And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. “Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time” — his voice rose — “there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation ‘seraphically free From taint of personality,’ which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.”

The Machine Stops, E M Forster, 1909

>We used to struggle with financial decisions—where to invest, whether real estate was a good idea, when is the right time to buy a house, pension plans, S&P 500, Bitcoin, all of it. We never really figured it out properly. Now, we just ask AI, and it helps us structure our thinking.

This one is a step too far for me. Glad it's working out for you (for now) though.

> Before, we browsed recipe online or watch them on youtube. Now, we just ask ChatGPT.

It's fine to use as a brainstorming tool especially as a decent freestyle cook. It's equivalent to reading three recipes for the same dish and going from there.

However, if you are a strict recipe-follower or lack kitchen confidence, like my wife, you're gonna need a recipe that has actually been cooked by a human before, ideally one you have some faith in.

> Before, we browsed recipe online or watch them on youtube. Now, we just ask ChatGPT.

> Even small things—if I can still eat those eggs or where to travel next—are now AI-assisted.

Both of these are true for my wife and me as well. It's incredible how valuable these LLMs are for short, quick answers in the day of SEO laden crapware on the internet.

For coding (side-projects), I find CLINE super valuable and use it quite often to get refactoring ideas.

One of the things I love about ChatGPT is voice mode for collaborative searching. My wife and I will both ask questions about things like house repairs, meal planning, sleep training, etc. So much better than both of us googling separately in silence on our phones.

This post is a good piece of evidence that the value of LLMs is driven far more by the circumstances surrounding them than by positive value they bring.

All I see is a society in which people are stretched insanely thin (even the software engineers work on monetized side projects, for god's sake), where basic needs like proper education and time to focus are degrading or too expensive, where information gathering has been totally co-opted by advertisers and grifter—LLMs are a suboptimal solution to what are inherently structural social problems that arise from a distribution of wealth and organization of labor. LLMs do not address this. Give it five more years and they'll be totally integrated into advertising and extracting capital from users too, and they'll be just as useless as search has become today.

I don’t see any evidence here that AI has helped the poster, or his wife, at all. He also does not say a thing about how it has hurt his critical thinking ability or changed his biases.

I look at posts like these for evidence about whether I should use AI more than I do. (I use it little and don’t pay for it.) What we have here is a devotional post on the order of “I prayed to Jesus and my life is better now.”

The basic problem is that this form of writing and testimonial cannot carry the information necessary to meet the needs of a critical thinker. For instance: recipes. Googling a typical recipe takes 5 seconds. It can hardly get any easier! And it takes me right to someone's specific website. But with ChatGPT there is some significant probability of hallucination, and the answer I get is one no human stands behind. How is this even worth mentioning as a benefit?

That the poster includes recipes tells us about his unserious standards.

Among all the problems of LLMs in society, the noise created by people who are likely in the throes of sunk cost bias, endowment effect, ostrich effect, and other biases is not helping matters.

Looks quite reminiscent of how I use ChatGPT. My wife and I don't share an account, I guess I'm just a one man show :')

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extreme shill

A pet theory of mine is that women will be better at using AI for all but the most analytical/symbolic work (even this may not hold but I'd imagine the crossover is around there)

I have no mechanism but it feels true.