LLMS help me get over the “halo problem“, a term I coined for a fail state of self-education in the wikipedia age. Which is, I have a desire to learn about subject ‘A’ and look it up. Then when I encounter a phrase or concept ‘B’ which is foreign to me I explore that link, and anything problematic in ‘B’ I do the same… there was a Simpsons scene where Homer start with an advanced Marketing guide, drops that for a Dummies type guide, bins that and goes to look up Marketing in the dictionary…
Well, that works a lot of the time, but sometimes ‘B’ includes a baffling concept ‘C’, when I try to understand that I trip over alien concept ‘D’, and so I read up on ‘D’ and… that article is contingent on already understanding my initial topic ‘A’. It circled all the way back around
So instead of finding stairs up, the whole topic exists in a self supporting halo above me and out of reach.
I won’t trust LLMs to understand things FOR me, I’ve no desire to activate an Electric Monk1. But it really gets me over the hurdle of not quite knowing how to ask another human (or redditor, close enough) what it is I don’t know about what I don’t know! Even hedging the comment to explain that’s what I am doing is painful.
If LLMs do nothing else well, they do this.
- “The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder… Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency ↩︎
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