Oddbean

I usually do an hour long walk every day and recently i’ve just been chatting with chatgpt with voice chat to ask questions about physics and to bounce ideas off it. Its like being on a podcast instead of listening to a podcast like I normally would do. Very odd but cool experience.

My 4yo ... "show me a picture of a bear attacking a car" "show me a picture of a bear attacking a window" "show me a picture of a bear attacking a rainbow" ... I'm struggling to explain to her that all these bears are just nice pictures made up by a bot and that rainbows can most definitely not be attacked by bears.

I would not build on top of these kind of experiences. It changes the internal wires of communication and the overall dynamic of interactive information, which will create some further projections and unconscious expectations within human relations that will feel just like the empty space that an addict feels when the chemical release drops. Can you get high on ideas? For sure, and there's nobody to balance and stop us there. My view.

why would your presence & interest annoy anyone, will? a lot of people, but i would say especially physicists, love teaching & explaining & musing aloud about physics like asking a star wars fan about star wars

pay money to get a worse experience? The breadth of questions you can ask an LLM is way more than an individual studying a small slice of physics. I saw this in my own domain of expertise. chatgpt knows way more coding than me, and ive been doing this for 26 years. I can ask an ai for hours on end to compare different aspects of different theories. There is lots to mine, and it’s easier to query than a human. It’s like a natural language interface to wikipedia. No human on earth is a walking talking wikipedia, chatgpt is the closest thing to it.

re: preferences & learning styles if money was out of the equation, & ai for hours at any hour is your preferred learning method ~> bless. it is a wonderful thing to know how you learn best. for my part, like if this was my dream, i think it would be cool if you had a coding tutor, too. but that, to me, is about a much more broad philosophy of learning thing. like for sure can ai be a good supplement & resource, in addition to. but the sole thing? learning how to ride a bike? learn how to scuba dive? surf? catch a baseball? sing? play an instrument? read? could ai replace a parent? do we ever achieve so much single domain expertise in anything that no human can teach or show us a damn thing? if you were teaching a coding class to high school students.. would some of them not be able to teach or show you something too? sure there is asking physics questions but what about learning to think like a physicist? learning to think like a tennis player? the type of learning that is applicable across domains. like oh, i can think like a physicist to write this poem? i can think like a scuba diver to clean my room? idk. maybe that's far far outside of what you plan on using physics for & again, you know best when it comes to you & what you want. 🫂💜 hope you are enjoying learning about physics!

Creating real connections with people who passionately study a small field of pysics actually tunes you in to that knowledge to explore it. You start having new ideas which were somehow influenced by that person's field of information and connection with the nature and the wander. Otherwise you can collect information fill your memory with it but I see no real point for it. Also there are some amazing dicumentaries. I loved Jim al-khalili's approach and he is also exploring some topics on to quantum biology which is, I think, the new frontier.