> “People who prompt things” can only do the latter, and they routinely do it poorly.

Right, but what I don’t agree with here is the idea that this category of people will never be able to improve into the first category of people. The value of an experienced anything is that they realize there is a big chasm between something that works now and something that will continue to work long into the future.

I don’t agree that doing everything yourself manually is the only thing that can grant you that understanding, because I don’t think that understanding is domain-specific. It evolves naturally as soon as someone realizes that their list of unknown unknowns is FAR larger than their list of known anythings, and that the first step in attempting to solve a problem is to prune that list as far as you can get it while realizing you will never ever be able to reduce it to zero.

You can do that by spending two weeks to build a brick wall by hand, or you can do that by spending two weeks having your magical helpers build ten brick walls that eventually collapse. I don’t think the tools are some sort of fundamental threat to cognition, I think they’re - within this society - a fundamental threat to safety, because the relentless pursuit of profit means even those that realize those ten brick walls should never actually ever be used to hold anything up will find themselves pressured to put a roof on them and hope, pray, they hold.

And this isn’t an LLM-specific thing. The vast diverse space of building codes around the world proves this, and coincidentally, the countries with laxer building codes tend to get a lot more done a lot faster; and they also tend to deal with a big tragic collapse every now and then, which I suppose someone will file away as collateral somewhere.

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Jensson 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I don’t agree that doing everything yourself manually is the only thing that can grant you that understanding, because I don’t think that understanding is domain-specific. It evolves naturally as soon as someone realizes that their list of unknown unknowns is FAR larger than their list of known anythings, and that the first step in attempting to solve a problem is to prune that list as far as you can get it while realizing you will never ever be able to reduce it to zero.

This isn't true, a car mechanic never evolves into an engineer, a nurse never evolve into a doctor. A car mechanic can learn to do some tasks you normally need an engineer for and same with nurses, but they never build the entire core set of skills that separates engineers from mechanics and doctors from nurses.

There are maybe some exceptions to this, but those exceptions are so rare that it doesn't matter for this discussion. A few people still learning it properly wont save anything.

	▲	thepasch 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> This isn’t true, a car mechanic never evolves into an engineer, a nurse never evolve into a doctor. “Doesn’t generally happen” =/= “is literally impossible”. The word “never” should be used with care. > A car mechanic can learn to do some tasks you normally need an engineer for and same with nurses This statement can only make sense if you regard titles as something that’s imbued upon you, and until it is, you are incapable of performing the acts that someone who has earned that tile can perform. I’ll just say I fundamentally disagree with this notion on pretty much every conceivable level, and if that’s the belief system you subscribe to, that would also makes arguing about this any further pointless. But I might just be getting you wrong.

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Peritract 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the idea that this category of people will never be able to improve into the first category of people

The fundamental difference between the categories is that the first is filled with people who put the effort in to learning/understanding, and the second is filled with people who take the shortcut around learning/understanding.

Changing from the second category to the first is something that would require already being in the first.

	▲	thepasch an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> The fundamental difference between the categories is that the first is filled with people who put the effort in to learning/understanding, and the second is filled with people who take the shortcut around learning/understanding. Exactly! That’s my entire point. Because now you’re separating the categories by “is willing to put in effort” and “is not willing to put in effort” rather than by “has done the thing” and “hasn’t done the thing”. I think the disagreement doesn’t lie in this concept, but rather in whether an LLM can be used by someone who’s willing to put in effort to assist them in doing so, rather than just having it do it for them. But as long as you understand what the thing you’re using it is for, you don’t have to understand how it works exactly. You can shift gears in a car without a physics degree.