alt Hacker News> Do we actually have any measurements of if AI helps you learn something better?
To me this is intuitively true based on anecdata. 2 examples
1) learning spanish - when I hear or read a phrase I don't know, I type it into the LLM and I learn a new word/phrase. Sure, I could have cracked open a spanish language dictionary, but tbh, I wasn't going to do that. Not to mention that dictionaries are translating word by word and not phrase by phrase.
2) growing vegetables in the garden. I literally watched YT tutorials and did what they did, and now I have vegetables that I didn't before. Yes, I could have probably could have gotten this from a botany book, but once again, I probably was not going to do this. I also was trouble shooting a lot in gemini
Here are the problems I traversed: - How much water should I give these per day? what's the watering schedule? - how much sun vs shade? - when do I move seedling to the ground outside? - Is trimming good? which parts and when do I trim? - [take a picture of weird growth] - Is this a disease on the plant? Or part of the plant naturally?
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Do you retain that information? Or are you just constantly relying on having access to an llm to re-look things up. The amount of information I retain when using llms to learn is far less than other methods, not sure why, you'd think it would be just as effective as reading a book, but it's definitely not. Probably for the same reason that learning math and always using a calculator does not make you great at math.
I've wasted a ton of my life already trying to make llms work for learning over the last few years, I'm especially bitter about it. I think this technology is a scam made to make us reliant on a think-for-me machines.
I also have one anecdote - I (think) I understood basics of quantum mechanics intuitively for the first time. Of course it's probably superficial and maybe not 100% correct, but it is better than every time I tried to understand it before.
It definitely wasn't a single prompt, but two hours of back and forth, with a lot of time spent thinking (me, not LLM) in between. There were multiple times where I misunderstood something, so if I just read a book I'd probably get stuck many times.