Bilingual

The tired you can't explain
21 hours ago
- The exhaustion from modern knowledge work is not a personal failing but a result of cognitive science, as revealed by a survey showing many workers feel overwhelmed and interrupted frequently.
- Ten cognitive laws explain the strain: insight restructuring, chunking, Zeigarnik effect, Ovsiankina effect, task-switching cost, attentional narrowing, choice overload, recognition over recall, implementation intentions, and affect-as-information heuristic.
- The cumulative effect of these cognitive factors—such as switching taxes, unfinished loops, and interruptions—leads to mental exhaustion, not lack of discipline.
- Recognizing that the tiredness is a natural byproduct of cognitive overload can remove shame and change one's perspective on workplace fatigue.
What Makes Humans Stupid
17 days ago
- Stupidity is not the absence of intelligence but a sophisticated, active process that uses intelligence to make easy problems harder, often through elaborate theories or systems.
- Intelligence and stupidity scale together; more intelligent systems can achieve greater feats of stupidity, as seen in human institutions, technology, and ideology.
- Stupidity involves elaborating and defending errors, turning them into foundations for further action, which paradoxically requires prior intelligence.
- Examples include misapplying theories like quantum mechanics to consciousness or cybernetics to economies, worsening problems instead of solving them.
- Novelists and philosophers, such as Musil, Swift, and Pynchon, have explored intelligent stupidity, where intellect serves error, leading to collective or institutional failure.
- Stupidity persists due to environmental changes or overextension of heuristics, as seen in moths drawn to artificial light or specialized systems hacked by external agents.
- AI poses a risk of super-stupidity, where errors become undetectable as humans outsource cognitive capacities, potentially creating sophisticated stupidity indistinguishable from intelligence.
- A science of stupidity is proposed to study its mechanisms, evolutionary dynamics, and design principles to prevent tools from replacing rather than enhancing cognition.
Show HN: I built a web tool to see and edit what an AI thinks before it answers
20 days ago
- Lucid visualizes the internal representations (J-space) of a language model as it processes prompts, similar to a global workspace in human cognition.
- It uses a 'Jacobian lens' technique to inspect concepts at each layer of the model, revealing which ones are utilized or suppressed in responses.
- The tool is publicly accessible in a browser, works on small open models, and requires only a single forward pass for operation, with no installation or account needed.

cognitive science

The tired you can't explain

What Makes Humans Stupid

Show HN: I built a web tool to see and edit what an AI thinks before it answers