Will Schenk

Brendan McCord:

LLMs are living off the moral and intellectual capital of a pre-AI world, just like Nietzsche said secular liberals live off Christianity. What happens when the inheritance runs out?

Using LLMs well – knowing when to trust them, how to interrogate their outputs, what questions are worth asking – depends on capacities that are pre-LLM in origin: critical judgment, domain expertise, philosophical seriousness, taste.

Nietzsche thought secular liberals were coasting on the fumes of a Christian metaphysics they’d officially abandoned. The shadow of God lingering on the cave wall. The question is whether LLM-native thinking is the same kind of afterglow.

The Nietzsche he’s pointing to is from Twilight of the Idols:

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.

When I first read the post I thought that the inheritance was the intellectual capital of a pre-AI world, including what is true, or how we thought about authenticity or realness, in addition to all of the things that we’ve learned through the manual struggle of developing skills and intuitions. Much like the deployment of calculators has reduced people’s feel for numbers, this would reduce people’s “feel” for thoughts and their meaning.

But I really like the phrase “borrowing while denying the debt.” The point isn’t just that you owe something you won’t acknowledge, it’s that the denial corrupts your self-understanding and makes you incapable of honestly examining what you actually believe and why.

You can coast on inherited capital for a while. The question is whether anyone is making new deposits.