There is two different types of learning people are talking about.

The first type happens when you are enthusiastically engaged in a topic, which LLMs will likely enhance.

The second type happens as a by-product of solving a, perhaps deeply uncomfortably, difficult problem. This is what people are talking about when they say LLMs will hamper human cognition. Instead of sitting there for an hour and struggling, people will instead reflexively give in and ask an LLM to solve it for them.

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spongebobstoes 2 hours ago | parent [-]

it's an interesting point. is it worthwhile to struggle through an incidental task that has been solved before? we all stand on the shoulders of giants

I think in most cases, understanding is the point. we don't expect students to derive general relativity before doing astrophysics. re-invention is only a tool for understanding

	▲	Retric an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		“Understanding” without being able to use that knowledge for anything isn’t useful for getting stuff done. The flip side is even more interesting. There’s a great number of electrical engineers or even with significant physics backgrounds who don’t really understand how electricity actually works, but they can still solve useful problems. By understanding I mean they can describe what underlying physical phenomena reactance represents etc.
	▲	rznicolet an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Small counterpoint to your analogy, as someone who studied astrophysics: I actually did have a requirement to understand general relativity! Deriving all of it independently from scratch wasn't something we did, but there _were_ derivations involved. And it was definitely worth working through -- it _is_ a good tool for understanding. (I've long since left the field, but I don't regret the work I did.)