121–130 of 158 posts
I agree very much with Paul here. Many a times as I'm thinking, I realize none of those are legitimate thoughts until I can put them in words. Describing your intuition is fundamentally a hard task, because it is trying to decipher the vague strands of reflection. Clarity emerges only when focused harder.
I expected much more from the article. It is, especially, poorly argumented. I feel the author wrote it hastily. To begin with, the following assumption is false: >To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard. For most people, most life situations which require clear thinking have nothing to do with writing. >This is why eminent professors often turn out to have resorted to plagiarism. What's…
You: what nonsense. Clearly, B does not necessarily require A, and yet he says it does, how poorly argued.
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If you observe the trend speech has actually devolved with the arrival of popular internet networks. Today's elites talk in a fashion that would embarrass even their immediate parents, let alone their ancestors. Just look at the quality of presidential debates and political discourse we've been having for the past decade. Not just in the US, but all over the world. The situation is perilous.
Devolved by what metric?
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10-15 years ago I think this take was correct, the Internet was about writing. 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. In the span of ~30 years pg is talking about I can absolutely imagine some job where you speak to the AI and it writes the documents for you and you never learned how to write one yourself.…
> 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…
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, it's much rarer.
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.
That writing is the only way to do deep, clear, thinking simply isn't true. Stephen Hawking is the first example that comes to mind. He developed a remarkable ability to perform complex calculations and visualize intricate mathematical concepts entirely in his mind. He once mentioned that his ALS diagnosis, which limited his physical abilities, led him to focus intensely on theoretical physics, as it required more in…
You have committed the Fallacy of the Inverse.
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If you observe the trend speech has actually devolved with the arrival of popular internet networks. Today's elites talk in a fashion that would embarrass even their immediate parents, let alone their ancestors. Just look at the quality of presidential debates and political discourse we've been having for the past decade. Not just in the US, but all over the world. The situation is perilous.
The total IQ on the planet remains constant even as the number of people increase, I guess. Although I really wasn't expecting the average to go down this fast--consider the idealistic and rationally thorough political speeches of the 70s and 80s, and the way things went quickly downhill from there... As someone said, it's no wonder The Matrix chose the 90s as the peak of human civilization.
What is the mechanism you propose, by which the birth of a child makes every person now living incrementally dumber?
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The issue with the modern internet is that it's primarily used for communication (via short writing), often resulting in poorly written messages. Animals communicate through sounds, but this doesn't mean they can talk. I agree with PG on this point and have noticed that people around me are often surprised when they receive well-written wsapp/sms messages that include proper punctuation and other linguistic markers.…
Which is still massively more then amount of writing people did pre-internet.
I wonder if your answer it intentionally badly written or that's a sign of the problem already affecting even us on HN :D
I think of writing as similar to a linear extension of a partial order. Your brain doesn't think a single letter at a time, instead, all of your neurons are doing neuron things all at the same time. But writing is linear. This forces order and I think is partially responsible for the "clear thinking" ascribed to writing! Hopefully I'll live the couple of decades to find out if PG's prediction is correct, I would bet…
As someone working on linear extensions of partial orders (some of the time), I found your observation very insightful, a perspective I haven't considered before.
I suspect thinking is similar, which brings up questions about LLMs as well. We all can now quickly write hundreds of generic business plans, but knowing what to focus on first is still the hard part.