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

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

#131

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 turned out right. I'm not extremely old and I still remember time before the Internet, when to know something, you had to look it up, which took ages, so you simply had to know it. Yourself.

We measured intelligence by the things you knew. We still have shows with questions based on this concept. This concept no longer makes sense in the modern world. But it used to.

Writing is a crutch, Internet even more so, and AI even more so. Eventually you can build the entire thinker out of those crutches and you need no humans anymore.

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

#132
post #66
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack Overflow searches for common tasks. An example I had last night: how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them back together again (I replaced one of the pages with a scanned signed version). This is a basic task, a beginner's task in the world of pdf munging, but I didn't know the answer off the top of my head.…

By the way, on macos the preview tool can do this. You can drag and drop pages between documents using the sidebar and reorder them the same way.

That's interesting and relevant to know if you'd be doing this a few times. And it doesn't invalidate your point at all, but the time savings of having a machine tell you really fast how to do something simple is valuable.

I recently had to do a 'git pull' on 120 repositories, and of course we already had an in-house tool to do that. Of course I could google a script to do it. But it saved me 5 minutes to just have ChatGPT write it for me, and I saved the overhead of a more thorough context-switch.

Even the guy sitting next to me. "Hey, check this out, ChatGPT wrote this script for me and saved me 5 minutes". "Oh, but we already have a tool for that". "Yeah, I figured. Where is it?" "Ummmmm, I don't know, let me ask someone. Frank maybe?" And 5 minutes spent chasing Frank.

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

#134

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…

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

Plato gives multiple hints across his works about the esoteric, unwritten teachings [1]. We can only speculate about the content; for me, they were surely tied with the Eleusinian Mysteries [2]: early, myths-driven psychonautics based on ergot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries

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

#135
And I think if you lose the oral tradition, if you don’t speak your thoughts out loud and make them into a speech then you lose something too. It’s also the ability to think. I find my modes of communication in writing, and speech way different to the extent that I’ve taken to Verbally responding to things; recording that; transcribing that; and then putting that into writing, because I find like the process of writing maybe because it’s cross pollinate it too much with my work as a programmer uses a different part of myself and a lot of the time ends up going on like long tangents to explain everything in agonizingly stupid legalistic detail wheras in speech, I would just get straight to the fucking point. Obviously, your mileage may vary my insights here may only apply to myself, and certainly not gonna apply to everyone I think.

However, what I’m saying, reminds me of what Haruki Murakami talks about as his process for writing I think in his earliest novels anyway, he even mentioned trying to write it as if he was speaking it but certainly he writes his novels in English first and then translates them back in the Japanese, because he finds that’s how he expresses his authentic voice. Kind of hilarious to have such lauded post modern writer, write in a way where his pre-translated works are then translated back into English else. Reminds me too of fight club / chuck Palahniuk copy of a copy of a copy. Yet in Murakami‘s case it seems to create rather than erode quality.

Of course there’s always the issue of the very low quality transcription available in a by default in iPhone and android keyboards. The voice typing sucks and so you always get some weird homonyms inside probably there’s some in his comment to.

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

#136
post #4

Interestingly enough, you can reverse this statement: "when you gain the ability to write, you gain the ability to think" - and in part gain some insight into how LLMs seem to suddenly have "emergent" behaviour to perform quite impressive feats of logic.

When you turn the handle on a mechanical computer and get an output, has the computer gained the ability to understand maths or think? No. When you give the LLM an input and you get an output, has it gained the ability to understand or think? No.

I just love how recurrent this argument gets. Obviously LLMs are not human brains, and we could be all day listing ways in which the two are different just for the pleasure of it.

But when we dig, and rip away all the layers of civilized dialog and cognitive philosophy, what we find at the bottom of the pit is our brains brilliantly doing what evolution wants them to do: to fight for our survival. The core of the argument is "Are LLMs better than us? Because if they are better than us, they deserve more than us, according to our cultural upbringing. And we don't want to be second class. So we must fight to death to convince the world they are inferior."

IMO, the folly is in the last sentence. Maybe we should just carve an exception in our culture, say that even if we create and exploit AIs which do a few things better than us, it is okay to smash any artilect that we make and that wants to supplant us. Humanity first.

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

#137
post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

I am trying to use ChatGPT for writing code and that code is mediocre to bad. I really hope that in couple of years LLMs will advance enought to support/refactor what they are generating now.

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

#139
post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

It is probably because you have standard / quality expectations and those are above the level of what GPT will give you. Keep your standards and quality expectations, I say.

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

#140
post #89

Especially on my phone I have actively disabeled all spelling control, and successively suggestive typing. writing a sentence while making it, I feel too much the words are being forced on me. Where as it can be a great tool, I like to exercise my mind, the same reason I calculated all Matrix determinants with pen and paper when I started my engineering degree. Some people may go to the gym and work out, but I am lik…

> Especially on my phone I have actively disabeled all spelling control

I can see that

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