Thoughts on thinking

Completely agree.

From all of my observations, the impact of LLMs on human thought quality appears largely corrosive.

I’m very glad my kid’s school has hardcore banned them. In some class they only allow students to turn in work that was done in class, under the direct observation of the teacher. There has also been a significant increase in “on paper” work vs work done on computer.

Lest you wonder “what does this guy know anyways?”, I’ll share that I grew up in a household where both parents were professors of education.

Understanding the effectiveness of different methods of learning (my dad literally taught Science Methods) were a frequent topic. Active learning (creating things using what you’re learning about) is so much more effective than passive, reception oriented methods. I think LLMs largely are supporting the latter.

You can learn a lot from LLMs though, same with, say, Wikipedia. You need curiosity. You need the desire to learn. If you do not have it, then of course you will get nowhere, LLMs or no LLMs.

Never underestimate laziness, or willingness to take something 80% as good for 1% of the work.

So most are not curious. So what do you do for them?

You have to somehow figure out the root cause of the laziness, or if it really is laziness, and not something else, e.g. a mental health issue.

Plus, many kids fail school not because of laziness, but because of their toxic environment.

> if it really is laziness, and not something else, e.g. a mental health issue.

Kids optimize. When I was in high school I was fully capable of getting straight F's in a class I didn't care about and straight A's in a class I enjoyed.

Why bother learning chemistry when you could instead spend that time coding cool plugins and websites in PHP that thousands of internet strangers are using? I really did build one of the most popular phpBB plugins and knew I was gonna be a software engineer. Not that my chemistry professor cared about any of that or even understood what I'm talking about.

What you just described is irrelevant to what we are discussing.

As for what you said, yeah, I got 1s (Fs) because I was too busy coding and reading books on philosophy, as a 14 years old.

How is it irrelevant? Kids will always cheat their way through classes they feel are a distraction. Even the super smart Type A kids.

Hell, all humans do that. You use every resource available to get out of dealing with things that are not your priority. This means you will never be good at those things and that’s fine. You can’t be good at everything.