Y’all can throw pithy sayings at each other all you like but memory is not the same as understanding, and AI does offer plenty of opportunity for humans to cognitively disengage. Doesn’t necessarily mean most people will, but it’s very likely that most people will.
Especially if we're more concrete: If your job is, say, in administration and what the machine answers is correct enough that in in 8 out of 10 cases you can basically copy-paste it, I'd say it's extremely likely that it's going to increase the amount of errors made.
No, since the setting is not specifying the initial rate, it might as well increase or staying stable at 20%.
But there are other factors, like, is the amount of outcomes done also changing, thus affecting the absolute number of errors?
Also, does the side effect of disengage the person in most cases means it has side effects like not paying the same attention to what would stand out as a big issue that needs more attention and consideration than business as usual?
It's an interesting thing to think about. From the way it's talked about, I would predict that AI will enable people who are more cognitively inclined to think in more complex and refined ways; while other people that over-rely on the results would be the ones that decline.
However, research[1] suggests that relying on AI tools degrades reasoning and cognitive ability regardless of your cognitive ability, and may even cause users to stop making their own choices[2].
Shortening your period of observation so that the effects have not occurred yet does not mean it’s “mitigated”.
And your philosophy of your own mortality is just as reductive, because humans have been trying to survive since time immemorial and do not actively work on their deaths unless in an unhealthy mental state.
I mean, what are we really going to do about it? So much chaos in the world, I don't think many are focusing on keeping plastics out of our body. No one's championing it.
Epidemiology and politics do involve systems, I’m afraid. We can call it “practical” or “human” or “subjective” all we like, but human behaviors exhibit the same patterns when understood from a statistical instead of an individual standpoint.
Unless they are forced to learn things that are uninteresting to them.
I almost failed the high school entry exams because I dedicated more time to soldering electronic devices and programming computers rather than writing essays about Polish literature or memorizing dates of historical battles. Same thing with the final high school exams - it was a really close call. I felt like they gave me good scores on non-STEM subjects just because I already won some prizes in electronics / physics olympiads and brought some fame to the school, so kida got away with that but... it was stressful anyways.
Man, you just triggered me. This was also me in school.
I even have a huge interest in history, but I remember my first history exam on World War 1. I was ready to answer questions on its causes, the people, how industrial war changed the nature of fighting, the new countries that formed after the war... First Question: What was the date the Serbian nationalist Gavrillo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Second Question: What was the dates each country declared war...
It also took me years to actually sit down and read JRR Tolkien as we read the Hobbit as a class book in grade 8. First question for the test: List the names of the 13 dwarves that attended the party at Bilbo's house (1 point each for a test out of 30 IIRC).
Holy crap - I have read the Hobbit many times (and LoTR a few less) and I would never have taken the time to commit 13-character names to memory - most of them simply were not that memorable.
The rhyming sets are a bit of a crutch, at least (Fili + Kili, Óin + Glóin, Bifur + Bofur + Bombur, etc). But you're right - most of the dwarves are individually forgettable. Only two are substantially characterized - Thorin the leader, and Bombur the comically fat.
Heh - exactly - the only truly easy character name that has always stuck in my mind was from "Snow Crash", I mean - who can forget "Hiro Protagonist"...?
But doesn't your global liberal democratic society want you to be trained and proficient in productive tasks which might only appear boring through a superficial lens or perspective? Or is this world's education entirely motivated by the selfish desire for pleasure and leisure? Rather than being founded to serve hard work ethic principles and effective programs that maybe can help build decent societies?
It's true, and okay, that the academia grind is only for a subset of us. It is not the only meaningful path! I went on to gradschool by rote, and I do not push it on my high-school students or anyone else. It took me about 40 years to find a sense of purpose (having a child was the catalyst).
Sadly, the push for STEM seems motivated by capitalists wanting further control of valuable labor, so I'm really chuffed by Bryan's Show HN post- even though open-source can be leveraged by capital, it doesn't have to be. It is a non-walled-garden model, and an example of what we can do collectively. Even if the Linux kernel is largely funded by corporations, it doesn't have to be.
A concern is that a laptop is still not something my community can make with the local resources, and thus the exploitation of land, labor, and money continues.
> Unless they are forced to learn things that are uninteresting to them.
This really resonates with me. I love math now, but absolutely loathed it in high school. The curriculum lacked any sort of way to apply math to real problems. I simply cannot learn things in the abstract like that. It's like learning a programming language without ever building a program.
Same. I stopped "caring" about math when we started to learn polynomials. Binomials..ok. Trinomials...ok. But then it just became repetitive when the class was just adding more terms to the functions that over the semester I ended up spending most of the class daydreaming.
