#sharedcommitment — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

I felt a little sheepish suggesting that the writing in the Media Lab paper about “cognitive debt” and ChatGPT needed some work. Ashley Juavinett, Professor of Neurobiology at UC San Diego, and psychologist Cat Hicks have no such qualms. Their podcast, “You Deserve Better Brain Research,” addresses some serious problems with this “weird document,” from the writing to methods and research design. I’m putting it up here because I enjoyed and learned from it, and I hope others will, too.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0XLGvUjtmrdEtHVaYUBo5X

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lvgaldieri @[email protected] · 2025-06-19 · 13:39 UTC

Read the conclusion of the recent Media Lab paper about LLMs. It’s a Non-Friction Nightmare.

No, that’s not a typo in my title. (Yes, it’s a bad pun.)

I’ve just had my first look at the MIT Media Lab paper that is making the rounds: “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.”

This paper is disturbing, to say the least. What the authors call “friction” is what we used to call thinking, or it’s at least an essential element of thinking, the effort of it. That effort includes the give and take of inquiry, the difficulty of dialogue, the sweat of education, the work of human language and human encounter.

The paper’s conclusion only scratches the surface of this problem when it addresses “ethical considerations.”

Consider what is probably the most alarming sentence here, which describes what happens when you reduce friction: people reach the conclusions the algorithm wants them to reach – or, rather, the algorithm reaches conclusions for them; people reach for nothing at all.

It’s surrender. Not just to machines, mind you, not just to the algorithm, but also to the interests (“the priorities”) the algorithm represents.

By surrendering to the these priorities, allowing ourselves to be guided by them, we’re also throwing in the towel on shared human experience, co-coordination and mutual guidance, reliance on each other and shared commitment — which is the only way we can work out our own priorities.

Finally, I can’t post this on my blog (a little center of friction in its own right) without saying something about the writing here.

I know this is a draft paper, but this conclusion sure could use another going-over. It’s not just the typo in the penultimate paragraph (“theis” instead of “their”) that needs correcting; there’s also that awkward bit about “net positive for the humans” in the final paragraph (which sounds like it came straight from an LLM) and the resort to cliche (“technological crossroads”) and industry jargon (“unprecedented opportunities for enhancing learning and information access”). The findings here deserve more clarity.

I’d also like to see a little more about the social and political consequences that would seem to follow inevitably from the “cognitive consequences” the authors document. But maybe that’s a matter for another paper.

As we stand at this technological crossroads, it becomes crucial to understand the full spectrum of cognitive consequences associated with LLM integration in educational and informational contexts. While these tools offer unprecedented opportunities for enhancing learning and information access, their potential impact on cognitive development, critical thinking, and intellectual independence demands a very careful consideration and continued research.
The LLM undeniably reduced the friction involved in answering participants’ questions compared to the Search Engine. However, this convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users’ inclination to critically evaluate the LLM’s output or ”opinions” (probabilistic answers based on the training datasets). This highlights a concerning evolution of the ‘echo chamber’ effect: rather than disappearing, it has adapted to shape user exposure through algorithmically curated content. What is ranked as “top” is ultimately influenced by the priorities of the LLM’s shareholders….
Only a few participants in the interviews mentioned that they did not follow the “thinking” [124] aspect of the LLMs and pursued their line of ideation and thinking.
Regarding ethical considerations, participants who were in the Brain-only group reported higher satisfaction and demonstrated higher brain connectivity, compared to other groups. Essays written with the help of LLM carried a lesser significance or value to the participants (impaired ownership, Figure 8), as they spent less time on writing (Figure 33), and mostly failed to provide a quote from theis [sic] essays (Session 1, Figure 6, Figure 7).
Human teachers “closed the loop” by detecting the LLM-generated essays, as they recognized the conventional structure and homogeneity of the delivered points for each essay within the topic and group.
We believe that the longitudinal studies are needed in order to understand the long-term impact of the LLMs on the human brain, before LLMs are recognized as something that is net positive for the humans.

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lvgaldieri @[email protected] · 2018-04-12 · 13:35 UTC

Cary Wolfe on “Another Moral Vocabulary”

Friday on the stoop.

This is from Natasha Lennard’s 2017 interview with Cary Wolfe in The Stone:

On the one hand, rights discourse is Exhibit A for the problems with philosophical humanism. Many of us, including myself, would agree that many of the ethical aspirations of humanism are quite admirable and we should continue to pursue them. For example, most of us would probably agree that treating animals cruelly, and justifying that treatment on the basis of their designation as “animal” rather than human, is a bad thing to do.
But the problem with how rights discourse addresses this problem — in animal rights philosophy, for example — is that animals end up having some kind of moral standing insofar as they are diminished versions of us: that is to say, insofar as they are possessed of various characteristics such as the capacity to experience suffering — and not just brute physical suffering but emotional duress as well — that we human beings possess more fully. And so we end up reinstating a normative form of the moral-subject-as-human that we wanted to move beyond in the first place.
So on the other hand, what one wants to do is to find a way of valuing nonhuman life not because it is some diminished or second-class form of the human, but because the diversity and abundance of life is to be valued for what it is in its own right, in its difference and uniqueness. An elephant or a dolphin or a chimpanzee isn’t worthy of respect because it embodies some normative form of the “human” plus or minus a handful of relevant moral characteristics. It’s worthy of respect for reasons that call upon us to come up with another moral vocabulary, a vocabulary that starts by acknowledging that whatever it is we value ethically and morally in various forms of life, it has nothing to do with the biological designation of “human” or “animal.”
Having said all that, there are many, many contexts in which rights discourse is the coin of the realm when you’re engaged in these arguments — and that’s not surprising, given that nearly all of our political and legal institutions are inherited from the brief historical period (ecologically speaking) in which humanism flourished and consolidated its domain. If you’re talking to a state legislature about strengthening laws for animal abuse cases, let’s say, instead of addressing a room full of people at a conference on deconstruction and philosophy about the various problematic assumptions built into rights discourse, then you better be able to use a different vocabulary and different rhetorical tools if you want to make good on your ethical commitments. That’s true even though those commitments and how you think about them might well be informed by a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the problem than would be available to those legislators. In other words, it’s only partly a philosophical question. It’s also a strategic question, one of location, context and audience, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that we can move more quickly in the realm of academic philosophical discourse on these questions than we can in the realm of legal and political institutions.

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