LLMs are teaching me incredibly obvious things about human intelligence that I'd nonetheless never thought much about before. We complain about LLMs forgetting bits of big complicated instructions, but of course, humans would do that too without being able to take careful notes, and in some sense, LLMs had nowhere to take notes until recently and yet seemed to do unexpectedly well. Ever wonder how people got anything done before they were both literate and had cheap paper to write down to-do lists? I would be lost without to-do lists, but they were literally impossible without fairly recent technologies, at least on a historical level. Imagine all the things you probably could not do without being able to write down a plan or a reminder, and then consider that for the bulk of the 200,000 years that there have been anatomically modern humans, no one could have written a simple to-do list for themselves. Even after the invention of writing, it was quite some time before most people were literate and writing media were cheap enough for the masses. It's remarkable how a tiny little technology like the to-do list, which feels incredibly primitive, can transform your abilities. Adding the ability to store just a few kilobytes of to-do items to a normal human suddenly transforms their productivity. And yet, we rarely even think about how much we depend on them, and how much we are forced to compensate for our poor memories using things like this. Sure, reference works and notes and all sorts of other external memories are critical to the way we function day to day, but we even can't reliably remember small things without low technologies like a calendar for appointments, or a grocery list scribbled down on scrap paper, or a list of to-do items. Our own contexts and abilities to do needle-in-a-haystack data searches in our memories are much poorer than we imagine. (And yes, I'm aware that ancient writers complained about the fact that literacy killed people's memories to some extent, but I'm pretty sure the reason people started relying on the crutch as soon as it became available was that only a talented few could reliably remember well enough to begin with. Most people were not Homer and could not recite epic poems from memory, and even the best almost certainly garbled what they were transmitting a bit every time.)