologize if I left that impression. As I said, I spend more time reading Wikipedia articles and watching YouTube videos than I do on any kind of "deep" study, and I think I am less well-equipped for that kind of work than I was twenty years ago. Some of that is life-circumstances - I have a kid, and a more-demanding (time-wise and cognitively) job than I did back then - but some of it is also the ease of access to the shallow stuff, and the instant gratification that it brings. That's cultural, and it's been created (along with, of course, many benefits) of our information revolution. I haven't been inside a library in years.