I disagree; I did similar projects like this in high school (not exactly like this; his is a true achievement). I did very well grade-wise and had a high GPA but I bombed the SAT because I didn’t understand that you didn’t lose the same number of points for questions you skipped. So the ones I didn’t have time to answer I just randomly selected, which resulted in a poor score.
I found out later:
1. How SAT scoring works
2. That you shouldn’t take the last SAT of the year since then you cannot retake it
3. I probably should’ve taken the ACT instead
I wish they’d prepared us in school for this, but they were too busy training us for standardized state testing since that determined their own budget.
Could I have gotten into MIT? Unsure; back at 18 I didn’t know MIT existed and this was early Internet times. It would have been nice if my high school mentioned it as an option.
In my case at least, doing projects like this and getting good grades didn’t automatically turn into attending any college I wanted. Either way, I ended up with a great career.
Anyways, kudos to the person who made this project!
Thankfully, the SAT no longer deducts points for wrong answers. But I agree, there's a big difference between testing and doing really great work.
I'm somewhat on the other end of this, where I excelled in school, graduated valedictorian, but didn't gain any meaningful experience with projects and such and had poor leadership skills all around.
I’ve known few exemplars like this one. But at least 2. One made a flight simulator for 737 in the backyard that was used regularly by airline pilots to train. The other made a complete discrete FM stereo transmitter, mounted his own radio later. He was 16, and it was the early 90. So all from books.
Both guys brutally failed in the first year in the University. They dis not like theory, they wanted to make.
Unless you aren't fit for traditional academic learning models.
I spent most of my young adulthood working on projects (not nearly as insanely technical as this! but) similar to this. But I dropped out of high school, didn't go to college, because none of them would teach me in a way, or a pace, that fit my learning disability or mental models. Luckily I had the drive to teach myself, and built a successful two-decade career, despite my parents and teachers telling me I'd fail and become homeless.
High school kids have insane potential, and can achieve truly amazing things. But often people disregard them and don't set them up for success. So many companies could hire really great engineers, even from high school, if they could just find the motivated ones and put them in a mentorship/apprenticeship program that aligned with their interests and ways of learning.
You really don’t want to see my pre-university grades.
I was on a mission, and I can’t do two things at once. So school was about efficiency. I got great grades wherever that took low effort. That only went so far.
After graduation, nowhere I wanted to be would have looked at me.
It took me a couple years after high school to find the right university, but my personal projects paid off.
Looking back, it was a gamble. But you don’t really choose those kinds of paths.
I dunno. I only succeeded as a kid academically because of literally my IQ not because I had grit learnt from my projects. I pathologically hated being told what to do so the determination to do my own projects did not translate into anything assigned to me.
Going from how many gifted children end up underperforming because they are made to do stupid things & then getting labeled as difficult or slow: a lot more then you'd think.
Being talented and gifted is generally not appreciated, not even in academia. Many of the most talented people never finish their education because academia is more about playing the game & having the grit (or lack of backbone?) to deal with the bullshit and do what you are told.
And tbf, the best engineers I know are not necessarily the most talented ones, but those that developed the grit to push through the bs.
There’s no use in talking about the origins of something by basing it purely on subjective experience. This comment section is bigger than it needs to be and too many are taking the author’s version of history at face value.
Which is why engineers who intend to use the term in their discussions shouldn’t dumb it down or loosely define it in their own words, and cite the definition from authoritative sources, say reference texts.
And whenever it is being used as an argument to reject or approve code, just saying “because cognitive load” should not be accepted as enough. Instead, there should be an accompanying explanation for what exactly in the code raises the cognitive load and what mechanisms come into play that creates the cognitive load according to cognitive science. (Note: I’m using “science” here as opposed to just “psychology”, because the ana/physio of human memory is not exclusive to the domain of psychology.)
I’ve been interested in the same topic for a while now and the most difficult part, when explaining the concept to other programmers and defending against it in coding standards/reviews, is how to prove that cognitive load exists.
Cyclomatic complexity seems one indicator, but architectural complexity needs to be clarified. I agree that how much modules expose to each other is one trait, but again, needs clarification. How do you intend to go about this?
Been thinking about custom abstractions (ie those that you build yourself and which do not come from the standard libraries/frameworks) needed to understand code and simply counting them; the higher the number, the worse. But it seems that one needs to find something in cognitive psychology to back up the claim.
> Cyclomatic complexity seems one indicator, but architectural complexity needs to be clarified. I agree that how much modules expose to each other is one trait, but again, needs clarification. How do you intend to go about this?
Too much to summarize in a comment, I recommend reading the 3-blog series linked above. Architectural complexity is pretty well defined and we have an exact way to measure it.
Unfortunately there’s little industry tooling I’ve found to expose this number on the day-to-day. There’s 1 unpopular paid app with an awful business model – I couldn’t even figure out how to try it because they want you to talk to sales first /eyeroll.
