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Do your own writing

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Re: Do your own writing

#101

Post by dzonga »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #9

I've long considered writing to be the "last step in thinking". I can't tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. Likewise I also have numerous times where writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really co…

nicely distilled.

however the education system has done a disservice of how critical thinking actually happens.

when you write - then try edit your thoughts (written material). the editing part helps you clarify things, bring truth to power ie. whether you're bullshitting yourself and want to continue or choose another path.

the other part - in a world of answers - critical thinking is a result of asking better questions.

writing helps one to ask better questions.

preferably if you write in a dialogue style.

Re: Do your own writing

#102

Post by antonvs »

delusional wrote: post #76
roadside_picnic wrote: post #9

I've long considered writing to be the "last step in thinking". I can't tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. Likewise I also have numerous times where writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really co…

For your context, I'm an AI hater, so understand my assumptions as such. > The obvious best solution is to have your agent write release notes for your agent in the future to have context. No more tedious writing or reading, but also no missing context. Why is more AI the "obvious" best solution here? If nobody wants to read your release notes, then why write them? And if they're going to slim them down with their AI…

What better solution do you have in mind? This scenario is AI being used as a tool to eliminate toil. It’s not replacing human creativity, or anything like that.

If you have a problem with that, then you should also have a problem with computers in general.

But maybe you do have a problem with computers - after all, they regularly eliminate jobs, for example. In that case, AI is only special in its potentially greater effectiveness at doing what computers have always been used to do.

But most of us use computers in various ways even if we have qualms about such things. In practice, the same already applies to AI, and likely will for you too, in future.

Re: Do your own writing

#103

Post by WCSTombs »

monkaiju wrote: post #25
dummydummy1234 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found the one of the better use cases of llms to be a rubber duck. Explaining a design, problem, etc and trying to find solutions is extremely useful. I can bring novelty, what I often want from the LLM is a better understanding of the edge cases that I may run into, and possible solutions.

I always find folks bringing up rubber ducking as a thing LLMs are good at to be misguided. IMO, what defines rubber ducking as a concept is that it is just the developer explaining what their doing to themselves. Not to another person, and not to a thing pretending to be a person. If you have a "two way" or "conversational" debugging/designing experience it isnt rubber ducking, its just normal design/debugging. The…

Absolutely, the whole point of the rubber duck is that it's inanimate. The act of talking to the rubber duck makes you first of all describe your problem in words, and secondly hear (or read) it back and reprocess it in a slightly different way. It's a completely free way to use more parts of your brain when you need to.

LLMs are a non-free way for you to make use of less of your brain. It seems to me that these are not the same thing.

Re: Do your own writing

#105

Post by AYBABTME »

This reduces writing to one concept: thinking and the writing is just a byproduct. But writing is also presentation and also communication.

There is nothing wrong with speechwriters. Various authors spilled out their thoughts in rough format and had writers turn them into better structured, prosed and understandable projections. Hand writing each sentence that is presented as an end-product to the reader doesn't solve that problem.

Forcibly coupling the two is an arbitrary choice that may be a valid tradeoff for some and not so for others, and not so for _all_ writing.

I'm not good at looping through a document with proper english prose. My writing is raw, particular, and I gloss over a lot of details. LLMs help me turn my shitty extensive notes in bad grammar and syntax, into shareable and understandable artifacts. They help me turn more of my thoughts into ingestable communication by others. Without AI, I communicate less of my thoughts due to friction. My thoughts are formed and authored and written, but not in a format consumable by anyone else.

Ebikes help older riders keep riding.

Re: Do your own writing

#106

Post by 8bitsrule »

WCSTombs wrote: post #99
user3939382 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really consolidated my thinking You see the same thing in teaching, perhaps even more because of the interactive element. But the dynamic in any case is the same. Ideas exist as a kind of continuous structure in our minds. When you try to distill that into something discrete you're forced to con…

I never learned a subject faster than when I was suddenly forced to teach it!

