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I really have to challenge the notion of AI "distilling information without cognitive bias. First, AI systems absolutely embody cognitive biases - they're just different from human ones. These systems inherit biases from: - Their training data (which reflects human biases and knowledge cutoffs)
- Architectural decisions made by engineers
- Optimization criteria and reinforcement learning objectives
- The specific prompting and context provided by users
An AI doesn't independently evaluate source credibility or apply domain expertise - it synthesizes patterns from its training data according to its programming.Second: You frame AI as a "power suit" for distilling information faster. While speed has its place, a core value of doing research isn't just arriving at a final summary. It's the process of engaging with a vast, often messy, diversity of information, facts, opinions, and even flawed arguments. Grappling with that breadth, identifying conflicting viewpoints, and synthesizing them _yourself_ is where deep understanding and critical thinking are truly built. Skipping straight to the "distilled information," as useful as it might be for some tasks, feels like reading an incredibly abridged version of Lord of the Rings: A small man finds a powerful ring once owned by an evil God, makes some friends and ends up destroying the ring in a volcano. The end. You miss all the nuance, context, and struggle that creates real meaning and understanding. Following on from that, you suggest that this AI-driven distillation then "allows for another level, experiments, surveys, etc to uncover things even further." I'd argue the opposite is more likely. These tools are bypassing the very cognitive effort that develops critical thinking in the first place. The essential practice for building those skills involves precisely the tasks these tools aim to automate: navigating contradictory information, assessing source reliability, weighing arguments, and constructing a reasoned conclusion yourself. By offloading this fundamental intellectual work, we remove the necessary exercise. We're unfortunately already seeing glimpses of this, with people resorting to shortcuts like asking "@Grok is this true???" on Twitter instead of engaging critically with the information presented to them. Tools like this might offer helpful starting points or quick summaries, but they can't replicate the cognitive and critical thinking benefits of the research journey itself. They aren't a substitute for the human mind actively wrestling with information to achieve genuine understanding, which is the foundation required before one can effectively design meaningful experiments or surveys. |
As humans, we align to our experiences and values, all of which are very diverse and nuanced. Reminds me of a friend who loves any medical conspiracy theory, whose dad was a bit of an ass to him, and of course, a scientist!
Without our cognitive biases, are we truly human? Our values; our desired outcomes inherently are part of what shapes us. and of course the sources we choose to trust reinforce this.
It's this that makes me think AGI can never be achieved, or human-like ability for AI to think, because we are all biased, like it or not. Collectively and through challenging each other, this is what makes society thrive.
I feel there is no true path towards a single source of truth, but collaboratively we can at least work towards getting there as closely as possible