The Type of Amnesia We all Struggle With

This is my cousin Tyler with his bike. I’ve recently started joining Tyler on rides to discover the city of Vancouver BC and surrounding area. This process has shown me the benefits of experiencing the sights and sounds of a city from a bike. It gives you an inside perspective you cannot obtain from inside a car.

I find that using AI is in some ways acting like a car in this scenario where I’m being sheltered from the elements that can grant me a wildly different and more meaningful perspective.

I’ve noticed that for some reason when AI gives me a completely ridiculous output and I recognize it as being false, I still trust the other answers I get on topics I’m less knowledgable in. It is as if I am fine letting it steer me so long as we do not touch on topics I have put sweat into.

This is an example of the Gel-Mann amnesia effect:

The phenomenon of a person trusting newspapers for topics which that person is not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing the newspaper as being extremely inaccurate on certain topics which that person is knowledgeable

After learning about this phenomena I started catching my self doing this constantly. The most recent example for me happened when learning the fundamentals of front-end programming in Javascript. I had vibe coded a few projects before but only once I grasped the fundamentals could I understand that I was being spoon fed fluff by the AI.

I got sick of vibe coding because of the dread that came with not knowing what was happening under the hood. I picked up two books on Javascript for beginners and blasted through the fundamentals. I found it fascinating, in fact this was my reading of choice for the beach in Tofino, BC… That’s how you know you have slipped into nerdity.

Since I built a foundation to stand on, for the first time I was able to correct code that the agent spit out. This was exhilarating, but also scary, since I so often took the LLM’s output as fact. And I’m not alone in this, nor do I blame others for doing this. AI is being presented to us as an authority and it is being sold well.

Then when picking up REACT, I did something I had not done before, I started reading the documentation… Seasoned programmers are laughing at me right now but I cannot state how helpful this was for my brain. The retention I’m having from reading books and documentation far outweighs the result of a quick LLM chat.

I recognize how simple this sounds, but this newly built habit unveiled the inherent issues with a population surrendering cognitive function to AI. Treating something like AI as the single source of truth allows us to shirk the responsibility of knowing, thinking, disagreeing, basically things that cause friction. We are already primed to do this as proven by the Gel-Mann effect. As longs as we stop learning the fundamentals, there will be nothing to cause friction with.

The positive side is that AI is pushing me into life changing realizations like this, I am ashamed to admit that I was not previously motivated to just pick up a book at the public library to learn something like Javascript. Now I am blown away that I have this resource in my community, and will continue to use it to learn new concepts. The compounding effect of having real fundamental knowledge before using AI is a heavy motivator to read more.

Happy learning everyone!

What You’re Hearing

I’m slowly getting better with the Roland P-6 but I can tell I need a groove box to develop more complex arrangements. However, the limitations of the P-6 is forcing creativity that I like to see. For this track I sat down after a bike ride and recorded it within 20 minutes of taking the bike shorts off (and no, not replacing them with pants).