Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
(OT: š¶ Do you rememberā¦)
Iāve been seeing some new terms pop up around AI use, namely ācognitive surrender,ā and also ācognitive offloadingā. Iām not in the mood for the full etymology dive, so the source Iām stopping at on the provenance would be a paper from Wharton. The meanings are pretty intuitive, at least based on how Iāve seen them used. Offloading would be when you delegate some of your thinking to something else, and surrender would be complete offloading.
I am not under the impression that people here havenāt seen these phrases before. ācognitive surrenderā has been mentioned, as far as I can tell, only one time on this instance. So just thought Iād bring it up.
I think cognitive offloading has come up a number of times here, but I donāt know that cognitive surrender has been brought up as much. It reminds me of The Colonization of Confidence by Robert Kingett, particularly the stretch where Leo is convinced that his actual voice as a writer is strictly inferior to the generic AI slop. Thereās a sense of active despair there that seems worth acknowledging if weāre going to have that conversation.
My bad, it was late when I posted and I only searched for surrender.
Iāve seen ācognitive surrenderā bandied about fairly often in various places online throughout the year, but I also keep wondering if the already well-defined psychology term ālearned helplessnessā doesnāt cover the underlying concept just as well.
Well, I donāt really have any skin in this game, so either term works well enough for me.
That being said, if the phrase is coming from that Wharton paper, note that it appears they are trying to extend the āThinking Fast and Slowā model of Systems 1 and 2 to include a System 3. So take that as you will. OFC it goes without saying that this model is beloved by our dear, dear, ever-increasingly incorrect friends
It feels like theyāre trying also to privilege AI as āsystem 3ā when realistically the idea of external cognitive assistance isnāt that different if youāre looking at Claude the chatbot or Claude the smart kid in your class who lets you copy his homework before homeroom. You could probably distinguish this from other forms of paratext by the degree to which it seeks to actively replace your own thought rather than supplementing or augmenting it, but then I remember my teachers saying the same thing about sparknotes so thereās probably more of a continuum there. If thatās the case, then the pattern that Dan Olsen describes in his WoW documentary is probably relevant here as well, since itās performance pressure and social norms that are really pushing the negative practices into a level that is killing everyoneās souls.
Epistatus: I skimmed the first 20 pages of the paper. I have not watched the WoW documentary.
Yeah, the paper doesnāt seem to do a good job at justifying introducing system 3. They should have at least looked at why you couldnāt model this as something like:
or
B- System 2 absorbs the result and begins trusting the black box more, perhaps deferring to its result before any internal cognition
Both of these things I pulled outta my ass can explain deskilling, and a situation like 5a) might explain capitulating to AI under pressure. So Iām not feeling like System 3 is necessary here.
That all being said, itās not like the paper gets to decide how the rest of the world chooses to use ācognitive surrenderā.
I donāt think so. Not that Iām referring to an academic definition of either term here, but sometimes when I get too far into the habit of reaching for a calculator to do some arithmetic, it gets to a point where I will go through all the motions of picking it up, punching in the numbers and reading the result, and only then do I feel very dumb for not managing to perform (in the occasion) a very basic addition myself. I wouldnāt describe that as ālearned helpnessnessā in the field of maths; itās just getting into a habit where I donāt even think about how tractable it is to do in my head. Extend that to a chatbot that purports to answer literally any question and I can see a problem developing.
To me, the difference is that the calculator was never really imposed upon you. It was obviously useful in certain situations (vanishingly few people are interested in calculating a sine or a square root by hand, practically none in doing so on a regular basis). Many of these AI tools are, in fact, being imposed through top-down mandates and interface dark patterns. That sets up the sort of adversarial environment that leads to learned helplessness over time.
Calculators also have a negligible chance of screwing up something basic, and you can in fact learn the right way to input problems into them such that they are guaranteed not to misinterpret you.
There also isnt a big company behind the calculator ran by some fragile egos who will change the results when they get it in their heads that dividing is now woke.
Or who think they are funny so it rounds 68 up to 69.
I thought learned helplessness was tied more to acceptance of negative stimuli. Like, if you expose a rat to an electric shock that it canāt do anything to escape or prevent enough times theyāll learn that they canāt do anything about it and stop trying even if presented with a very clear means of escape. Cognitive offloading I think is more tied to atrophy and/or habituation, which is related but distinct imo.