Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 593 posts

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#111

Post by marginalia_nu »

largepeepee wrote: post #100
marginalia_nu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato's criticism is very true on an individual basis. What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances. It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't a loss though, and his…

It's also useful to point out that historical verbal tradition trained a very specific type of memory recall but that doesn't automatically make anyone wise. Just because you memorized 10000 random articles on Wikipedia, doesn't mean you now have the wisdom to apply that in a particular circumstance. Very much like early AI models.

I think the contrast should be between studying and internalizing a subject versus having the ability to look up a subject. That seems the most true to Plato's intention.

It's common and easy to fall into considering the things you could look up as things you already know.

What's the difference, one might ask? What's the problem with offloading some of this knowledge and free up space in your head? Well the thing when you learn something is that it doesn't just permit access to the information, it also permits synthesis of new ideas. The sum of knowledge is greater than its parts.

A very concrete example: As someone who only speaks English one may look up the Latin terms 'manus' (hand) and 'facere' (to act/do/make); but unless you actually do, you'll probably not immediately grok the etymology of the English term 'manufacture'.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#112

Post by passion__desire »

tlb wrote: post #110
passion__desire wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In how many different ways can a simple phrase "I love writing" can be expanded so that the variations don't resemble each other?

Pop music contains 10^5 or so versions of “I love you”. I think there could be a similar number for writing.

On what metrics are you judging them to be different?

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#113

Post by nestorD »

My experience has been that GPT4 is terrible at thinking but, if I provide it with both the content and the way I want structured, it can give me an output that requires very little tweaking before being ready to go. I do my writing-as-thinking when getting the draft ready.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#114

Post by hammyhavoc »

passion__desire wrote: post #108
hammyhavoc wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks very similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35898426

In how many different ways can a simple phrase "I love writing" can be expanded so that the variations don't resemble each other?

Personally, I could probably hand write a book of paragraphs, all very distinct and different to each other, you likely wouldn't even know they were by the same author if you didn't use stylometry ML, and you'd probably have a rough time if I used adversarial stylometry to counter that.

You'd think by this point that music would have all been done too, but people keep finding novel stuff in 12TET, 4/4 and sound design. That's without even getting into other time signatures, scales and microtonality.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#115

Post by passion__desire »

tlb wrote: post #110
passion__desire wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In how many different ways can a simple phrase "I love writing" can be expanded so that the variations don't resemble each other?

Pop music contains 10^5 or so versions of “I love you”. I think there could be a similar number for writing.

Here's GRRM version. I asked it to include the "colorless green ideas".

"In the labyrinthine corridors of my imagination, writing holds the key to an irresistible enchantment. The kaleidoscopic play of words, as they dance across the parchment, is a spectacle that never ceases to enthrall me. The very act of crafting sentences, like a blacksmith hammering out the perfect sword, is a symphony of creation whose composition and cadence resonate deeply within the chambers of my soul. The allure is in the unpredictable: the malleability of vocabulary, the rhythm of repetition, the literary waltz that ties it all together in a mesmerizing ballet of ideas. Yes, by the gods, I love writing. And it's not merely an affection, but an unyielding obsession, a raw and passionate love that fuels my every heartbeat. Those colorless green ideas that sleep furiously in the hidden corners of the mind, they are the unexpected treasures waiting to be awakened, ignited by the quill's touch. They may seem paradoxical, absurd even, like a dragon in the heart of winter, yet it's their very improbability that breathes vitality into the narrative. In this wonderful, maddening craft, we, the storytellers, find our joy, our purpose. The written word is our battleground and our sanctuary, our curse and our solace. Most people I know, they also fucking love writing, and I do mean love. A love profound and all-consuming, fervent and relentless. A love as fierce as a direwolf, as enduring as the Wall. And so we write, for in the tumultuous seas of letters and punctuation, we find our truest selves."

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#116

Post by mike_hock »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #93
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #50

This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful: "For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have inven…

Plato's criticism is very true on an individual basis. What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances. It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't a loss though, and his…

Ironically, we'd never know what he said had it not been written down.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#117

Post by Kim_Bruning »

lordnacho wrote: post #86
bayindirh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An LLM is not a conscious entity, and while it can babble and assemble meaningful sentences, it has no guarantee of correctness, a baseline honesty, and other small bits and pieces we value in a conversation. It's just a sentence builder. As a result, it can't replace a real human being backed by real experience and thoughts, hence it can't be as useful. I converse with myself, too, but it's not the same either with…

> no guarantee of correctness, a baseline honesty, and other small bits and pieces Humans for sure do not guarantee this either. I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. It's heard of everything, and it always responds with something that sounds like it came from the same sphere. You have to use your own mind to figure out if it's meaningful, but this is not so different from conversing with a person. People can ba…

> I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck.

That was my first thought too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

But it's a pretty amazing rubber duck that has read the entire internet and thus can correlate your ideas with the ideas of all of humanity in a split second on the spot.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#118

Post by marginalia_nu »

dbtc wrote: post #47
imtringued wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone knows that using ChatGPT is about signalling your non Luddite status so that the police won't go after you.

I noticed that you haven't been talking to your AI very much lately, what's wrong?

Please drink a verification can of AI marketing kool aid!

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#120

Post by bayindirh »

lordnacho wrote: post #86
bayindirh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An LLM is not a conscious entity, and while it can babble and assemble meaningful sentences, it has no guarantee of correctness, a baseline honesty, and other small bits and pieces we value in a conversation. It's just a sentence builder. As a result, it can't replace a real human being backed by real experience and thoughts, hence it can't be as useful. I converse with myself, too, but it's not the same either with…

> no guarantee of correctness, a baseline honesty, and other small bits and pieces Humans for sure do not guarantee this either. I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. It's heard of everything, and it always responds with something that sounds like it came from the same sphere. You have to use your own mind to figure out if it's meaningful, but this is not so different from conversing with a person. People can ba…

> Humans for sure do not guarantee this either.

However, humans are more nuanced than that. One might remember wrongly, or act in bad-faith. This is why I said "baseline honesty". One people's traits definitely affects how their words are perceived, and this is not carried in the sentence itself.

> I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. ... People can babble too. (Snipped for brevity)

Humans are not as random as an LLM.

> You're not always looking for those in a conversation. Sometimes you really are just checking that you've thought things through.

Again the person you're asking or answering has their own character and their or your words are affected by that implicit knowledge. This is a background process we're not aware of unless you dig into yourself and look for it.

Post reply on HN