I have some prototype ideas rolling around my brain but been focusing on writing the book first. Early experiments look promising.
There IS backing from cognitive research too – working memory. We struggle to keep track of more than ~7 independent items when working. The goal of abstraction (and this essay’s cognitive load idea) is to keep the number of independently moving or impacted pieces under 7 while working. As soon as your changes could touch more stuff than fits in your brain, it becomes extremely challenging to work with and you get those whack-a-mole situations where every bug you fix causes 2 new bugs.
OK, but anyone who makes this argument should at least put some effort into thinking about how to define what is a social network, and what is an addictive game. It’s not that you’re wrong, but you need to think about the execution and making sure that the criteria has a strong basis in principle that can be used to justify the decisions on what to ban. Otherwise you’re just suggesting the impossible
You're right. Defining the criteria for marking an app as harmful might not be straightforward or easy. But we're talking about the education and life of the children. These difficulties shouldn't a preventing factor. Maybe it's easier to allow services and apps one by one when there is a need only. Whatever that's not, let kids have a phone with internet and everything that comes along.
There were plenty of games around when I was a kid, and I’m not convinced they were materially less addictive. But none of them could fit in my pocket or could send me notifications.
Of course it is. Knowing the events shaping your world have repercussions on your personal decisions. What should I eat? What should I learn? What career should I embark upon? What should I invest in?
To think that you can shield yourself from the world is one of the biggest yet most foolish ideas of individualistic cultures
I mostly agreed with your first paragraph, but then the examples killed it for me.
Especially the second one: what a profoundly sad existence that someone would define their learning interests by what their boss recommends, with the sole goal of advancing one’s career. It isn’t even guaranteed the advice would be useful—bosses can be incompetent and petty too. And pray tell, if your boss follows that same advice, where does it stop? When does anyone have one original thought to pursue?
Food in the grocery store is stocked by corporations who have no concern for your health and want to fill you up with addictive fat and sugar. Eat instead natural ingredients, preferably from local growers or a farmer’s market.
Don’t limit yourself to local careers if nothing calls to you. Dare to dream even just a big bigger.
401k is a US concept. Most of the planet doesn’t live there.
Most people don’t consult their family doctors when food isn’t available or when they are confronted with a variation in recipe. It isn’t the case that most people blindly follow their boss’ advice. Most people don’t decide their careers based on short-term local availability. And almost no investor who’s financially literate enough to consider an index fund would consider volatility as a metric of attractiveness of the fund.
I was going to say that your arguments only hold so long as you oversimplify what are inherently complex decisions that require multiple and current information sources, but the very foundation of your line of questioning is just plain wrong.
I'm going to disagee with you there. You are seeing the world through a different lens driven by constant churn in the tech industry.
In many industries if you are just a drone that does their job reasonably well, will work overtime every now and then when it's available and have shown willingness and ability to improve, management will make sure you stay at that company. Your only actual fear would be that the company fails but then very likely you are on the shortlist for that same management at their new company.
Assume incompetence not malice, people aren't out to get you and trying to get the worst for you, they want to best for themselves and if you make it so that making you comfortable also makes them comfortable then you aren't at risk.
Regarding food... Buy what's on the shelf, nobody needs their special kale only diet or whatever is the trend. What the parent was saying is follow general food guidelines, avoid excessive meat, keep portion sizes reasonable, half you plate should be vegetables etc...
Same with the index fund thing, if you start investing with a reputable investor when your are in your 20s even if it doesn't beat the market you will retire comfortably.
You don't need to minmax life. You can hit autopilot and just go where life takes you while just make small course corrections every now and then and you will be fine. You wont have a great life or a bad one. You will fall close to the middle of the bell curve and that's actually good enough.
Focus on the things that are important, spend time with your loved ones etc.
Trust me I understand your point of view as well, that's me I can't be vanilla with these things, my mental health doesn't allow it. I need to shoot for the moon and do it as efficiently as possible. I just know that's not necessary.
You nailed my intent here, although I wasn't really advocating for it either. More just reminding HN readers that we aren't representative, and that (as the replies here confirm) we seem to forget that.
The world is filled mostly with people who read below the 6th grade level. Those people have average life expectancies, average local jobs, and will retire with average savings if they retire at all.
I'm not judging those average lives, just trying to encourage the high achievers here to consider the way the 24 hour news cycle impacts the average, barely literate, person who just wants to survive their day without falling down either slope of the bell curve.
> Whichever index fund option in your 401k is least volatile.
That would be a govt bond fund or, worse, a money market fund. That is no different than telling retail investors to avoid equities, and only buy bonds. That is a terrible investment strategy. Literally: I have never seen an investment professional recommend such a portfolio for any one of working age.
