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Independent thought? All relevant thought is highly dependent of other people and their thoughts.
That’s exactly why I bring this up. Having systems that teach people to think in a similar way enable us to build complex stuff and have a modern society.
That’s why it’s really weird to hear this ”people should think for themselves” criticism of AI. It’s a similar justification to antivaxxers saying you ”should do your own research”.
Surely there are better reasons to oppose AI?
The usage of "independent thought" has never been "independent of all outside influence", it has simply meant going through the process of reasoning--thinking through a chain of logic--instead of accepting and regurgitating the conclusions of others without any of one's own reasoning. It's a similar lay meaning as being an independent adult. We all rely on others in some way, but an independent adult can usually accomplish activities of daily living through their own actions.
Yeah but that’s not what we are expecting people to do.
In our extremely complicated world, most thinking relies on trusting sources. You can’t independently study and derive most things.
Otherwise everybody should do their own research about vaccines. But the reasonable thing is to trust a lot of other, more knowledgeable people.
My comment doesn't suggest people have to run their own research study or develop their own treatise on every topic. It suggests people have make a conscious choice, preferably with reasonable judgment, about which sources to trust and to develop a lay understanding of the argument or conclusion they're repeating. Otherwise you end up with people on the left and right reflexively saying "communism bad" or "capitalism bad" because their social media environment repeats it a lot, but they'd be hard pressed to give even a loosly representative definition of either.
This has very little to do with the criticism given by the first commenter. And you can use AI and do this, they are not in any way exclusive.
How do? What would your alternative assertion be on the topic?
If you think your comment and this are the same thing, then I don't know what to say.
Well you didn't respond to my questions and you're vaguely referencing our other comments instead. It's not effective communication and leads me to think you didn't understand my comments. You seem to be into math, so I'll put it this way,
Be explicit, show your work: premises-->arguments-->conclusion
Well I first replied to that first comment. Then people started making completely different claims and the point got lost in the sauce.
Edit: why should I take the time to formulate my thoughts well if you have demonstrated that you don’t give even the slightest hint of good faith to understand what I’m saying?
Ah, I haven't looked at others' responses. I can see how responding to many different people gets messy.
But to answer your question, because I took the time to formulate my thoughts for you, and I responded directly to things you said in your comments. I also asked you directly "How so? What's your alternative assertion." Which was a good faith attempt to better understand what you meant.
Well, I do consider this post, as a rephrasing of
not made in good faith. You don't engage with the point I'm making at all. Instead, you pivot from understanding the logic to making sure the sources are trustworthy. Which is a fair standard for critical thought or whatever, but definitely not what the original contention of the first commenter was. Which was heavily upvoted (=a popular opinition?), and which originally I replied to.
Also, hearing "How so? What’s your alternative assertion" after ten comments worth of people going out their way to misunderstand my point, presumably because they dislike AI, is not motivating.
OP: I want people to think for ourselves.
My understanding of your point: People have never done that because no thought is truly independent. Modern complexity relies on thought that builds upon others.
My point: Sure, but that's also a narrow and ungenerous interpretation of the term "independent thought" as per OP's usage. It's closer to critical thought than silo'd thought developed from the ground up.
Modern thought not only relies on thought built upon other people, it relies on trusting textbooks, data aggregators like weather apps, google search results, bus route apps, wikipedia, forum posts, etc. etc.
I don’t think it’s ungenerous at all to question whether are LLMs really any different in this regard. You take in information from an imperfect automated source, just as we’ve done for a really long time, depending on the definition.
The no thought is truly independent is also a bit of a strawman. The point was, the more complex technology you have, the more the same ideas spread and thought is harmonized (which is good in some ways, standardization makes things easier).
I agree on the sentiment, it was just a weird turn of phrase.
Social media has done a lot to temper my techno-optimism about free distribution of information, but I'm still not ready to flag the printing press as the decay of free-thinking.
Things are weirder than they seem on the surface.
A math professor collegue of mine calls extremely restrictive use of language ”rigor”, for example.
The point isn't that it's restrictive, the point is that words have precise technical meanings that are the same across authors, speakers, and time. It's rigorous because of that precision and consistency, not just because it's restrictive. It's necessary to be rigorous with use of language in scientific fields where clear communication is difficult but important to get right due to the complexity of the ideas at play.
Yeah sure buddy.
Have you tried to shoehorn real life stuff into mathematical notation? It is restrictive. You have pre-defined strict boxes that don’t have blurry lines. Free form thoughts are a lot more flexible than that.
Consistency is restrictive. I don’t know why you take issue with that.