Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 593 posts

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#121

Post by Kim_Bruning »

Arisaka1 wrote: post #96
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #50

This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful: "For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have inven…

I can only begin to wonder what would his opinion on Google search would be since we (developers) always practice the "don't memorize what you can easily search", and there's a sizeable amount of people claiming that memorization shouldn't even be a concern most of the time, and that's an advice given to people who are new in the field (like myself).

I think understanding is more important than both. Even if you're cut off fro the internet somehow, you can still re-derive things if only you understand them. And understanding also allows you to solve novel problems.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#122

Post by hammyhavoc »

passion__desire wrote: post #115
tlb wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pop music contains 10^5 or so versions of “I love you”. I think there could be a similar number for writing.

Here's GRRM version. I asked it to include the "colorless green ideas". "In the labyrinthine corridors of my imagination, writing holds the key to an irresistible enchantment. The kaleidoscopic play of words, as they dance across the parchment, is a spectacle that never ceases to enthrall me. The very act of crafting sentences, like a blacksmith hammering out the perfect sword, is a symphony of creation whose composi…

Both your original version, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35898426, and the new one you did, include this idea of dancing quite strongly.

How did "Most people I know, they also fucking love writing" get into that? What prompt did you give it?

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#123

Post by passion__desire »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #114
passion__desire wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In how many different ways can a simple phrase "I love writing" can be expanded so that the variations don't resemble each other?

Personally, I could probably hand write a book of paragraphs, all very distinct and different to each other, you likely wouldn't even know they were by the same author if you didn't use stylometry ML, and you'd probably have a rough time if I used adversarial stylometry to counter that. You'd think by this point that music would have all been done too, but people keep finding novel stuff in 12TET, 4/4 and sound desig…

Can't you specifically ask LLM to tailor the paragraph to produce those variations that you will incorporate to make your own writing different each time? Most of the criticism of LLM not being able to produce something is just people asking LLM to basically MIND-READ the exact thing they had in mind.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#124

Post by bayindirh »

orbital-decay wrote: post #95
bayindirh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An LLM is not a conscious entity, and while it can babble and assemble meaningful sentences, it has no guarantee of correctness, a baseline honesty, and other small bits and pieces we value in a conversation. It's just a sentence builder. As a result, it can't replace a real human being backed by real experience and thoughts, hence it can't be as useful. I converse with myself, too, but it's not the same either with…

> Currently, we simply ignore or don't understand the fact that the meaning of a sentence is not solely built with word order Many people argue convincingly that it's exactly how the meaning is built, though.

If convincingly arguing about something was the only thing we needed for proving correctness, we wouldn't have the scientific method.

Or, if word order built the meaning and it's devoid of the character itself, we wouldn't be praising authors for their character building skills and embedding things not written or spoken into their stories, regardless of the medium it's presented.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#125

Post by jxramos »

“If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.” ― Oscar Wilde

The above quote may be apocryphal (I tried to source it once but only found secondary sources) but I shared it at work slack when chatGPT had a lot of action with our tea, chats. Seemed quite fitting much like a pilot rotting their flying skills leaning on the autopilot too heavily. You get good at what you do or so the saying goes.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#126

Post by hammyhavoc »

passion__desire wrote: post #123
hammyhavoc wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I could probably hand write a book of paragraphs, all very distinct and different to each other, you likely wouldn't even know they were by the same author if you didn't use stylometry ML, and you'd probably have a rough time if I used adversarial stylometry to counter that. You'd think by this point that music would have all been done too, but people keep finding novel stuff in 12TET, 4/4 and sound desig…

Can't you specifically ask LLM to tailor the paragraph to produce those variations that you will incorporate to make your own writing different each time? Most of the criticism of LLM not being able to produce something is just people asking LLM to basically MIND-READ the exact thing they had in mind.

Well, can't anybody else just tell it the same prompt? The output is generic and samey between all users because the average human being enters the average prompt, thus getting the average output from the training data of statistical averages because it's a next-word prediction model.

If I run a writing workshop and tell a room of a hundred people to write me a story about two star-crossed lovers from different time periods, the likelihood of them writing the same thing in the same way is extremely low statistically speaking. If the week after I then give that same room of people the same exercise, they will write something different again, even if the core story that's being told is the same thing. That's because human brains aren't static, and they don't store information as binary values, the "data" is abstract and chemically gradient. That's without even accounting for mood, the general zeitgeist, and what they've been through since then, and not even getting into them entertaining themselves by changing it up or learning from the previous one.

Long-form consistency also isn't something LLMs do well with.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#127

Post by sanitycheck »

jmillikin wrote: post #10
armchairhacker wrote: post #8

How much is ChatGPT replacing human writing? It still seems to me like most of the articles on HN are human-written, and I heard CNBC tried replacing writers with ChatGPT and it went terribly. But I've also heard anecdotes of freelance writers getting replaced [1] [2] [3], and every once in a while I spot or hear about something ChatGPT-written in the wild. I'm sure ChatGPT replaces boilerplate writing (e.g. legal do…

ChatGPT can't replace writing intended to convey information, but that's only a small fraction of the writing that's getting created. There's a whole industry where people are given prompts like "five paragraphs about the history of spaghetti" and get paid $0.01 per word, then that text gets put into an Italy-themed travel blog full of ads. You and I wouldn't notice if that entire industry was replaced by ChatGPT bec…

I think you're right, and it's so depressing.

What I need is not an AI that generates that bullshit, but an AI that detects it and ensures I never have to encounter it.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#128

Post by nicbou »

rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

It fills the role of an intern. It can do stuff but the quality is inconsistent and the work needs to be verified.

Nonetheless it's better than Google at many things. I find it really good at giving paragraph-long introductions to things, instead of pages-long blogspam. It's also good at suggesting improvements when writing in a second language.

But I don't see what those AI startups see when they want to replace all sorts of skilled workers with this bullshit generator.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#129

Post by marginalia_nu »

mike_hock wrote: post #116
marginalia_nu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato's criticism is very true on an individual basis. What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances. It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't a loss though, and his…

Ironically, we'd never know what he said had it not been written down.

Yeah, and then some.

Tired Alfred North Whitehead quotes aside, he's basically the single most influential author in the western tradition, arguably even eclipsing the bible.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#130

Post by [deleted] »

kqr wrote: post #29
weinzierl wrote: post #23

I think pg underestimates the amount of trivial and mundane copy most people write day in day out. Be it stupid Jira tickets, spec documents, school essays with standardized expectations or formulaic messages and emails. Not much ability to lose there, but AI is a tremendous timesaver. A pg quality essay is a whole other story but I doubt AI is much useful there in its current state.

I don't know about other people, but it helps my thinking process to write things in stupid Jira tickets, spec documents, etc. also. It forces me to combat edge cases that I didn't think about until I had to spell them out. Not always, of course, but perhaps often enough that it's worth it to know how to. Even formulaic messages and emails can be useful, because when what I want to write doesn't plug in neatly into t…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN