[papandada]

I've learned almost everything I know through reading and listening, with very little discourse. I rarely asked questions in class, never had tutors, never went to office hours. I hesitate to post questions online. If I don't understand something, I just read ... more, or bang my head against it as trial and error.

I think this is partly why I'm still looking to be wowed by this technology, personally, in terms of what it can accomplish for me. And while it could be rightly said I've made things unnecessarily hard for myself approaching life like this, I feel it has been beneficial, and enriching, to force myself to really ask, what is this person saying here? In particular, I wouldn't want GPT to lead to a general lessening of empathy.

[haswell]

> And while it could be rightly said I've made things unnecessarily hard for myself approaching life like this, I feel it has been beneficial, and enriching, to force myself to really ask, what is this person saying here?

I personally don’t believe there’s mutual exclusivity here.

I spent the first half of my life just absorbing. I’ve spent the 2nd half of my life so far undoing the patterns of thought that can result from staying inside one’s head instead of engaging with people.

In my experience, asking the person saying something what they mean is far more effective than asking myself what they mean.

When I ask them, I can form real empathy.

When I only ask myself, I just waste significant energy on all of the ways I imagine I could or should be empathetic.

> In particular, I wouldn't want GPT to lead to a general lessening of empathy.

While I have a lot of concerns about LLMs and the future of literacy, propagation if misinformation, etc, I don’t think ChatGPT is any more risk to empathy than 100 other aspects of modern life.

Facebook, Twitter and Reddit seem far more responsible for the erosion of empathy, and it’s unclear how LLMs would inherently lead to a “general lessening”. I think that ship sailed a decade ago.

[papandada]

Well, here instead of asking you a clarifying question about your response, I might instead ask ChatGPT. Something would be lost, in my mind. Just musing out loud.

[haswell]

I think leaning on ChatGPT to understand others is as problematic as relying only on oneself to understand others, but now you’ve added a layer of your own interpretation depending on how you engage with ChatGPT.

Put another way, if you’re going to sources other than the individual speaking to clarify what they’re saying, the underlying issue is probably not ChatGPT or whatever the next tool is that comes around.

Another form of what you describe is leaning on one’s friends/acquaintances. Plenty of people do this, often with poor results. Reddit’s various relationship forums are a great example. I translate what I thought I heard and ask a 3rd party who wasn’t there what they hear. But by doing so, I remove even more context and make it even less likely to arrive at a useful answer.

I’m sure people will use LLMs for this, but the root issue is deeper, not caused by these tools.

I think that with time, we’ll get better at determining which types of conversations are worthwhile and which aren’t.

If I’m trying to understand a complex multi-faceted technical issue, it’s amazing to be able to drill deeper and deeper into the knowledge contained within the LLM.

If I’m trying to understand the internal states of other people, I have no reason to believe I’ll find good answers in a model that wasn’t trained on that person’s thoughts.