Cal Newport

God gives sermons about Cal Network.

Something I'm going to go to hell for.

All right, let's see what else we have here.

Thomas wrote and said, I consider LLMs to be practice for communicating in real life, not a substitute.

What I do is similar to what Ben and David of Acquired do.

They use Claude to train themselves on their spiel and test the coherence of their ideas, and then they hit the recording booth and talk to each other.

I think that's the model.

I mean, I get that, Thomas.

I know people do that.

They test out ideas, the back and forth.

It's like a...

It's a way of thinking that lowers the energy required to think because you get all these mental breaks while you're waiting for the chatbot to say things and to do some thinking on your behalf.

I get it, but it also still makes me uncomfortable.

It still makes me uncomfortable, the sort of interacting using something that's uniquely human and sacred to speech with a machine.

There's a sort of emotional, spiritual fraud there where our mind, even though part of our mind knows this is a matrix being multiplied a bunch of times to create tokens autoregressively.

A deeper part of our mind thinks it's talking to another being and treating it as such, and it's not.

And there's just something there that makes me uncomfortable, but I can't quite articulate what to do about it.

France writes in to say, Well, I'm sure all species or many species have different ways of communicating, but I think the point here of Jewish tradition is

is that speech as we know it, that is the ability to transmit arbitrary mental states from one individual to another, this deeply human thing, is core to the human experience and therefore should be treated with care.

Alex says, you nailed it.