Plato's _Phaedrus_ features Socrates arguing against writing; "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
I have heard people argue that the use of calculators (and later, specifically graphing calculators) would make people worse at math; quick searching found papers like https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED525547.pdf discussing the topic.
I can't see how the "LLMs make us dumber" argument is different than those. I think calculators are a great tool, and people trained in a calculator-having environment certainly seem to be able to do math. I can't see that writing has done anything but improve our ability to reason over time. What makes LLMs different?
The bit of the dialogue you quote is Plato telling a story.
On another bit he says directly: anyone can plainly see there is nothing detrimental about writing itself.
And further down the line he warns against relying on text solely to learn and not other learned people because you might lose context and internalize the wrong interpretation.
Individuals? Most information technology makes us dumber in isolation, but with the tools we end up net faster.
The scary thing is that it is less about making things "better" than it is making them cheaper. AI isn't winning on skill, its winning on being "80% the quality at 20% the price."
So if you see "us" as the economic super-organism managed by very powerful people, then it makes us a lot smarter!
I buy this for writing. There's a very limited set of things GPT is good at for improving my writing (basic sentence voice and structure stuff, overusing words), but mostly I find it makes my writing worse, and I don't trust any argument it makes because, as the post observes, I haven't thought them through and had the opportunity to second-guess them myself.
Also it has a high opinion of Bryan Ferry. Deeply untrustworthy.
But I don't buy this at all for software development. I find myself thinking more carefully and more expansively, at the same time, about solving programming problems when I'm assisted by an LLM agent, because there's minimal exertion to trying multiple paths out and seeing how they work out. Without an agent, every new function I write is a kind of bet on how the software is going to come out in the end, and like every human I'm loss-averse, so I'm not good at cutting my losses on the bad bets. Agents free me from that.
This is a great illustration of the dangers of lost context.
This excerpt is a bit of the dialogue where Socrates is quoting some legend that takes place in Egypt.
On other parts of the dialogue, when speaking directly, Plato says that anyone can plainly see that writing in itself is not negative.
There is also a great bit where he warns that relying on texts solely to learn without guidance of other learned people opens oneself to misinterpreting the text and learning all the wrong things from it.
Similar fear mongering when calculators came about. No one got dumber, we just got faster at doing simple math. WOrking out complex math will always be interesting to those who really want to do it, and the rest likely wont contribute mu ch anyway - thier just consumers. Let the kids have thier wordy calculators, it actually may unblock critical paths of success needed for someone to really go deep.
Dumb is more the inability to make expedient, salient, and useful decisions either from the lack of knowledge or the fundamental incapability to process the available knowledge.
Dumb is accidental or genetic.
AI won't affect how dumb we are.
I think they will decrease the utility of crystalline knowledge skills and increase our fluid knowledge skills. Smart people will still find ways to thrive in the environment.
Just as the engine replaced physical strength, artificial intelligence, through models like large language models, is now replacing cognitive labor and thought.
From the article "Muscles grow by lifting weights" yet we do that now as a hobby and not as a critical job. I'm not sure I want to live in a world where thinking is a gym like activity, however if you go back 200 years it would probably be difficult to explain the situation today to someone living in a world where most people are doing physical labor or using animals to do it.
> Just as the engine replaced physical strength, artificial intelligence, through models like large language models, is now replacing cognitive labor and thought.
Curious how the "AI" going to replace thought, as it is incapable if creating anything. Its just statistically matching data patterns for G-d's sake, don't make it something anything beyond that
Engine scales without limits. There is no mechanism by which more engines in use lead to worse engines (leading to less use of engines). LLM output quality suffers heavily as the percentage of human-generated input drops. Which is what is happening right now as humans hand content production to machines.
Impressive research but I can't help feeling like it's fundamentally flawed. The analysis considered "essay ownership" a property of LLM, Search, and Brain-Only participants, but what would have been more valuable is flipping all of the graphs based on percieved ownership levels. On average, less LLM users felt a sense of ownership, and this should not surprise anyone. The researchers lumped together people who let LLMs do all of the writing vs using LLMs constructive ways. What would have been more interesting is studying the LLM users who maintained a sense of owership, because then we could learn more way to use LLMs that potentially make us smarter.
I also feel like there's more to be said about LLMs fostering the ability to ask questions better than you might if you primarily used search. If the objective was to write, for example, about an esoteric organic chemistry topic, and a "No Brain" group of non-experts was only allowed to formulate a response by asking real-life experts as much as they can about the esoteric topic, then would users more experienced with LLMs come out ahead on the essay score? Understanding how to leverage a tight communication loop most effectively is a skill that the non-LLM groups in this study should be evaluated on.
When working well, they enable us to offload needing to memorize a wikipedia worth of information and think about higher level problems. We become more intelligent at higher level solutions. Of course people don't know what was written if they were required to "submit an essay" where the main grade is whether or not they submitted one and the topic may have been one not interesting to them. Ask people to write essays about things they're truly, honestly interested in, and people who have access to an LLM are likely able to enrich their knowledge faster than those without.
The problem is in the chain of learning required to understand or master something. If you offload the foundational things that you learn and chunk you will hinder yourself. We can see this right now in the reading dilemma in US schools where early decoding skills were misunderstood and it lead to significant struggles later.
I disagree that this is a given. In the long run they just allow us to stay in other levels of abstraction for longer periods of time, whether those be lazy/ignorant or otherwise.
I've been thinking about this a bit in the context of a current, very complex and challenging side project.
When I first began, I tried vibe coding the backend, but found the feeling of disconnect from "my" code too uncomfortable so abandoned that approach.
