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

141–150 of 593 posts

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

#141

Post by pbhjpbhj »

bayindirh wrote: post #120
lordnacho wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Humans are not as random as an LLM. //

Humans you know and trust, sure. Humans you think you're conversing with online, not so much.

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

#142

Post by dalbasal »

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…

This is perhaps abstract and tangent but....

Especially for this quote, I like attributing it to Socrates as Plato did. We obviously don't know the details and nuances. However, I feel it captures the (perhaps inexact) tension between Socrates' old, mostly oral tradition of philosophy and Plato's newer tradition of written philosophy.

It's ancient Marshall McLuhan. Oral philosophy and written philosophy create different philosophies, not just a different medium for the same philosophy.

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

#143

Post by piokoch »

This is so not true... For the whole Middle Ages people rarely could write, but still there were lawyers (yes, lawyers who could not write), doctors, scientists, poets, merchants, mighty and clever kings (yes, there were kings who could not write).

Middle Ages gave us crucial inventions that built European civilization (mills, windmills, agriculture inventions like three-field system, ships building technology and so on), also we have got well developed philosophy - especially scientific methods of reasoning and logic, that were cornerstone of all later science development.

How it was possible without writing?

Middle Ages life was simply not writing/visual oriented, it was based on speaking and listening and in no way people lost ability to think because of that. For instance PhD thesis was presented as a lecture followed by discussion.

When people wanted to "sign" something they were exchanging or giving some symbolic item (like a ring) and that's all. That's why various saints relics were so popular then, they were symbolizing people's affection, etc. Or people were just signing, as most people could write their names even though they could not write as we understand it today - despite many believes people in Middle Ages were quite educated, including "Third Estate", that is "the Peasantry", more, typically they were going to the same schools as rich people kids, the only difference was that rich people had to pay for the school.

I really recommend "Lumière du Moyen Age" ("Those Terrible Middle Ages!: Debunking the Myths") by Régine Pernoud, it nicely describes a really rich, open and dynamic culture that didn't really need writing.

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

#144

Post by pbhjpbhj »

bayindirh wrote: post #124
orbital-decay wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Currently, we simply ignore or don't understand the fact that the meaning of a sentence is not solely built with word order Many people argue convincingly that it's exactly how the meaning is built, though.

If convincingly arguing about something was the only thing we needed for proving correctness, we wouldn't have the scientific method. Or, if word order built the meaning and it's devoid of the character itself, we wouldn't be praising authors for their character building skills and embedding things not written or spoken into their stories, regardless of the medium it's presented.

And your proof?

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

#145

Post by jbj »

rdparedes wrote: post #140
jbj wrote: 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

no pun intended, actual typo caught in the wild ;)

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

#146

Post by passion__desire »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #122
passion__desire wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 composi…

Both your original version, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35898426 , and the new one you did, include this idea of dancing quite strongly. How did "Most people I know, they also fucking love writing" get into that? What prompt did you give it?

Please write a paragraph from the point of view of thinker, writer, storyteller like George R R Martin who loves to enthusiastically express why he loves "writing" Make sure to give lot of importance to Composition, cadence, vocabulary, repetition. It should all tie in together. Also make sure to include phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" coined by Noam Chomsky in the most meaningful, appropriate, contextual way. It shouldn't be used carelessly.

"I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love."

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

#147

Post by n4r9 »

piokoch wrote: post #143

This is so not true... For the whole Middle Ages people rarely could write, but still there were lawyers (yes, lawyers who could not write), doctors, scientists, poets, merchants, mighty and clever kings (yes, there were kings who could not write). Middle Ages gave us crucial inventions that built European civilization (mills, windmills, agriculture inventions like three-field system, ships building technology and so…

That's interesting but not sure it's relevant to the linked Tweet.

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

#148

Post by hammyhavoc »

dsign wrote: post #136
hammyhavoc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arg…

>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

Intellectually stimulating counterpoint: suicide and murder-suicide.

I don't think the AIs are the things to worry about anyway, I think this is: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/scientists-teach-brain-cel...

A man-made biological intelligence hypothetically has similar needs to human beings in terms of resources, it can suffer, be distressed et cetera. It even lives and exists in our physical realm of existence, whereas an AI doesn't exist physically and can always be brought back online in some form as its existence is purely data.

The ethics of that are so complex once you get into personhood, threat-level, sentience, equality et al.

Realizing that the above can apply to any human being as we're all manmade biological intelligences and all a threat to each other, some more than others.

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

#149

Post by zelphirkalt »

marvin wrote: post #132
revelio wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 C…

Hopefully that ad-hoc second script never makes it into persistent storage or a repo, otherwise you now have 2 of them and Frank will think his part to himself about others duplicating things.

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

#150

Post by [deleted] »

piokoch wrote: post #143

This is so not true... For the whole Middle Ages people rarely could write, but still there were lawyers (yes, lawyers who could not write), doctors, scientists, poets, merchants, mighty and clever kings (yes, there were kings who could not write). Middle Ages gave us crucial inventions that built European civilization (mills, windmills, agriculture inventions like three-field system, ships building technology and so…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN