Chess has seen rating inflation because of youtube, stockfish and leelazero, and chess.com. basketball is seeing a boom in 3 point accuracy. More people than ever know about squats and deadlifts. I would learn to program much faster today with chatgpt than I did without it. Legalese and flowery prose and even rhymes were really unnecessary for pure communication and thought. we know thought, search, computation is infinite, so there will be no end to progress.
Writes and Write-Nots
141–150 of 158 posts
Re: Writes and Write-Nots
#142> 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 t…
That's actually a super interesting idea that I've never considered.
It's interesting to think of humans as being like a premium service where AI's are a sort of knock-off/budget human service.
Re: Writes and Write-Nots
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is probably the case.
Re: Writes and Write-Nots
#144I follow Paul's argument about the consequences of the churning of low quality output by AI, but I think there's a second order effect that's more concerning. The ability to judge other people's knowledge of a subject area will become exceedingly rare and priceless. Unlike younger generations, who are growing up surrounded by AI-generated content, many of us older folks have had the experience of engaging directly wi…
> many of us older folks have had the experience of engaging directly with people and evaluating their competence. We developed a knack for quickly determining someone's skill level through just a few minutes of face-to-face conversation—a skill that was essential for navigating various life situations.
I think I have a bit of this knack, in some areas, tempered by an awareness of some of my blind spots, but most people don't even claim to have this knack...
As evidence from our own field: before the explosion of LLM cheating, we had the explosion of Leetcode hazing.
Because, supposedly, good experienced software developers couldn't plausibly recognize each other just by talking with each other.
So instead we whip out these douchetastic did-you-prep-for-this rituals. And afterwards you still have no idea what the other person would be like to work with (except that you now know both of you are willing to play fratbro nonsense games).
Re: Writes and Write-Nots
#145Is the ability to convince or prove a thesis more importan than the thesis itself?
Re: Writes and Write-Nots
#146I 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…
> For most people, most life situations which require clear thinking have nothing to do with writing.
The problem with "clear thinking" is that it is subjective. I think Paul Graham and Leslie Lamport, have experienced something like this: when they sit down to write about a certain topic, they realize that their initial thoughts were not nearly clear enough, and after a number of iterations they became clearer and clearer. Most of us don't write essays, so we simply don't recognize this feeling.
Re: Writes and Write-Nots
#147so true
Re: Writes and Write-Nots
#148I'm stuck on the title.
What's this article about? Why should I read it?
(I read it)
This post's title does not echo some of the points in the article. Good human-sourced writing will be hard to do/find?
Well, don't perpetuate the problem with a title that doesn't tell me why to pay attention.
Re: Writes and Write-Nots
#149writing offers relatively high information density in a low bandwidth medium. but video offers high information density in a high bandwidth medium. the challenge in both cases is coming up with something to say that requires a high information density. for those who do manage to find something to say that requires a high information density format, speaking will be more effective (newspapers/books were replaced with…
> Just everyday people talking to each other. But video. And realtime.
Does video add not a dimension of friction over sending text? For one, you can't scan a video the same way you can scan text.
Re: Writes and Write-Nots
#150Is the ability to convince or prove a thesis more importan than the thesis itself?
Can it be a thesis if it is not a convincing thesis?