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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather not learn more, faster, and I think the attitude of wanting to do so is unhealthy, as well as is the attitude of optimizing productivity.

I think it's better to learn for the love of it, and keep the automation of learning to a minimum. I understand the desire to make learning faster in the short term, but I can't help thinking that in the long-term it leads to imbuing learning with an atmosphere of necessity and the stripping of beauty from the holistic experience of learning as wonderful discovery. No thanks.

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Learning more faster and learning for the love of it are not mutually exclusive. Also there are different contexts in which I want to learn, and in some of them, speed matters, in some it doesn't. I don't think it makes sense to make blanket statements like this even about your own learning, much less about others.

I think when speed matters in learning, it's time to modify one's life so that it no longer matters. I understand necessity, but that's just the constraint of a suboptimal condition. I think it makes total sense, and we need more absolute stances rather than acting like optimizing machines.

> rather than acting like optimizing machines

Just because sometimes you just want a 30 second break down on how to boil pasta, or whatever, doesn't mean we're becoming "optimizing machines", just that the context matters. Sometimes I don't want to or need to know the "fundamentals of why water boils", I just need to know enough in order to complete some other thing.

> it's time to modify one's life so that it no longer matters

It sounds like you have 100% control of your own life, which might be great and all, but it isn't very realistic for most humans on the planet. Time is limited, and what we spend our time on is a choice. I too probably spend too much time learning about stuff I cannot really apply, because I like learning, but sometimes you're faced with something, you need to make a choice within N minutes/hours/days, and spending 1 month researching the topic before making a choice just isn't feasible.

> Just because sometimes you just want a 30 second break down on how to boil pasta, or whatever, doesn't mean we're becoming "optimizing machines"

If I want a 30-second breakdown of how to boil pasta, I'll look on the back of the box.

> Sometimes I don't want to or need to know the "fundamentals of why water boils", I just need to know enough in order to complete some other thing.

False dichotomoy, because even if I want to quickly know how to do something, I don't need AI, nor do I need to research everything either.

> Time is limited, and what we spend our time on is a choice

That's fine, and I agree. But that doesn't mean we need to go to the level of AI to learn something, and I'd argue it's even harmful in the long run as even a study by Microsoft [1] shows that AI makes people stupider, so not really learning at all.

[1] https://slashdot.org/story/25/02/10/1752233/microsoft-study-...

> If I want a 30-second breakdown of how to boil pasta, I'll look on the back of the box.

Yeah, but then you're in a foreign country or whatever, you understand that was just an example right? To illustrate something... Have some imagination.

> False dichotomoy, because even if I want to quickly know how to do something, I don't need AI, nor do I need to research everything either.

Right, I'm not claiming it's impossible to "learn X quickly without AI", but I would make the claim that I can learn X faster with AI, than without. YMMV and all that.

> But that doesn't mean we need to go to the level of AI to learn something

I don't have to use Wikipedia or the Internet instead of going to my local library, but if I'm in a rush, and need something quickly, I probably prefer those two options rather than the last.

> as even a study by Microsoft [1] shows that AI makes people stupider, so not really learning at all.

That study says no such thing, and the amount of people mislead by that paper is kind of shocking to me. If you're curious what the paper actually says, feel free to read the actual paper instead of a "YouTube AI thought-leader" summarization of it, or whatever you got the whole "AI makes people stupider" from: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

I did read the paper. One of their conclusions is that it's less likely for people to engage in criticial thinking the more they trust AI. Which to me implies that widespread AI usage will lead to a diminishment of people even practicising critical thinking, which in turn will lead to a overall degradation of the skill. From the paper: "Moreover, while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving."

> Yeah, but then you're in a foreign country or whatever, you understand that was just an example right? To illustrate something... Have some imagination.

I haven't seen a convincing example yet.

> Right, I'm not claiming it's impossible to "learn X quickly without AI", but I would make the claim that I can learn X faster with AI, than without. YMMV and all that.

Again, I wonder if that's true. Because skim-learning, IMO, does not lead to much real learning in the long run. Like I knew a guy in grad school who did that, and could come up with answers faster at first. But after a couple weeks, he had a very sketchy knowledge of the subject and had to keep looking things up whereas people who were more systematic at learning could answer questions without any reference at all.

I'm not saying skim-learning is bad, sometimes it is necessary but in general, AI takes it too far for the average person and it will most likely lead to mental degradation.

Pracically, most of the time, IMO, where learning speed matters, is when you're competing against someting, could be an individual, or a startup, etc, which doesn't seem to be the optimal condition one would like to be in.

First counterexample that comes to mind, you're traveling to a country for one reason or another, and it'd be helpful to learn or know more of the language. The faster you learn, the more helpful it'll be.

Another example, your friend's band's guitarist got sick and you've got a week to learn a full set's worth of music

Generally I find some urgency to be a nice motivator

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