I think this can be worse than ignorance. It's the illusion of knowledge coupled with the confidence that comes from thinking you understand something you've never actually encountered. These people walk around armed with headlines masquerading as insights, ready to deploy half-digested talking points in conversations that require actual thought. They've become human echo chambers, amplifying signals they never bothered to decode.
This is such a good summary of what I feel like I've been observing (including in myself) for the last 15 years or so
I have thought of this as knowing _about_ things, as opposed to knowing things, and not having the self-awareness to be able to differentiate between the two.
I've seen this most notably in a former coworker who enjoyed watching YouTube videos (especially when the rest of the team was hard at work, but that was another point of contention entirely). He thought himself very knowledgeable on various topics because he could readily regurgitate talking points, but if you asked him about second-order effects, or implicit simplifying assumptions, or how X from the video would be different if Y and Z were different, it was obvious how surface-level his "understanding" was.
> He thought himself very knowledgeable on various topics because he could readily regurgitate talking points
I do think people have that bias - when someone is able to regurgitate talking points or answers about whatever topic in no time, said person is perceived as intelligent.
Because it takes time to actually know if someone is smart, because intelligence is complex and multifaceted – and we don’t have time anymore.
So, if within 10s you have one guy regurgitating something and the other one shrugging, it does make some sense to assume the first one is smarter.
What would make even more sense is to accept one cannot know this about someone in 10s. But uncertainty sucks, humans will always try to reduce it as much as possible, at all cost.
I just finished up some freelance (hardware/embedded software) where I had to talk to a “software” engineer who was sort of the “lead”. Every time we hit an interface problem he would say “if you don’t understand the error feel free to use ChatGPT”. Dude it’s bare metal embedded software I WROTE the error. Also, telling someone that was hired because of their expertise to chatgpt something is crazy insulting.
It was such a strange interaction - like this guy who thought he knew everything because he could leverage AI and anyone not doing that instantly was wasting their time. People are already offloading having a single thought to AI and then turning around and acting like they know everything because they have access to this tool.
Also weird to watch someone in the web-sphere act like AIs knowledge and understanding is the same for all fields because their field was so heavily trained on. No, AI will not know the answer for this one register in this microcontroller correctly or understand a hardware errata for this device or fully understand the pin choices I made on the device and the system consequences of those choices.
I had this experience at a recent job, where I'm working with, theoretically at least, the people who literally wrote all the software I'm trying to learn about, and half the responses I got were "just ask chatgpt". Like, you wrote this stuff, why am I supposed to ask an LLM??
I've noticed this lately too, I think everyone is like posing as an AI-influencer or something and copying the "Just use AI" slogan that everyone is repeating right now. What if I don't want to use AI for this problem, and instead want to learn a re-usable and more deterministic skill for debugging?
Oh boy does this ring true to me. Worked briefly with a contractor who wanted to do something with some internal tooling and couldn't figure out how. Said he asked ChatGPT and it doesn't know either. Terrifying how little supposedly qualified people understand what they're even doing.
I think the terrifying part is just how fast software practitioners completely gave up trying to understand anything. As if these oracles actually know anything about our bespoke systems. It was almost overnight that SMEs were lost.
The content of your post made me think you’re a real one and I wanted to reach out as I’m thinking of hiring a freelancer to help me build some stuff I am working on, but the site in your profile is not responding.
There is definitely a truth to it. And then there's also this increasingly complex world that you can not possibly deeply know in all important ways, where I believe having ambient knowledge about a lot of things really does useful stuff.
I don't think the article author is claiming that we should have no compression, that all compression is bad. But compression culture can reach absurd levels, for example in the opening sentence of the article where the author receives requests to summarize a novel. The whole point of a novel is to be experienced. Nobody has time to deeply learn everything, but that shouldn't become an excuse to be lazy and refuse to deeply learn anything, just because it's possible to ask anything of ChatGPT.
Donald Rumsfeld didn't do much good during his life, but this quote by him lives in my head rent free like the kids say:
> Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
Even before social media and AI summaries, when we only had land lines and libraries, my passion has been lowering the amount of unknown unknowns and increase the amount of known unknowns.
My grandfather shared the same passion and owned a series of books that had stuff about _everything_ on a surface level. The one of them on the shelf next to me is from 1952 and is called "The Book of Skills". And has stuff like how to water your plants, detailed instructions on bookbinding, how to build a boat and fix (1950s) electric components.