Same here. And when you encourage students to ask good questions, that goes double ... you're forcedd to see how important their new perspectives are, and to create your own!

Re: Do your own writing

#107

Post by _pdp_ »

LLMs are not very good at generating ideas - unless you ask them to go crazy - then they can generate interesting ideas that quickly become repetitive. But the initial set is actually good in my own experience.

As for writing, we need to keep in mind that LLMs are tools that augment. So yes if you completely abdicate all responsibility to the LLM that is basically not constructive at all. But if you use it as a tool - what difference does it make? Spell and grammar checkers are also changing your text and of course I am exaggerating a little.

And I do think LLMs can help you think better but not in a default mode. It is not about prompting skills but making it work the way you want it. And that takes time because well, it is not deterministic and it requires understanding how you generally think and write. Most of the time might not be possible. For others it works really well, maybe because they write like an LLM?

Btw, we often forget that English is not native for majority of people on this planet.

IMHO using LLMs to express themselves clearly is many times better than remaining misunderstood.

Re: Do your own writing

#108

Post by modriano »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #95
modriano wrote: post #93

This reminds me of a talk I attended many years ago given by the director of UChicago's writing program (and found a recording of the talk [0]), and his thesis was that writing IS the process of thinking. That talk changed the way I write and made writing a primary tool I reach for when I want to learn something new. Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those i…

You can do that interactively with LLMs. Instead of aiming for a finished product you ask a question, then refine your understanding with more questions. "So if that is true then this next statement is also true..." and the LLM will either agree or disagree. There are lines between writing as a persuasive medium, writing as a didactic medium for teaching, writing as a creative/poetic medium, writing as the process of…

> You can do that interactively with LLMs. Instead of aiming for a finished product you ask a question, then refine your understanding with more questions.

Yeah, I regularly spend a lot of time with Claude fleshing out ideas and scoping out features. I'm behind the times and just use the chat interface rather than Claude Code, so perhaps there are controls I'm not aware of, but there can't be any that make it correctly understand an under-specified idea, or even correctly understand an adequately specified idea.

For example, I've been playing around building a side-project that involves building out a safety-weighted graph to support generating safer bike routes. I was recently working on integrating traffic control devices (represented on OpenStreetMaps nodes) into the model where I calculate weights for my graph (I essentially join the penalty for the traffic control device onto the destination end of an edge) and Claude kept wanting to average that penalty by the length of the edge (as that makes sense for some other factors in my model like crashes, surface material, max speed, etc), but doesn't make sense for traffic control signals at intersections (as the length of an edge shouldn't change the risk a cyclist experiences going through an intersection). If I didn't have a well-developed ability to closely parse words to ideas, I could have very easily just taken the working model Claude generated and built more on top of it, setting up a dangerous situation where the routing algo would promote routes running a user through more intersections (which are the most dangerous place for cyclists).

I hope a comparable proportion of kids coming up today will spend the time and energy to understand the ideas behind the text and the code, but I really doubt 18-year old me would have had that wisdom. I would have been underspecifying what I wanted out of a lack of prerequisite knowledge, receiving slop, and either promptly getting lost in debugging hell or more likely the worse case of erroneously believing the slop satisfied the brief.

> There are lines between writing as a persuasive medium, writing as a didactic medium for teaching, writing as a creative/poetic medium, writing as the process of creation of marketable products, writing as a shared summary of specialist niche knowledge, and writing as an aid to personal comprehension. > Those are fundamentally different activities, They happen to use the same medium and there are some overlapping areas. But they're essentially different activities with different requirements and different processes.

In all of those areas, if you take away the human who can develop value-creating ideas into an accurate and high-fidelity written representation, you will just get slop. Developing ideas and representing them in words is the skill. There is no substitute.

Re: Do your own writing

#110

Post by keithnz »

tines wrote: post #38
keithnz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm finding AI great to have a conversation with to flesh out ideas, with the added benefit it can summarize everything at the end

You're being steered without being aware of it.

not at all, it's very productive.
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