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alickz01/21/20252 repliesview on HN

> If you need the answer to a question, and you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter approach than the former.

Why not force everyone to start from first principles then?

I think learning is tied to curiosity and curiosity is not tied to difficulty of research

i.e. give a curious person a direct answer and they will go on to ask more questions, give an incurious person a direct answer and they won't go on to ask more questions

We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and that is a _good_ thing, not bad

Forcing us to forgo the giants and claw ourselves up to their height may have benefits, but in my eyes it is way less effective as a form of knowledge

The compounding force of knowledge is awesome to behold, even if it can be scary


Replies

sanderjd01/21/2025

Yes exactly. I think the concern here is totally valid. But for me personally, having LLMs unblock me more quickly on each question I have has allowed me to ask more questions, to research more things in the same amount of time. Which is great!

dragon9601/21/2025

One of the values of doing your own research is it forces you to speak the "language" of what you're trying to do.

It's like the struggle that we've all had when learning our first programming language. If we weren't forced to wrestle with compilation errors, our brains wouldn't have adapted to the mindset that the computer will do whatever you tell it to do and only that.

There's a place for LLMs in learning, and I feel like it satisfies the same niche as pre-synthesized Medium tutorials. It's no replacement for reading documentation or finding answers for yourself though.

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