00:11
Also, our IP features were also new to this technology, so they didn't really know much better than us.
Yeah, right. This is part of what makes my own current research so important.
Hey, always good to be self-important.
Look, I have a high level of self-importance, Asami. This is actually a key feature of me.
Just in case anybody's unaware, that was intended to be deep sarcasm.
That was a deep, deep sarcasm.
So, this idea... I've distracted myself with my own sarcasm.
The idea of having a little bit of accessibility but still having to struggle with it is actually really well aligned with the learning process.
I mean, it's aligned with being like, yeah, it's a little tough, it's a little weird, but I can still kind of get it. I can go along with this.
The teachers also, maybe they didn't vocalize this. I think it would have been best if maybe they did, where they were like, hey, it is hard.
It is kind of tricky. This is a new thing.
Yeah, I think it aligned with our sort of age expectation of how much we should know.
Yeah, that's fair.
None of us, nobody of adult age expected us when we were in middle school how to write command lines.
But we did know how to look for different folders or make new folders and things like that.
There was enough struggle. What do you do when the laptop crashes all of a sudden? Let's maybe turn it back on again, right?
Don't just necessarily sit there and cry right away.
You wait first.
Right. And here, the technology over the decade or two have exponentially become so much more user friendly to the point that it's just so far removed from the inner workings layer.
And so higher up in a level that if something happens in an unintuitive way, it's really difficult to undo that and troubleshoot because you don't know how to get to the deeper level.
And maybe for the digital native kids, it's like, oh, what do you mean you don't have an app for this?
We frequently did not have app for a lot of things. And we frequently had to make something.
03:00
Right. The app is a good example of that higher level sort of disconnect from some of the underlying features of the tech.
Because it does all of the heavy lifting for you. It hasn't even offloaded your thinking at this point. It's just removed it.
There is no thinking. You open the app and then you do the thing.
And I don't want to put a moral stance on that.
I don't think it's good or bad.
I do this the same way when I talk about anything AI labeled, especially LLMs or diffusion models for images.
It's less about the good and bad in these particular cases. And it's more about what has been lost and what are you gaining?
And in a lot of cases, usually the loss is a learning. You're losing a learning about something.
Yeah. Learning opportunity is what's lost.
And in, say, like the file system stuff, I mean, you are losing until it becomes completely sort of unnecessary.
The ability to navigate a lot of information.
You lose until it's a non-issue.
Yeah. You lose a lot until it becomes a non-issue. And so part of this is that working.
I mean, take the Apple products in general.
Those worked entirely towards becoming user friendly to the point that it removed all that.
You really don't have to know anything about it.
I mean, in order to install something, you're not even executing an installer.
You drag an icon to your applications folder, which like, OK, also folders.
But still, you drag this to the other box, which has had an arrow drawn for you.
Right, right, right.
Convenient, easy, fast. Right? Like, no problem.
I don't need to know how an installer works.
Yeah.
But, like, I have an idea.
If your drag and drop doesn't work, then you all of a sudden don't know what to do.
Right. Yeah. You're not really getting any feedback.
And you might get no feedback, depending on any type of errors.
And even the idea of getting errors and having to search for them is a bit of a, like, back thing.
It's not like what you would do maybe anymore. Right?
You might just try it again.
Yeah, you might be like, oh, well, I'll call this number and figure it out.
Or ask a chatbot.
Yeah, I'll ask a chatbot, not even a forum.
Forum is so 2000.
Yep, yep.
We will, I will share maybe at least one thing I've posted in our Zoom chat here.
But, like, I've also put it into our little tracking file.
I found an old 2021 Vox article that I think talks specifically about this, like, file system thing.
And I have found at least one, maybe two, but, like, one archive paper using Perplexity.
06:07
Just as a side note, because that's, again, we can talk about this later.
As to why it's almost more convenient to start there and then filter things out later.
That points out that the struggle is somewhere between, like, the user friendliness.
This user interface function that people have become accustomed to.
And they get locked into a particular ecosystem or way of thinking.
Right?
This is the pattern I use to approach this particular topic.
This is how I'm going to do it.
This is what I'm used to.
And I think what we see there is some hints in some of these of, like, what I know.
Or at least am aware of in the space of tech and in the space of trying to create, like, flexible, transferable skill sets.
And humans, right?
Humans who are deep and nuanced and all that stuff.
You can't just have them do one thing.
If you teach them one thing, and that's the one thing that they do, we as humans then cannot necessarily stretch that to another thing.
Like, if you're locked into one ecosystem, it's very hard to then break out from that ecosystem.
And this is a way of thinking.
It's part of our way of thinking.
If you are told, use Apple iOS and only Apple iOS.
And that's all you do for, like, a decade or more of your life when you're first introduced to these things.
And then somebody hands you a Windows computer, you're in trouble.
I mean, like, you're in trouble.
What do you mean?
Where's my Apple key?
Yes.
And then with the caveat that, like, there is definitely an attempted convergence of these, right?
To make them as user-friendly as possible.
But, like, you'd still have some issues until you, like, kind of slowly adapted to the other one.
Right.
I mean, different OS is essentially, like, a different, like, thought mechanism, right?
Different thought logics.
And, like, you're asking this, like, people who only have ever seen one type of way of thinking and one method of logics.
And suddenly saying, now scratch that.
Do this other thing.
Like, of course, there's going to be a huge learning curve and a period of confusion and chaos.
Exactly.
I mean, that's just.
And it's, which would be normal, right?
Except that is, like, part of this problem of having isolated ecosystems of tools is that it becomes really hard to move between them and you end up locked.
09:01
And then it's hard to break the barrier, right?
To sort of go to this other one.
It's not impossible.
It can be a worthwhile process.
Just like your mom's new learning into a new field, a new way of thinking, right?
This is possibly really great and beneficial.
But it is an interesting observation and something that teachers, I think, notably struggle with across grade levels, depending on where they're coming from and how they're trying to help the students to be flexible and think.
But they're also confined by time and requirements.
And some of these being good, but they're somehow constrained or confined and then end up narrowing that too much.
Or the students are already pre-narrowed because the devices in front of them and the tools in front of them are just locked in one way.
Yeah.
Okay.
Let's end it here.
But it's given me thoughts for something else that we should maybe or maybe not continue over the next episode.
We can always talk about thinking.
I mean, like...
Yes.
Yeah.
All right.
Great.
There's endless things to talk about.
But now for now.
All right.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C.
See you next time.
