The Need to Read
paulgraham.com
The Need to Read
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Re: The Need to Read
#2I find the quality of my thinking is much higher when writing by hand, but it’s so slow I feel like I get down a particular path and forget so many of the other things I was considering in parallel.
I can type much faster than I can write but it feels like a messier thought process. It feels more like jamming a gearbox, while writing by hand feels like a smooth shifting bicycle, with the wind in my hair.
Should I try dictation and then writing it down later? Or typing up my handwritten notes after writing them? Any other ideas?
Re: The Need to Read
#3have you seen nassim taleb's recent comments about
this guy? Taleb while harsh, always is truthful to the
truth. I'm too young to know the story behind Hacker News and
ycombinator, but reading some of the recent stuff makes me
question prevailing sentiments about PG.
Re: The Need to Read
#4I find the quality of my thinking is much higher when writing by hand, but it’s so slow I feel like I get down a particular path and forget so many of the other things I was considering in parallel. I can type much faster than I can write but it feels like a messier thought process. It feels more like jamming a gearbox, while writing by hand feels like a smooth shifting bicycle, with the wind in my hair. Should I try…
you must be much older than me. i never had a chance to handwrite my notes or thoughts. all goes to straigh to typing. I fear though my generation and future generations are missing out substantially.
Re: The Need to Read
#5Here is the output of GPT reading and summarizing this (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33748363). Model seems to be hallucinating the author. Any thoughts on how to improve it?
"The Need to Read is an essay written by Kevin Kelly. In it, he argues that reading is essential not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning how to write. He cites the example of a science fiction book in which reading has been replaced by a more efficient method of knowledge transfer. He argues that even if such a method existed, it would be insufficient because it would not allow for the kind of discovery that writing does. He concludes that people who want to have ideas can't afford not to read."
Re: The Need to Read
#6have you seen nassim taleb's recent comments about this guy? Taleb while harsh, always is truthful to the truth. I'm too young to know the story behind Hacker News and ycombinator, but reading some of the recent stuff makes me question prevailing sentiments about PG.
How about an excercise in writing? Instead of referring to "comments" by someone else, tell us your own thoughts. What is the prevailing sentiment you see? And how do you question it?
Re: The Need to Read
#7I think there is clear historical evidence that this thesis is, at a minimum, greatly exaggerated. Socrates never wrote, and I think he had more good ideas than Paul Graham ever will. Muhammad was not even literate, and unless he was inspired by divinity, his ideas were extremely powerful.
I mean, I do personally find that writing is a powerful tool for thinking. Maybe that means that Paul Graham and I are normal, and Socrates and Muhammad were atypical. But maybe it says more about humans-in-our-society than it does about the essential human condition. If humans learned "by tape" (as per the SF books from the Silver Age, referenced in TFA's opening para), maybe idea-production would work along different lines.
I admit, I tend to agree with him about the usefulness of writing. But I think it's just an irrational intuition, not the clear argument he implies.
Re: The Need to Read
#8His first reference around audiobooks it's particularly resonating, in so far as to express, record and iterate ideas with mind maps!
Mind maps, sketches, doodles, mocks, are ineffably (pun intended) great at having good ideas.
Re: The Need to Read
#9Here is the output of GPT reading and summarizing this (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33748363 ). Model seems to be hallucinating the author. Any thoughts on how to improve it? "The Need to Read is an essay written by Kevin Kelly. In it, he argues that reading is essential not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning how to write. He cites the example of a science fiction book in which reading has be…
Does GPT-3 offer summaries out of the box? Or do you do it by a prompt like "The summary of the text above is:"?
Re: The Need to Read
#10“Quantum entanglement” / “quantitative easing” Can we think of a substitute to writing that will allow us to coin these phrases (which in turn sit on a stack of coined sequences of syllables) and make them stick? Speech can communicate writing in its entirety. But in committing to paper, we take these fleeting streams (sequences) of thoughts and sounds, let them live outside our limited working memories, and allow for new meanings and ideas to emerge and breathe and survive. With far greater likelihood and frequency than speech alone. Fascinating to think about what invention might make writing obsolete. Will have to be something that allows for effortless creation and storage of new sequences of old ideas…