There's a psychological phenomenon in which people confuse access to information with information that they know. So they will say "I know how to do X" even if they can't do X, as long as they know where to find information on who to do X (a book, Google, personal notes, etc).
In the same way, people probably confuse the abilities of AI with their own knowledge and their own skills.
I have to disagree that access is trivial today. I can find nothing much of value on the internet.
Think about it, if you have a new theory, it's not already common knowledge, but all you can find is common knowledge, and anything which goes against common knowledge is censored or pruned, which is why finding such has gotten almost impossible. Furthermore, LLMs are only competent at common tasks, so the further you get in a field, the less useful LLMs become. All the best information is necessarily rare, and both search engines and LLMs are made to filter out the rare.
Your post did give me something important to think about, though! I thought that we were getting more systematic and materialistic in the western world, categorizing people and misinterpreting labels as being concrete pieces of reality, because of our scientism. It did not occur to me that it could be a natural consequence of people being bombarded by information. Still, people seem to think in different ways in Asia, are they really consuming less information than us?
Lastly, I take multidisciplinary theories to be a natural outcome of high intelligence, I don't think it can occur naturally very often, since most people simply cannot see abstract relationships across disciplines. Are you not calling yourself "crank" simply to beat other people to it? Because you've been call crazy enough times to doubt yourself? Because, like I said, other people fail to understand you. The only situation I can think of where stupid people connect seemingly unrelated things is skizophrenia, and the theories of skizophrenics are usually pretty poor.
Do you know the book "The Master and His Emissary"? According to the author of this book, a cultural shift in the west has caused us to value the left hemisphere's processing of the world, at the cost of the right (holistic, contextual, connected to lived reality). I fully agree with this observation, but I'm not sure which reason is correct. I haven't read the book, but like me, the author probably calls the effect cultural because it doesn't seem to occur in Asia.
Interestingly enough, skizophrenia is consistent with left-hemisphere dominant thinking. I personally think that the increase in autism diagnoses might be related as well.
I for one welcome solipsisms. I'm tired of "the consensus" eating everything, and every intellectual community asking me for a "source" the second I come up with any original ideas, and dismissing whatever I say unless I can find an authority which came to the same conclusion. But I also predict that this effect you're afraid of will never occur - we will experience the exact opposite. Everything tends towards homogeneity (the first I've seen notice it is Nietzsche), there's no generative power of uniqueness anymore, LLMs literally lack the ability to generate uniqueness, and society
I think you find great enjoyment in thinking, but I have done enough of it to realize that it's similar to day-dreaming. It's not useful, it's not healthy. Even if you came up with a workable ToE, it wouldn't benefit the world since the world is already too 'legible'.
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There's a psychological phenomenon in which people confuse access to information with information that they know. So they will say "I know how to do X" even if they can't do X, as long as they know where to find information on who to do X (a book, Google, personal notes, etc). In the same way, people probably confuse the abilities of AI with their own knowledge and their own skills.
I have to disagree that access is trivial today. I can find nothing much of value on the internet.
Think about it, if you have a new theory, it's not already common knowledge, but all you can find is common knowledge, and anything which goes against common knowledge is censored or pruned, which is why finding such has gotten almost impossible. Furthermore, LLMs are only competent at common tasks, so the further you get in a field, the less useful LLMs become. All the best information is necessarily rare, and both search engines and LLMs are made to filter out the rare.
Your post did give me something important to think about, though! I thought that we were getting more systematic and materialistic in the western world, categorizing people and misinterpreting labels as being concrete pieces of reality, because of our scientism. It did not occur to me that it could be a natural consequence of people being bombarded by information. Still, people seem to think in different ways in Asia, are they really consuming less information than us?
Lastly, I take multidisciplinary theories to be a natural outcome of high intelligence, I don't think it can occur naturally very often, since most people simply cannot see abstract relationships across disciplines. Are you not calling yourself "crank" simply to beat other people to it? Because you've been call crazy enough times to doubt yourself? Because, like I said, other people fail to understand you. The only situation I can think of where stupid people connect seemingly unrelated things is skizophrenia, and the theories of skizophrenics are usually pretty poor.
Do you know the book "The Master and His Emissary"? According to the author of this book, a cultural shift in the west has caused us to value the left hemisphere's processing of the world, at the cost of the right (holistic, contextual, connected to lived reality). I fully agree with this observation, but I'm not sure which reason is correct. I haven't read the book, but like me, the author probably calls the effect cultural because it doesn't seem to occur in Asia. Interestingly enough, skizophrenia is consistent with left-hemisphere dominant thinking. I personally think that the increase in autism diagnoses might be related as well.
I for one welcome solipsisms. I'm tired of "the consensus" eating everything, and every intellectual community asking me for a "source" the second I come up with any original ideas, and dismissing whatever I say unless I can find an authority which came to the same conclusion. But I also predict that this effect you're afraid of will never occur - we will experience the exact opposite. Everything tends towards homogeneity (the first I've seen notice it is Nietzsche), there's no generative power of uniqueness anymore, LLMs literally lack the ability to generate uniqueness, and society
I think you find great enjoyment in thinking, but I have done enough of it to realize that it's similar to day-dreaming. It's not useful, it's not healthy. Even if you came up with a workable ToE, it wouldn't benefit the world since the world is already too 'legible'.
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