Better advice would a broad based US/Europe equity index, e.g., S&P 500 or FTSE 100 or EuroSTOXX 600.
Given how terrible that advice is, it makes you reconsider the other items. The whole post might be clever satire: "Don't just do what you're told. Don't just eat the crap pushed by Big Ag. Do think."
That seems unwise. The comparison point for me would be 1920s Europe - in hindsight it seems likely they'd have had a lot of telegraphing in advance that things were about to go really badly wrong - disasters of the magnitude that engulfed them aren't easily missed. The average person wouldn't have been aware of it because the lack of an internet would have resulted in an insanely biased view of the data being presented that probably obscured just how bad things were getting. Today we have a much better level of information access available.
The answer in the 1920s if you can see the 1930s and 1940s coming wasn't go local, it was some combination of fortify, fearmonger and/or flee. People needed to be alerted that the situation was really bad and immediate action was required at all levels to avert disaster - but action wasn't taken and we saw an economic crisis unfold, followed by a military one.
The point appears to be that even if most people in 1920's Europe could have seen all the telegraphing, how many of them could have done anything to make a difference for their given situation? How many people do we think were realistically in a position to make a change to the economic conditions and still uninformed? How many were in a place to make a change to the military conditions and similarly uninformed?
Hind sight is 20/20, and its easy knowing a massive war was coming to say people should have been getting the hell out of Dodge. But moving your entire family to a new country let alone a new continent is a massive undertaking. How many people even if they had the warnings would have pulled the trigger on that move rather than wait and see? What sort of huge, global war scale negative things are being telegraphed today and what major life altering decisions on the magnitude of leaving your entire community and extended family behind and seeking asylum in a foreign country do you foresee yourself undertaking to address them in response to your unprecedented levels of modern awareness?
Or does your unprecedented access to that information simply make you feel helpless and hopeless? Are you actually better equipped to attend to the impending doom or do you just know that it's there. One wonders if we had the ability to know the exact month and year we were going to die, would we think our lives were made better by knowing that, or would we find that having that knowledge does little to change the quality of the life we live in any positive way, and largely adds stress or other negative experiences. There's a balance to be struck with any amount of being informed, but like everything else in life, I suspect moderation is the key.
> how many of them could have done anything to make a difference for their given situation?
Lots of them. Pretty much all the major players were democracies and it isn't that unreasonable to think that democracies can be persuaded to do sensible things. It is hard to evaluate counterfactuals but it is certainly plausible that if they'd actually understood how dire the situation was from better information the course of events was changeable. There are a lot of 1/10,000 people out there. It really is just a game of convincing a few of them to behave sensibly and they move mountains politically.
I'd suggest that from your perspective it isn't the information making you feel hopeless, your starting point is that of helplessness and hopelessness and the information is just making that more apparent. The world is hardly hopeless and the people in it are not helpless. Just ineffective on average and very poorly informed - problems that can be minimised by lots of information.
> Pretty much all the major players were democracies and it isn't that unreasonable to think that democracies can be persuaded to do sensible things.
Again though, how many people were actually in a position to direct that democracy to do something different than it did, but were unable to do so because they were not sufficiently informed with available information for their position? I'm not suggesting that if people who were in power knew different things than they did that things couldn't have been different. I'm arguing that it wasn't a lack of reading available news by every day people not in power that allowed things to get to where they were.
> The world is hardly hopeless and the people in it are not helpless.
I wholeheartedly agree, I just think people vastly overestimate how important "being informed" is over just actually doing something about a local problem. How many things do you read in your daily feed that fundamentally alter or make a difference in the things you plan to do? Let's say you're interested in helping make a change with regards to child abuse. A noble and worthwhile cause. Who is actually helped by you spending even an hour every day scrolling "child abuse tik tok"? Or reading through a daily list of updates on child abuse cases and statistics nation wide? In my opinion almost any time you spend being "informed" about child abuse by mass media would be better spent actually volunteering for local abuse shelters and safety organizations. And the little actual good you or anyone else gains from you scrolling through mass media coverage could be gained in much shorter and more sporadc review of recent events rather than a daily firehose of news.
The "events shaping your world" are a handful of currently trending narratives promulgated by an engagement-optimizing algorithm or a literal popularity contest, not an epistemologically meaningful sample of reality.
Making quality decisions with incomplete information is a higher order operation than
(as this study shows) surfing whatever has a compatible emotional valence.
I am keeping up with my steady tide pod diet, learning about how much God loves me, training to be a YouTube influencer to make thousands of dollars per month without leaving my home and investing in helping a Nigerian prince move his funds out of the country. Yet I still feel there is something missing. Which Gab group would you guys recommend for knowing the truth about the events shaping my world that they are hiding from us?
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