Q&A sites breed complacence
Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2024 8:26 pm
If you type any technical question into google, you'll most likely end up on a site such as stackexchange (or one of its many variants), Quora, Reddit and so on. Popular search engines strongly favor these websites, but I distrust and dislike this status quo. In most cases there exist other sources that not only contain the information the user needs, but are also perhaps more general and useful as a reference. For example an online book, manual or paper - they might take more time to read, but they will be of more value to the reader. Instead, Q&A sites offer "the best answer" - something to be taken at face value with little if any further interpretation. That's the pretense.
This pattern encourages a sort of intellectual complacence among the public. People want a convenient "answer" and without guidance they often avoid having to think more abstractly or broadly about the question. I've seen this many times while helping students. Naturally I would break the task down into pieces for them and prompt them to answer an easier question, and continue leading them along the same line of reasoning I'd use. Outside an academic context it's often appropriate to simply provide an answer if one exists, but clearly these Q&A websites should not dominate the search results or displace authoritative sources from the immediately-visible search results. If LLMs eventually come to yield 'better' results, it will only encourage this exploitable habit. I'm not sure that people will put quite the same faith in responses they know to be machine-generated, compared to a site like Wikipedia that launders propaganda as public consensus, but it's certainly possible and the basic ruse they're using is essentially the same. These services provide a convenient source of information in order to habituate the public and make them confident using the services, and then use it to lie and mislead very selectively, when and where it really counts.
This is not to say people mustn't use these conveniences or any such hypocrisy of that sort. Instead, one should have awareness of the habits these services encourage and how they could be exploited and try not to rely on them when possible. So many people use them regularly and consider it second nature. It's one thing to use a calculator and let your mental arithmetic skills lapse a bit. It's another thing entirely to use some service that's promoted (and received) as the next Oracle of Delphi for most of one's questions. If that isn't a major cause of intellectual complacence, dependence and credulity, then I don't know what is or could be.
This pattern encourages a sort of intellectual complacence among the public. People want a convenient "answer" and without guidance they often avoid having to think more abstractly or broadly about the question. I've seen this many times while helping students. Naturally I would break the task down into pieces for them and prompt them to answer an easier question, and continue leading them along the same line of reasoning I'd use. Outside an academic context it's often appropriate to simply provide an answer if one exists, but clearly these Q&A websites should not dominate the search results or displace authoritative sources from the immediately-visible search results. If LLMs eventually come to yield 'better' results, it will only encourage this exploitable habit. I'm not sure that people will put quite the same faith in responses they know to be machine-generated, compared to a site like Wikipedia that launders propaganda as public consensus, but it's certainly possible and the basic ruse they're using is essentially the same. These services provide a convenient source of information in order to habituate the public and make them confident using the services, and then use it to lie and mislead very selectively, when and where it really counts.
This is not to say people mustn't use these conveniences or any such hypocrisy of that sort. Instead, one should have awareness of the habits these services encourage and how they could be exploited and try not to rely on them when possible. So many people use them regularly and consider it second nature. It's one thing to use a calculator and let your mental arithmetic skills lapse a bit. It's another thing entirely to use some service that's promoted (and received) as the next Oracle of Delphi for most of one's questions. If that isn't a major cause of intellectual complacence, dependence and credulity, then I don't know what is or could be.