Basically I don't pretend to know everything about everything, but I do enjoy knowing something about a bunch of things.
If I know a solution for a problem _exists_ so if I (or someone else) need it, I know it has been solved - even though I don't have a clue how - but I know too look for a ready-made solution. Then I can go look it up and stand on the shoulders of giants so to speak.
Nowadays I use LLM summaries for similar things, I don't claim to know everything but I absorb enough surface level information so I can go look for more if I need the full data later on. Basically building an index instead of a full-ass library.
CLARK
There's no problem. I was just hoping
you could give me some insight into
the evolution of the market economy in
the early colonies. My contention is
that prior to the Revolutionary War
the economic modalities especially of
the southern colonies could most aptly
be characterized as agrarian pre-
capitalist and...
WILL
Of course that's your contention.
You're a first year grad student.
You just finished some Marxian
historian, Pete Garrison prob'ly, and
so naturally that's what you believe
until next month when you get to James
Lemon and get convinced that Virginia
and Pennsylvania were strongly
entrepreneurial and capitalist back in
1740. That'll last until sometime in
your second year, then you'll be in
here regurgitating Gordon Wood about
the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the
capital-forming effects of military
mobilization.
CLARK
Well, as a matter of fact, I won't,
because Wood drastically underestimates
the impact of--
WILL
--"Wood drastically underestimates the
impact of social distinctions predicated
upon wealth, especially inherited
wealth..." You got that from "Work in
Essex County," Page 421, right? Do
you have any thoughts of your own on
the subject or were you just gonna
plagerize the whole book for me?
I disagree. Most articles on the web are very shallow and kind of tend to terminate searches for more knowledge while LLMs are fantastic at pointing you to more nuance on subjects you're unfamiliar with if you know how to ask them.
However since it doesn't actually reason you have to be familiar enough with the subject that you can tell when it is and isn't hallucinating since it's extrapolating from those same shallow articles.
I used to try services like Blinkist. Did anyone have similar experience as I had: I simply couldn't remember what I read, let alone what I listened to. The summaries, despite being reasonably detailed and having key points and representative examples, were still bland and boring, to the point that they left little impression on me.
This isn't due to Blinkist, but due to how you consume (high information density) content. What you need to do is write the insights you are getting from it down in a way where you will see them again when they are relevant.
Lengthy stuff has lots of repetition and different access routes to the insights and information. Even then the above approach works much better than hoping that the passive consumption will lead to memorization.
That’s certainly one way of looking at it, but those who think humans walking around armed with half an understanding and making claims about reality is a recent thing would, on face, seem naive to thousands of years of history. Nearly every scientist was persecuted in their time (worse as you go further back in time) because the entire world thought they knew better. Wouldn’t you consider climate exchange advocates to be in an echo chamber? What about Nazis, or towns with high klan membership? Were they not living in their own echo chambers too? Every “movement” and belief system is a de facto echo chamber; no one has a meeting to promote their ideals by spending the entire time sharing contrary facts. In fact, wouldn’t it have been even worse the further you go back in time because contrary information was primarily distributed by singular people? People weren’t exposed to thousands of contradictory facts that went against their beliefs; they just ignored what Tommy had to say because they knew better. They had their one set of facts they believed and judged whether what another person said was truth mostly by character and how it aligned with their beliefs, and rarely because it was truth. This is still true today. Change only came as the number of people they encountered who were saying the same thing increased; again, not because they were right, but because they were saying the same thing. Young Margret had no way of calculating the trajectories of planets or evaluating the science of gravity; she just had to trust others explanations of how things we can plainly see are the result mystical magical forces. The only thing that has changed is the number of people we are exposed to who are saying the same things, right or wrong, but what hasn’t changed is the number of people who were believed things and repeated them…right and wrong.
Around 10 years ago, I learned to root out people who read reddit based on this principle. My thought at the time was the site made you feel informed. But everyone knew same facts leading to the same incomplete picture and having the same attitude problem of constantly correcting people. “Well actually..” and “that’s misinformation” were thrown around a lot on reddit and the lazy readers end up copying that bad behavior IRL
. But the confidence was high and the picture incomplete. And the worst part of it all, the behaviour was
