alt Hacker NewsThe best way to understand a car is to build a car. Hardly anyone is going to do that, but we still all use them quite well in our daily lives. In large part because the companies who build them spend time and effort to improve them and take away friction and complexity.
If you want to be an F1 driver it's probably useful to understand almost every part of a car. If you're a delivery driver, it probably isn't, even if you use one 40+ hours a week.
Replies
It might make sense to split the car analogy into different users:
1. For the majority of regular users the best way to understand the car is to read the manual and use the car.
2. For F1 drivers the best way to understand the car is to consult with engineers and use the car.
3. For a mechanic / engineer the best way to understand the car is to build and use the car.
yes except intelligence isn't like a car, there's no way to break the complicated emergent behaviors of these models into simple abstractions. you can understand a LLM by training one the same amount you can understand a brain by dissection.
Your example / analogy is useful in the sense that its usually useful to establish the thought experiment with the boundary conditions.
But in between someone commuting in a Toyota and an F1 driver are many, many people, the best example from inside the extremes is probably a car mechanic, and even there, there's the oil change place with the flat fee painted in the window, and the Koenigsberg dealership that orders the part from Europe. The guy who tunes those up can afford one himself.
In the use case segment where just about anyone can do it with a few hours training, yeah, maybe that investment is zero instead of a week now.
But I'm much more interested in the one where F1 cars break the sound barrier now.