I've been relying pretty heavily on ChatGPT to help me learn unfamiliar technologies, but perhaps because of its fallibility with DuckDB, I've been spending a lot of time in the documentation and writing my own queries, and I think I'm going through enough cognitive difficulty to be learning properly.
There was one time when I'd spent probably at least a day trying to optimise a query in Postgres (yes, two database technologies, don't ask) without much success, and ChatGPT completely solved it in about 10 minutes. Incredible result, helped me learn some useful techniques. There are so many rabbit holes on this project it's nice not to have to go down every single one by myself.
On HN there's often this split between anti-AI and AI evangelists but there really is a lot of space in the middle: judicious use of AI for specific purposes, managing the risks and benefits, etc.
(Side note...did the OP really mention the highly discredited broken windows theory?)
Kinda, I mean so our brains shift once we are able to write things down instead of having to memorize completely, similarly when the internet happened we now could find answers quickly and stopped remembering or writing down things that were easy to find. So now thinking will shift again, dumber might be the right word, but it might not be, our thinking would shift away from computation type of knowledge and lean more toward making good judgments or having clearer goals type of knowledge.
Do you think it's like when driving with GPS first became a thing?
Everyone stopped learning the roads & streets of where they were driving, but it was OK to lose that knowledge.
GPS companies revised their products to adapt to driver mistakes, and today driving is generally better with Google Maps, even though sometimes it can be worse (no internet, or when a bug arises).
27 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] threadI have heard people argue that the use of calculators (and later, specifically graphing calculators) would make people worse at math; quick searching found papers like https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED525547.pdf discussing the topic.
I can't see how the "LLMs make us dumber" argument is different than those. I think calculators are a great tool, and people trained in a calculator-having environment certainly seem to be able to do math. I can't see that writing has done anything but improve our ability to reason over time. What makes LLMs different?
The bit of the dialogue you quote is Plato telling a story.
On another bit he says directly: anyone can plainly see there is nothing detrimental about writing itself.
And further down the line he warns against relying on text solely to learn and not other learned people because you might lose context and internalize the wrong interpretation.
Much like you did.
Individuals? Most information technology makes us dumber in isolation, but with the tools we end up net faster.
The scary thing is that it is less about making things "better" than it is making them cheaper. AI isn't winning on skill, its winning on being "80% the quality at 20% the price."
So if you see "us" as the economic super-organism managed by very powerful people, then it makes us a lot smarter!
Also it has a high opinion of Bryan Ferry. Deeply untrustworthy.
But I don't buy this at all for software development. I find myself thinking more carefully and more expansively, at the same time, about solving programming problems when I'm assisted by an LLM agent, because there's minimal exertion to trying multiple paths out and seeing how they work out. Without an agent, every new function I write is a kind of bet on how the software is going to come out in the end, and like every human I'm loss-averse, so I'm not good at cutting my losses on the bad bets. Agents free me from that.
https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/
This excerpt is a bit of the dialogue where Socrates is quoting some legend that takes place in Egypt.
On other parts of the dialogue, when speaking directly, Plato says that anyone can plainly see that writing in itself is not negative.
There is also a great bit where he warns that relying on texts solely to learn without guidance of other learned people opens oneself to misinterpreting the text and learning all the wrong things from it.
Much like you did.
Dumb is accidental or genetic.
AI won't affect how dumb we are.
I think they will decrease the utility of crystalline knowledge skills and increase our fluid knowledge skills. Smart people will still find ways to thrive in the environment.
Human intelligence will continue moving forward.
From the article "Muscles grow by lifting weights" yet we do that now as a hobby and not as a critical job. I'm not sure I want to live in a world where thinking is a gym like activity, however if you go back 200 years it would probably be difficult to explain the situation today to someone living in a world where most people are doing physical labor or using animals to do it.
Curious how the "AI" going to replace thought, as it is incapable if creating anything. Its just statistically matching data patterns for G-d's sake, don't make it something anything beyond that
I also feel like there's more to be said about LLMs fostering the ability to ask questions better than you might if you primarily used search. If the objective was to write, for example, about an esoteric organic chemistry topic, and a "No Brain" group of non-experts was only allowed to formulate a response by asking real-life experts as much as they can about the esoteric topic, then would users more experienced with LLMs come out ahead on the essay score? Understanding how to leverage a tight communication loop most effectively is a skill that the non-LLM groups in this study should be evaluated on.
When I first began, I tried vibe coding the backend, but found the feeling of disconnect from "my" code too uncomfortable so abandoned that approach.
I've been relying pretty heavily on ChatGPT to help me learn unfamiliar technologies, but perhaps because of its fallibility with DuckDB, I've been spending a lot of time in the documentation and writing my own queries, and I think I'm going through enough cognitive difficulty to be learning properly.
There was one time when I'd spent probably at least a day trying to optimise a query in Postgres (yes, two database technologies, don't ask) without much success, and ChatGPT completely solved it in about 10 minutes. Incredible result, helped me learn some useful techniques. There are so many rabbit holes on this project it's nice not to have to go down every single one by myself.
On HN there's often this split between anti-AI and AI evangelists but there really is a lot of space in the middle: judicious use of AI for specific purposes, managing the risks and benefits, etc.
(Side note...did the OP really mention the highly discredited broken windows theory?)
Did Google and Yahoo make us dumber?
Everyone stopped learning the roads & streets of where they were driving, but it was OK to lose that knowledge.
GPS companies revised their products to adapt to driver mistakes, and today driving is generally better with Google Maps, even though sometimes it can be worse (no internet, or when a bug arises).
What once was! A genius paradise lost to technology once again.