by globnomulous | 2025-04-28 04:43:54+00:00
It's no bother! I appreciate the civil, engaging back and forth.

This is fascinating and compelling. My concern with using LLMs for this sort of thing is similar to my concern with using them in a business setting: it provides a direct line from a single idea to a finished product. That isn't a great way to generate a product or to learn. The messy process of discovering other avenues, hitting dead ends, working through them, and finding your way to a solution to your problem will leave you in a very, very different, and much better, position than the one you find yourself in after taking the LLM's advice. You'll have a richer understanding of the terrain of the problem (edit: even when your problem is "tell me about this problem"), and, as a result, you'll have provided yourself new, improved, or refined tools for the next problem you encounter.

The blinkered solution that the LLM gives you results in something narrower and much worse. You may gain something helpful from the sources it suggests. Its proposals may lead you to an interesting solution. But you've lost out everything else -- and I'd argue it's the "everything else" that is most essential to learning, not the specific solution or source you've chosen.

To put this another way, I've been thinking lately about what I think I'm teaching my students, and what I think experts have that amateurs and novices lack. It isn't possession of the specific knowledge or reasoning that constitutes correct understanding or a correct answer to a given question (e.g. the stuff you'd find in a good written source). It's not the ability to solve difficult problems more easily. It's not any of the concrete stuff that one associates with a certain field (e.g. a Roman historian knows a lot about Rome). It's more nebulous. It's probably best described as just fluency with the problem space, which enables a person to retrieve, use, present, reason, and creatively rework. Having a skill and knowing don't boil down to the stuff you're able to do or the facts you can trot out. Those are the superficial stuff. They're incidental to learning itself.

When you rely on LLMs, I think you're essentially shearing away the entire problem space and replacing the general problem-solving skill with the superficial stuff to which the problem-solving skill applies. You wind up with literally a trivial version of the understanding you'd have if you'd worked through the issues and problems yourself.

I don't know whether this makes sense. It's a thought I've just recently been turning over in my head and I'm not sure I can articulate it well. It started from my watching an interview with a historian of authoritarianism, marveling at the polish of her answers and realizing that her expertise has nothing to do with the specific insights or historical facts she was trotting out in answer to viewer questions. It has everything to do with a deeper, subtending faculty that one develops through years of intensive study.

Edit: here's the video -- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vK6fALsenmw . The historian is clearly incredibly, incredibly smart, and the questions aren't terribly difficult, but I was still bowled over by just how good her answers are -- the diverse base of knowledge that she draws on, the fluent ease with which she ties together the historical, psychological, and sociological threads.