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Writing is thinking

nature.com

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Re: Writing is thinking

#31

Post by spyckie2 »

jll29 wrote: post #12

To add: Reading is also thinking (ideally). And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during students' formative time, they need to learn how to think in reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc. Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you have a solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but first o…

I really think the effects of LLMs on thinking is the exact same as a calculator. It shortcuts some forms of thinking to open up other forms of thinking.

My thinking has increased with the use of LLMs, not decreased, most likely because LLMs take the edge off of grind work like reading a lot of noise to capture the 1% signal, formulating accurate statements for abstract ideas, and bringing together various domains that are beyond your area of expertise.

Now will you make mistakes? Sure, but you would have made the same mistakes at a slower pace without LLMs anyways. Or more accurately, you just wouldn’t do the research or apply domains not in your area of expertise, and your thinking would be a lot more narrow.

The strawman is thinking that banning LLMs will induce rigorous thinking. Just like banning calculators does not make everyone good at math.

But allowing calculators WILL make those who like math reach much deeper into the field than without.

Re: Writing is thinking

#32

Post by ysofunny »

carlesfe wrote: post #10

While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this. We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods. I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear t…

> Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap writing technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not saying the current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the only way to think is to write.

I have a better way to frame this:

Learning your own language and culture is a lifelong process.

A big phase, the adult phase, of learning is learning to write in your language (I'm implying there's more to writing than chosing words; specially in this context of language as thinking)

indeed, a lot of modern people never make it out of this big phase of learning your language. they never go beyond writing = thinking. but some people do learn the next phase

which involves distinguishing language itself from thoughts and ideas (is some idea known? understood? perceived?? but the idea is "the self" or some other complex notion)

so the only quality of the modern era I admit, is that there's a lot of people that only learn rudimentary thinking-writting, and too few people that learn 'advanced' languange-thinking where writing becomes secondary to thinking.

finally, I learned this idea from reading around the meaningness blog/book

Re: Writing is thinking

#33

Post by keiferski »

carlesfe wrote: post #10

While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this. We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods. I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear t…

I'm not sure if writers developed the entire book in their head first, but: it was indeed very, very common for people to dictate novels, journal entries, and other "written" works to a secretary, typist, or tape recorder.

Nowadays that seems to be rare, but my impression from reading my journals is that it was often more common to dictate than to physically hand write things.

Re: Writing is thinking

#34

Post by [deleted] »

jll29 wrote: post #12

To add: Reading is also thinking (ideally). And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during students' formative time, they need to learn how to think in reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc. Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you have a solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but first o…

[deleted]

Re: Writing is thinking

#36

Post by bwfan123 »

We may enter a vicious loop where writing is increasingly generated by LLMs. Then, LLMs have to train on their own output leading to model collapse.

Hence, the models depend on human writing.

Re: Writing is thinking

#37

Post by cindyllm »

ysofunny wrote: post #32
carlesfe wrote: post #10

While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this. We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods. I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear t…

> Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap writing technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not saying the current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the only way to think is to write. I have a better way to frame this: Learning your own language and culture is a lifelong process. A big phase, the adult phase, of learning is lea…

[dead]

Re: Writing is thinking

#38

Post by cubefox »

carlesfe wrote: post #10

While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this. We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods. I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear t…

That's true, but I would phrase it from a different perspective:

It's seems clear that abstract thinking in particular is greatly aided by writing, because the written text acts like a thought cache. A bit like an LLM context window which you can fill with lots of compact, compressed "tokens" (words).

Abstract thoughts are "abstract" because they can't be visualized in our mind, so they don't benefit from our intuitive imagination ability (Kant's "Anschauung"). So it is hard to juggle many abstract thoughts in our working memory.

We can also think of the working memory as the CPU registers, which are limited to a very small number, while the content of the CPU cache or RAM corresponds to the stuff we write down.

Our "anschauung" (visual imagination) is perhaps something like a fixed function hardware on a GPU, which is very good at processing complex audiovisual content, i.e. concrete thoughts, but useless for anything else (abstract thoughts).

Re: Writing is thinking

#40

Post by zahlman »

empath75 wrote: post #26

It is interesting to hold in one's head the following two beliefs: Writing requires thought. LLMs do not think.

"Writing is thinking" does not entail "writing requires thought".

Which has a lot to do with how people intuit when text is LLM-generated.

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