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Sounds profoundly anti-humanist.
What you mean by "humanist" does not seem to be what philosophers mean by it.
If writing is thinking, then perhaps we should think more about what language would produce the best thinking, and does it exist? How do we go about creating it? And if thinking is dependent on language, maybe we should create a new language for artificial intelligence rather than feeding it human languages.
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1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Artifici...
I see a lot of people say "writing is so important," and I think what they mean is "I feel really smart/good when I write." And I think what they are experiencing is that they've been assembling ideas in their heads for weeks, and only when it's all come together are they ready synthesize that information at a higher level, and they mistake this synthesis for the writing itself (rather than the writing being a sympto…
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What you mean by "humanist" does not seem to be what philosophers mean by it.
Sounds like "memetics" gives agency to writing as a thing independent of human beings doing writing, which is an interesting frame but also untrue.
One key takeaway is if you want to learn/remember something better, always rewrite things in your own words as both the act of writing AND paraphrasing makes it more sticky
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>> But allowing calculators WILL make those who like math reach much deeper into the field than without. Have you ever run into any mathematician that praised the calculator for his/her career? I’d be really curious to read about that.
Pure math people probably don’t reach for calculators. But engineers do all the time. Back of the envelope guesstimating is bread and butter. The modern equivalent of a calculator is Excel.
And that is not done with calculators, that is done quickly in your head by having practiced a lot of calculations manually. This is why engineer students still practice manual calculation in college in most places.
I see things more optimistically. If good writing leads to good thinking, then anything I do to improve my ability to write well transitively helps me to think well.
In that sense, I actually see a huge benefit to LLMs in improving my writing and therefore improving my thinking. Not only can I ask for detailed and powerful feedback, I can also ask for more details on background context or related topics that I wouldn't be aware of.
I believe judicious use of LLMs can make us better than we could be without them.