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Writes and Write-Nots

paulgraham.com

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Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#151

Post by swores »

begueradj wrote: post #136
brabel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're still both missing PG's point, and getting your logic wrong for the point you are on. About the latter:

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

That's not the QED you seem to think it is. The statement that "most life situation where we need clear thinking do not involve writing" doesn't give any reason to think that most people are good at clear thinking most of the time, nor whether people find clear thinking easier with the help of writing or if writing has no benefit to the goal of clear thinking. You're just putting two opinions you have next to each other and acting like one confirms the other.

And a friendly tip, "have I explained better what I meant before?" would come off as a lot more polite than "got it?", which to anyone who agrees with the rest of your comment could easily read as snide/patronising, while anyone who thinks you're still wrong will see it as smug and wrongly confident. (Apologies if English isn't your first language, in which case you're very good at it, and apologies if you didn't want unsolicited opinions on how your choice of language makes you seem in my view!)

edit to give an analogy: I feel your argument is like if somebody said "control of body movement is key to being a great athlete", and you replied "everyone is always controlling their body movement, clearly therefore it's not relevant to how good an athlete is".

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#152

Post by thih9 »

screye wrote: post #140
thih9 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's a fascinating point of view, thanks for sharing.

I know that the concept of dark ages is overblown, but still - something about relying on AI like this makes me think of the end of classical antiquity.

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#153

Post by begueradj »

swores wrote: post #151
begueradj wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're still both missing PG's point, and getting your logic wrong for the point you are on. About the latter: > "I meant: since most life situation where we need clear thinking do not involve writing, then we are obviously well equipped to think clearly." That's not the QED you seem to think it is. The statement that "most life situation where we need clear thinking do not involve writing" doesn't give any reason to…

I upvoted for:

> "have I explained better what I meant before?" would come off as a lot more polite than "got it?"

Thank you very much.

PS. English is not my native language.

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#154

Post by Swizec »

samatman wrote: post #125
Swizec wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It isn't anymore, not for newer generations - e.g. Gen Z spending most of their time on Tiktok and phones, and not knowing how to use a word processor. This is a classic fallacy as old as society. “Whatever the hoi polloi are doing is by definition not the good stuff”. But long-term whatever the masses are doing always wins. You know Shakespeare? He was the rube who thought plays could be entertaining to the masses…

There should be a term for the fallacy on display here. The Spurious Generalization Fallacy perhaps? At no point did you address whether the shifting habits of younger generations will be bad for their literacy, instead making a general point that new trends in society are routinely panned by older members of such a society. As a counterpoint, before radio and the phonograph, musical ability was quite widespread. Now…

> You haven't even attempted to address whether various developments in society and technology might do this to literacy the way earlier trends did to musical skills. I think that result is quite likely, by the way.

Fair, I was making a different point. Yes literacy might be reduced, my argument is that this isn’t necessarily a problem. Our abilities shift to take advantage of technology.

A lot like how we got really bad at memorizing long epics because we can just write them down instead.

That said, I don’t think writing/literacy will go away as much as we might fear. The new technologies are not a good enough replacement (yet?)

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#155

Post by moritzwarhier »

baxtr wrote: post #93
moritzwarhier wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Doesn't that mean to limit oneself to bias, mediocrity, and preconceived judgements instead of actually thinking?

Well it helps me to get started. Not more but also not less. For me it’s very important to emphasize that AI is a tool. You have to use it responsibly. But there is no reason not to use it.

I see, I don't want to shame this kind of use. It's kind of almost like talking about something briefly with an educated person.

Until it's not.

I'm not the type who'd say "don't use AI". Use whatever works. Myself I became really fascinated by transformer LLMs / GPTs in winter 2019, then again when ChatGPT was published and a good few months after that.

It's just that my interest&enthusiasm has almosted vanished by now. Surely it will reemerge at some point.

Re: Writes and Write-Nots

#156

Post by qntmfred »

handfuloflight wrote: post #149
qntmfred wrote: post #97

writing 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.

Yet
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