Posts tagged with "quote"
- In mathematics you don't understand things
11/3/2025
Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.
- Our story is the absolute accurate version
9/6/2025
Drama tends to be from all the assumptions. Like, I know that, my truth, is the right story… You were wrong. And I think it’s so interesting because people come to therapy with these faulty narratives…
We’re all storytellers. We all try to make sense of something, and we all believe that our story is the absolute accurate version of the story, and actually it’s so funny when you see couples and they experience the same experience, and they have wildly different versions.
And then there’s some part where the Venn diagram overlaps, and then finally, they can see, oh, that person’s not a bad person they were coming at it because they, in their story, they believe this. And that’s so important. So drama happens when assumptions are made. People characterize the other person’s story as inaccurate, their own story as accurate. And then there’s… no space for curiosity or connection. It’s all rupture, no repair. our-story-is-the-absolute-accurate-version.md
- Quoting Richard Matthew Stallman in Reasons not to use ChatGPT
10/3/2025
Quoting Richard Matthew Stallman in Reasons not to use ChatGPT:
It does not know what its output means. It has no idea that words can mean anything.… people should not trust systems that mindlessly play with words to be correct in what those words mean.
My initial reaction is agreement. But then what are the implications? Does it follow that machines will never have intelligence? What makes our intelligence different? A calculator doesn’t know what its output means. Should we trust it? Is the way the calculator works with numbers significantly different than the way the LLM works with words. It’s empirically different, but when attempting to consider each domain they operate in is it significantly different?
Did he think about all of this and then come to his conclusion?
These are all interesting questions and conversations we should be having but I wonder if his real complaint is included in his trailing thoughts:
Another reason to reject ChatGPT in particular is that users cannot get a copy of it.
- Quoting Toby Stuart on Pedigree
10/6/2025
Quoting Toby Stuart on the EconTalk episode The Invisible Hierarchies that Rule Our World
The episode ended with a discussion on the impact of AI as it relates to people’s status, that it will reinforce the prestige hierarchy.
When you can’t judge quality that’s precisely the time in which you rely on pedigree.
He goes on to say:
So if you are a college admissions officer, take that problem at a place where a lot of people want to go, it’s really hard to read an essay and say “I’m admitting them because this is an outstanding essay,” if that ever happened. But what you can do is, I’ve heard of the high school, or there is some other status marker in the background, so I’m going to overweight that relative to information that formerly was a signal but it’s just noise.
Writing has been used just about everywhere to evaluate people. Now the capability of crafting well written content is available to everyone. Consequently, we become more reliant on other indicators for evaluation, which, unfortunately, are often characteristics over which people have limited control
This line of thought presents a sobering reality. What was once seen as an equalizer for those lacking inherited advantages potentially turns out to be detrimental to their advancement.
- Quoting Unmesh Joshi on The Learning Loop
11/5/2025
Quoting Unmesh Joshi via The Learning Loop and LLMs
An AI can generate a perfect solution in seconds, but it cannot give you the experience you gain from the struggle of creating it yourself. The small failures and the “aha!” moments are essential features of learning, not bugs to be automated away.
Relatedly, on the topic of learning, I was pondering today how popular AI chat apps are great at providing answers, but that is often opposed to learning.
This brings to mind the concept of designing a system so that users fall into the pit of success, instead of the pit of despair. When using the popular AI chat systems for learning they are designed so that by default users fall into the pit of despair, they are detrimental to learning. But it does not need to be that way. Chat systems can be designed so that users fall into the pit of success, so that by default they enrich the learning process.
- Run back the tape to prove one's self-righteousness
9/1/2025
I think he’s saying one other thing, or at least I learned one other thing from it. Which is that—and this is something you learn from marriage or a close friendship—you feel an injustice, or you’re accused of an injustice, and you play back the tape in your mind and you realize, ‘Nope, I was right.’ I did the right thing, and my friend or my wife is misremembering this, and let’s bring it out in the light. Let’s play the tape. Let’s get the video. Let’s get the CCTV—the closed circuit television—of that conversation we had three weeks ago at breakfast. And I’m going to show her—she’s going to show me—how it really was.
And, that’s not available, that tape. And, your mind has—it’s an illusion to think you can bring that into the light and settle it. And, it’s one of the deepest things I think you learn from marriage, is that your self-righteousness is usually—it’s either wrong, it’s a fake memory. We don’t have the tape. And, it’s much better to just say, ‘Maybe I was wrong and I’m going to learn from it.’
But, the idea that you could just get that big flashlight and illuminate that dark corner from childhood, from two years ago, from last week, it’s just an illusion. And it’s a dangerous, unhelpful illusion for interacting with other human beings who have the same challenges you do.
- To really understand a concept
11/3/2025
To really understand a concept, you have to “invent” it yourself in some capacity Understanding doesn’t come from passive content consumption. It is always self-built. It is an active, high-agency, self-directed process of creating and debugging your own mental models.
François Chollet (via)