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Writes and Write-Nots

paulgraham.com

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Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#131

Post by brabel »

amenhotep wrote: post #123
begueradj wrote: post #67

I expected much more from the article. It is, especially, poorly argumented. I feel the author wrote it hastily. To begin with, the following assumption is false: >To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard. For most people, most life situations which require clear thinking have nothing to do with writing. >This is why eminent professors often turn out to have resorted to plagiarism. What's…

The author: A requires B You: what nonsense. Clearly, B does not necessarily require A, and yet he says it does, how poorly argued.

Exactly. Isn't it ironic?!

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#132

Post by MarkusQ »

samatman wrote: post #127
rcarmo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The total IQ on the planet remains constant even as the number of people increase, I guess. Although I really wasn't expecting the average to go down this fast--consider the idealistic and rationally thorough political speeches of the 70s and 80s, and the way things went quickly downhill from there... As someone said, it's no wonder The Matrix chose the 90s as the peak of human civilization.

I'll be generous and pretend you said intelligence, not IQ. What is the mechanism you propose, by which the birth of a child makes every person now living incrementally dumber?

Personal anecdote only, but I'd suggest lack of sleep. Every time a kid is born, the total amount of quality sleep extant adults get drops.

(Kids, if you ever see this, I'm not saying it wasn't worth it. But seriously, 2AM every night for months?)

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#133

Post by brabel »

dgacmu wrote: post #77
leethomas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That writing is the only way to do deep, clear, thinking simply isn't true. You're correct here. > Stephen Hawking is the first example that comes to mind. The post is obviously speaking of the general population or at best average professional, and in my opinion choosing one of the most brilliant exceptional scientific minds of our lifetimes is not a good counterargument for a piece that speaks of a potential prob…

As someone who teaches PhD students who are quite far beyond "average professional", I concur completely with PG on this one. Writing forces you to make very clear and concrete ideas that feel like they make sense but are still fuzzy. It's certainly not the only way, but it's the most common and easy way.

I don't disagree, just want to mention that as someone married to someone who supervises Phd students, they're not by any means "far beyond average professional"... but perhaps you're on a exceptionally highly regarded faculty where that may be the case.

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#134

Post by 082349872349872 »

spencerchubb wrote: post #85
dartharva wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you observe the trend speech has actually devolved with the arrival of popular internet networks. Today's elites talk in a fashion that would embarrass even their immediate parents, let alone their ancestors. Just look at the quality of presidential debates and political discourse we've been having for the past decade. Not just in the US, but all over the world. The situation is perilous.

Devolved by what metric?

Others in this thread are likely using their own metrics; my responses were all based on declining Flesch-Kincaid score of State of the Union addresses (from "20th" grade to 8th grade over 200+ years): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41961710

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#135

Post by cmpalmer52 »

localghost3000 wrote: post #128

I understand his point and think it's an interesting observation, but honestly I disagree. What AI is great at is handling all the bullshit writing tasks that you have to do that no one reads or cares about. For example I got asked to write a blurb for a company newsletter recently. Told an LLM the things I needed to talk about and how long it should be, and the tone I was shooting for. Done in less than a few minute…

I am a professional writer (in the sense that I have published short stories that were paid for, even though it is a hobby). Recently, my wife was participating in an event where she had to portray an historical figure and she had a fact sheet and a couple of articles about the person (she wasn’t super famous). I used Perplexity with ChatGPT-4o and prompted it with all the materials we had and asked it to generate a 5 minute monologue in first person for the event. First draft was excellent, I touched up a few lines and printed it out. Done.

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#136

Post by begueradj »

brabel wrote: post #131
amenhotep wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author: A requires B You: what nonsense. Clearly, B does not necessarily require A, and yet he says it does, how poorly argued.

Exactly. Isn't it ironic?!

I think he is hinting to when I said: "For most people, most life situations which require clear thinking have nothing to do with writing."

I meant: since most life situation where we need clear thinking do not involve writing, then we are obviously well equipped to think clearly.

And if thinking clearly is not that problematic for most people, then the author can't say we can't write because thinking clearly is hard/or we can't think clearly.

Got it ?

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#137

Post by gqcwwjtg »

amenhotep wrote: post #123
begueradj wrote: post #67

I expected much more from the article. It is, especially, poorly argumented. I feel the author wrote it hastily. To begin with, the following assumption is false: >To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard. For most people, most life situations which require clear thinking have nothing to do with writing. >This is why eminent professors often turn out to have resorted to plagiarism. What's…

The author: A requires B You: what nonsense. Clearly, B does not necessarily require A, and yet he says it does, how poorly argued.

Yup, as long as you ignore this quote “If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.”

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#138

Post by n4r9 »

localghost3000 wrote: post #128

I understand his point and think it's an interesting observation, but honestly I disagree. What AI is great at is handling all the bullshit writing tasks that you have to do that no one reads or cares about. For example I got asked to write a blurb for a company newsletter recently. Told an LLM the things I needed to talk about and how long it should be, and the tone I was shooting for. Done in less than a few minute…

I don't think this example refutes the article. LLMs can obviate bullshit writing tasks and remove the appeal of writing altogether for some people.

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#139

Post by jll29 »

> But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear.

This observation of Paul Graham may generalize beyond writing: modern technology appears to turn populations into bi-modally distributed populations - for example, those that write/consume human-written prose and those that produce/consume AI-generated prose; those that can afford human medical doctors and those that can only afford to consult ChatMedicGPT or Wikipedia; those that can afford human teachers for their childrens and those that let EduGPT train them, etc. Generally speaking, I expect a trend that more affluent people will use higher quality human services and the rest has to live with automation output.

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#140

Post by screye »

thih9 wrote: post #107
tim333 wrote: post #76

>in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write seems quite wrong to me. If anything the trend seems to go the other way - when I was younger pre internet most communication was face to face or voice over the phone. Now the predominant thing seems text - sms, whatsapp, this text box I'm typing into now. I saw a stat the other day that online / app dating had gone from a minority to over 50% of how coupl…

> That said long form text may be different but those who write novels and the like were always a minority. I think this is the article’s point - that this minority is going to shrink even more.

That minority only flourished for a brief period in the 20th century when universal literacy was achieved through schooling and proliferation of white collar work.

For most of history, writers were a tiny minority. It exploded 100x in the last few decades. If it goes down 10x, it's still way above where we were in the 1800s.

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