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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

#181

Post by raincole »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #25

> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. Way more than admit it I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love . Some do it for pleasure, some do it as a career, others do it as a means to an end in their career, and they haven't found value in LLMs. There's writing and writing . If all you're doing is rewording what someone else has already done like a high sch…

Do people really hate writing? If so the comment sections of HN and Reddit, the timelines of Facebook and Twitter, the whole Medium... would be so empty.

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

#182

Post by notahacker »

makeitdouble wrote: post #174

I have the feeling this is missing on what people want ChatGPT to do for them. They're still communicating their exact thoughts to the prompt, and will adjust to get exactly something matching their intent. To take an example, asking ChatGPT to write a professional sounding resignation letter might look absurd to people who value writing in itself, but the people doing it are still expressing a very specific intent:…

> To take an example, asking ChatGPT to write a professional sounding resignation letter might look absurd to people who value writing in itself, but the people doing it are still expressing a very specific intent: "I quit".

But they're not expressing other very specific intents like going out of their way to assure the team that the new opportunity was unmissable or pointedly thanking some people but not others or being deliberately terse because frankly the whole experience was a bit shit. (and might if they're not careful be expressing particular intents they specifically don't wish to convey)

And ChatGPT itself generally gives the most verbose answer possible, because people training it reward verbose and somewhat ambiguous responses more than clear but not quite right answers, so I suspect its impact on prose norms will be the exact opposite...

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

#183

Post by Kim_Bruning »

Last5Digits wrote: post #157
bayindirh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato's warning is true, actually. Since I started to write, I remember less and less about the things I have written down, because the brain replaces them with a pointer. However, writing for thinking and writing for storage is two different things, and it activates different parts of the brain. I'm an avid pen and paper user, and using a real pen on a paper allows me to think much more deeply. It regulates thinking…

I know this is HN, but can we please stop drawing these vague parallels between basic programming concepts and the functioning of the human brain? No, the brain does not "replace written information with a pointer". I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it, but I can tell you that you can construct computer analogies in support of either case. I could posi…

A librarian might say they create a reference card, a web person might say they're creating a hyperlink.

In all cases I think parent post is trying to communicate that they are putting the large mass of information elsewhere, and only retain a reference locally. (implementation details notwithstanding)

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

#184

Post by notahacker »

raincole wrote: post #181
hammyhavoc wrote: post #25

> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. Way more than admit it I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love . Some do it for pleasure, some do it as a career, others do it as a means to an end in their career, and they haven't found value in LLMs. There's writing and writing . If all you're doing is rewording what someone else has already done like a high sch…

Do people really hate writing? If so the comment sections of HN and Reddit, the timelines of Facebook and Twitter, the whole Medium... would be so empty.

There are a lot of people not on Reddit or HN or Medium

(Also a lot of people whose terse and incoherent interactions and tendency to simply repost on Facebook and Twitter suggest that writing is a regrettably necessary means rather an end)

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

#185

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

It's not just writing.

The big problem with the chat interface is it pretends to be acting and reasoning like a human - but it's more like a person with a half brain chopped off (cf> McGilchrist The Divided Brain), and even then, it has no embodied awareness.

And so I wonder how it will affect people and their relationships. If you already have eg. anxiety and often times a little bit of frustration in trying to get answers or simply get help from REAL people... imagine how it will change you when you get used to an AI that seems to always be on point.

In other words people who spend lots of time interface with AI via a chat interface ; and who have even minor mental health issues such as depression, OCD, etc ; I suspect will have even less social skills. They will expect REAL people to be on point, be even more disappointed or frustrated, and isolate even more.

Put simply I think spending a lot of time with this kind of AI may turn us into Spocks... now for some this is good news. To each their own...

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

#186

Post by futureshock »

rcme wrote: 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 feel like this is the bias of a very smart, highly educated, highly capable person. If you are already an excellent writer and coder, can take vast fields of knowledge and blossoming ideas and spit them out onto paper in skilled form with minimal anxiety, GPT probably does very little for you. Maybe you could see if you were missing something very obvious and average.

I read for probably 8-12 hours a day. I write every day. I think every day. I’ve been doing this for decades. GPT has been like a talking dog. It’s an insane achievement, but he’s not the worlds best conversationalist.

But to be 17 again and struggling all night to write a three page paper filled with unoriginal ideas, it would have been a game changer back then.

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

#187

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

There were the same warnings about the printing press, both books and newspapers; "kids don't play anymore, they read books all day", or "people don't share news anymore, they all read their own newspapers".

I'm not going to deny it's a change, but it's too early to decide if it's a bad change. Every generation has its own big shift in the past 100-200 years, and every generation complains about the change.

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

#188

Post by hammyhavoc »

jiggawatts wrote: post #179
hammyhavoc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How impressed or unimpressed you are by it is a direct reflection of yourself and what you are trying to achieve with it. I find zero value in it. Others are very impressed by it, but I'm not very impressed by what they hold up as an example of its output. Sometimes I can only laugh when it's horribly wrong, but they herald it as amazing. The whole thing reminds me of the blockchain hype train. Still using and loving…

You're not impressed!? Here on HN, a few days ago, there was a post about Microsoft publishing a GitHub repo that contained a "table recognizer AI". Basically, you feed it PDFs that contain horrible scanned images of finance records, and it spits out Excel spreadsheets. For some reason, Microsoft had just "thrown this over the fence" and released it to the public for free. This, despite man-years of effort developing…

I mean, sure, I guess that's neat, but Kofax OmniPage Ultimate has been a thing for years at this point and does the whole OCR from a crappy scan thing, including reformatting it into whatever format you want. Can even take data from forms and digitize it into editable text or stick it into a database. Goes back to the '80s. Sure, different methodology, but it's not something we haven't already been doing for yonks. Users have even been able to train OmniPage Ultimate to recognize someone's bizarre and unique handwriting styles in seconds.

OmniPage Ultimate is an entire workflow that's turn-key and ready-to-go.

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

#189

Post by hammyhavoc »

raincole wrote: post #181
hammyhavoc wrote: post #25

> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. Way more than admit it I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love . Some do it for pleasure, some do it as a career, others do it as a means to an end in their career, and they haven't found value in LLMs. There's writing and writing . If all you're doing is rewording what someone else has already done like a high sch…

Do people really hate writing? If so the comment sections of HN and Reddit, the timelines of Facebook and Twitter, the whole Medium... would be so empty.

There's writing and writing though. Short throwaway comments and bickering on social media aren't really the same as writing long-form prose.

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

#190

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

Last5Digits wrote: post #157
bayindirh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato's warning is true, actually. Since I started to write, I remember less and less about the things I have written down, because the brain replaces them with a pointer. However, writing for thinking and writing for storage is two different things, and it activates different parts of the brain. I'm an avid pen and paper user, and using a real pen on a paper allows me to think much more deeply. It regulates thinking…

I know this is HN, but can we please stop drawing these vague parallels between basic programming concepts and the functioning of the human brain? No, the brain does not "replace written information with a pointer". I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it, but I can tell you that you can construct computer analogies in support of either case. I could posi…

Fun fact about the biological machine is that we could maybe make it "replace written information with a pointer". In planarian worms we can use a voltage-sensitive dye to see a "memory" the cells will fallback to in case of injury and they regenerate based on that "memory", however we can alter that "memory" to say "build a worm with 2 heads" instead of the regular worm with head and tail [1].

[1] "Michael Levin - Plasticity without genetic change: bioelectric embryos & synthetic proto-organisms", https://youtu.be/5ChRM4CEWyg?t=1169

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