The slow collapse of critical thinking in OSINT due to AI

The other thing is that the second anyone even perceives an opinion to be "anti-AI" they bombard you with "people thought the printing press lowered intellect too!" Or radio or TV or video games, etc.

No one ever considers that maybe they all did lower our attention spans, prevent us from learning as well as we used to, etc. and now we are at a point we can't afford to keep losing intelligence and attention span

That’s a much harder claim to prove. The value of an attention span is non zero, but if the speed of access to information is close to zero, how do these relate?

If I can solve two problems in a near constant time that is a few hours, what is the value of solving the problem which takes days to reason through?

I suspect that as the problem spaces diverge enough you’ll have two skill sets. Who can solve n problems the fastest and who can determine which k problems require deep thought and narrow direction. Right now we have the same group of people solving both.

I think people don't consider that because the usual criticism of television and video games is that people spend too long paying attention to them.

One of the famous Greek philosophers complained that books were hurting people's minds because they no longer memorized information, so this kind of complaint is as old as civilization itself. There is no evidence that we would be on Mars by now already if we had never invented books or television.

Pluto? Plotto? Platti?

Seriously though, that's a horrible bowdlerization of the argument in the Phaedrus. It's actually very subtle and interesting, not just reactionary griping.

> The value of an attention span is non zero, but if the speed of access to information is close to zero, how do these relate?

Gell-Mann Amnesia. Attention span limits the amount information of information we can process and with attention spans decreasing, increases to information flow stop having a positive effect. People simply forget what they started with even if that contradicts previous information.

> If I can solve two problems in a near constant time that is a few hours, what is the value of solving the problem which takes days to reason through?

You don't end up solving the problem in near constant time, you end up applying the last suggested solution. There's a difference.

I'd be interested in your analysis of it!

But it possibly did lower our ability to memorize? We may be didn't need that ability to be so high to go to Mars or whatever.

I'm just saying, it's possible that reliving our minds of various tasks worked incrementally each time until a point it didn't anymore. Same way our liberal and egalitarian progress as a society worked great until all our countries started having birth rate problems? I mean, not trying to start another argument. The point is. Something (technological progress, social progress, even financial progress) can be great until we hit a point of no return where things collapse.

I'm not sure I can do it justice in an adhoc way, but it's important to keep in mind there are a few layers of irony that the piece is working on. First, Socrates, who does not write, is being presented as a character, in written form, by his disciple. So obviously Plato does not share Socrates' views on writing, even if he finds them interesting and valuable.

Second, in the dialogue, there are a bunch of examples of texts that are presented by the characters: the speech from Lysias, which Phaedrus has hidden in his cloak, then the speech from Socrates, that he disavows, then another speech, taking the opposite position. There's also the (fascinating) recounting of a legend about Thoth, and the invention of writing, which plays on the fact that the greek word for 'medicine' is the same as that for 'poison'.

It's a really rich text - as, I guess, you might expect from a really brilliant writer who was also a disciple of a philosopher who never wrote a word. I tend to think of it as a serious attempt to describe the conceptual differences between speech and writing - something people tend to collapse ('writing is recorded speech', etc).