The shift from "you need to optimize your thinking/rationality" to "yeah, LLM use breaks your cognitive abilities but what can you do" that so many middle aged men went through is literally brainmelting.
14
Replies
7
Boosts
@tante There's maybe something that happens to the brain at that time of life that makes you less eager to "optimize" and more eager to just do and think as little as possible.
Spoiler: the people embracing LLMs never had especially keen rational abilities to begin with.
They've been sucking in their figurative gut their whole lives intellectually and LLMs have given them a chance to just give up on appearances altogether and offload what little thinking they do to the Wrong Answer Machine.
@tante So many people still think chatbot/LLM use does not affect their cognitive abilities at all.
Somehow they are special, it will not do anything to them 🙃
@tante well it is all consistent from the perspective that most of these guys simply move around the executive social spaces copying whatever short term strategy they hearsay will make the money. Yesterday it was the quantified self IoT transhuman and today it's the AI orchestrator passive income master. Neither of those things have a good use case, btw. It's just cloud data harvesting businesses trying to elevator-pitch their solutions in search of problems.
@tante most of the 'what can you do types' I've encountered are much younger, 30-40. The going on 60s I know are more like, 'thank gog I'm out'.
@tante nah, it's all serving the same goal. it's just a pivot.
@tante Ageism is a complicated problem, and I think one of the social problems we have is that the minority of older people in positions of power won't admit that they have less energy and learn more slowly than younger people. They prefer to stifle younger people so they can hold on to power.
I think they’re specifically irresistible to people whose advantage, when young, was being fast. Almost everyone loses that with age. If you haven’t replaced it with depth or breadth or taste, how terrifying.
@tante I think to understand this, you have to understand their motivations. They were rarely actually obsessed with **being smarter** or more mentally *capable.*
They were obsessed with what it would **get them.**
"Optimize your thinking", "build a second brain", etc have one purpose: to be **productive** and more capable of **grinding**, not *necessarily* improve yourself for the sake of it.
From that perspective, "machine that does things for you" is quite appealing to them by default.
People used to take weird supplements to optimize their brain and now just fuck up their abilities without a second thought.
@tante But I think the rationale behind it is exactly the same.
People are looking for a cheat code to "performance", which usually means money and status/belonging to the "in-group", not actually being skilled.
@tante TBF some of those weird supplements could really fuck up their brains. AMHIK.
You know what?
I suspect micro dosing drugs was never about performance.
I fear, it was just a rationalisation to take drugs.
Shocking, I know.
So the real timeline is that delusional people went from messing with their brain via chemicals to messing with their brain via... behaviorism?
@tante this is what I wanted to say... some of them use drugs anyway, so what's the difference?
