Comment by moffkalast
18 hours ago
> "it's difficult to research something if you don't know the name of it"
> - Tom Scott, 8 years ago
Ah, research in the pre-LLM era was quite different. You actually had to know which questions to ask.
Going one level down further, it's really hard to imagine what it was like doing research into something you have zero clue about in the pre-Google era. I guess you just asked a librarian and hoped they'd point you roughly towards the right section and then just started to read random books?
When I first joined the university I went to a guided tour of the library. The librarian said that this was the most important tour of my entire stay. She said that the key for finding knowledge was not about the answers but the questions.
It's about finding the questions to ask. About learning to learn. The tour guided us through actually using the library and how to learn the library which is a way to find the questions first and then find the answers afterwards. The librarian then outlined their role in helping the student in how to learn, and how to use the various facilities too.
Learning the question is something that is most fundamental to learning but is kind of overlooked.
A good knowledge system should probe initial enquiries to identify what the users actual desires, gaps and questions are. No one wants a sycophantic doctor, they want one that can ask probing detailed questions to learn whats really going on.
Ah, research in the pre-LLM era was quite different. You actually had to know which questions to ask.
You get a much better response if you ask the right questions in the right language though. Expertise still has value.
I guess you just asked a librarian and hoped they'd point you roughly towards the right section and then just started to read random books?
You looked it up in an encyclopedia first, which gave you the basics. That gave you enough to find it in a library using the Dewey Decimal code. From there you could generally trust the book because they tended to be trusted if they were in a library. For newer topics you swapped books for journals.
Researching a niche topic as someone outside of the academic community with no journal access was basically impossible.
Encyclopaedias, damn I've forgotten that used to be a thing. I think I still have a few somewhere that were used maybe once or twice. Now that was something internet search engines really made obsolete almost overnight.
Come to think of it though, as long as civilization has existed, libraries have been a thing. Or well, monasteries or some kind of place that kept records and copied books. And before that you just asked the oldest person in your village/tribe and hoped they knew I guess. It's weird that access to knowledge has basically been unchanged for the past ~10k or so years until now.
Search engines didn’t themselves make encyclopedias obsolete, a certain free online encyclopedia made paper (and CD-ROM) encyclopedias obsolete.
With Tom Scott in particular, there’s a number of his videos that are kinda eerie to watch now with today’s LLM context
eg. https://youtu.be/CcZdwX4noCE
Tom describes an LLM word for word 4 years before GPT3
"I think it's a long way off"
Welp, I hope this one doesn't age similarly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
In general, yes, you'd probably start at a library's reference desk. (which are still a thing!) Some serial publications have indices where you can find key words (and there are also similar indices published by subject area). If you're looking at academic works, most of them will have a bibliography for you to look through, and those works can have their own bibliographies. This includes subject specific encyclopaedias etc which are usually a good place to start.