I think you're generally right about the OP, but I don't see your alternative method as a tonic to the problem the author is discussing. I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong, and that the original post tends towards hierarchy in an almost reactionary way, yet at the same time I also see that many people tend to ingest information from other forms of media less critically than they might a book or written piece. I think this dichotomy derives from the different levels of focus we apply to different activities. Reading, even for leisure, demands a level of effort that forces you to focus and, in a way, analyze the information you're ingesting. By removing that barrier, you might fail to fully grasp the ideas that the primary source expressed.
In your use case, the LLM can be a great tool to get a start, but it's much easier to accept that output uncritically, which is especially problematic because it bears the biases of the training corpus. Sure, you can mitigate that issue if you're driven by the intellectual curiosity to dig deeper, which it seems you are, but at that point aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway? You're just using the initial steps to discover the "foundational texts", as the original post puts it, of the field. The LLM step becomes less material to the follow-up reading you've done after the fact.
Many, perhaps even most people will not make it to the second step. I see the lack of intellectual curiosity as a problem of focus more than anything else, and in my experience the overly rich media landscape of the internet does not concentrate that focus in most people.
> I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong
The good news is that not only does the "private researcher"
(curious individual person without a research background or job) nowadays have the ability to read online in far-removed libraries, they are even empowered to download the data of many studies, fire up their Jupyter notebooks to replicate
some work.
The danger is that some wannabes create even more noise on the proper science channels that are already polluted by fraudsters generating fake papers via ChatGPT and friends... making it harder for the untrained eye to distinguish between respectable science and pseudo-science.
I think there'd be some value in asking each of the major chatLLMs whether vaccines cause autism. If the answer is not some unequivocal variation of "no, aside from fraudulent and discredited research," you have a serious problem if you're relying on AI to do research for you.
Yea, it's the classic conflation of the format of the media with other factors- it's not the fact that you're reading from a screen instead of a paper page that's making you intellectually incurious.
But the disingenuous thing is that I don't think these arguments are really meant to examine why people might be less curious- it's just to sound cooler than people who read the OP and imagine the writer in some cafe pouring over a big stack of hardcover books.
>> aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway?
I would say the distinction is that I don't need to be precious about why I would look at foundational texts. Maybe foundational texts are a bit over-hyped- anything written 100 years ago was made for the context of that time, and even if the ideas are universal to a certain extent, it's better digested through a modern lens in light of how those ideas have affected everything since then. How much more do you get out of an idea reading it from the original? It feels like there's a bit of a diminishing return in a lot of cases.
In your use case, the LLM can be a great tool to get a start, but it's much easier to accept that output uncritically, which is especially problematic because it bears the biases of the training corpus. Sure, you can mitigate that issue if you're driven by the intellectual curiosity to dig deeper, which it seems you are, but at that point aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway? You're just using the initial steps to discover the "foundational texts", as the original post puts it, of the field. The LLM step becomes less material to the follow-up reading you've done after the fact.
Many, perhaps even most people will not make it to the second step. I see the lack of intellectual curiosity as a problem of focus more than anything else, and in my experience the overly rich media landscape of the internet does not concentrate that focus in most people.