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The Need to Read

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Need to Read

#21

Post by Razengan »

eternalban wrote: post #18
jholman wrote: post #7

I think there is clear historical evidence that this thesis is, at a minimum, greatly exaggerated. Socrates never wrote, and I think he had more good ideas than Paul Graham ever will. Muhammad was not even literate, and unless he was inspired by divinity, his ideas were extremely powerful. I mean, I do personally find that writing is a powerful tool for thinking. Maybe that means that Paul Graham and I are normal, an…

> Muhammad was not even literate, and unless he was inspired by divinity, his ideas were extremely powerful. He used to take retreats in the caves near Mecca to meditate and reflect . It was during one of these sessions that he later claimed that he was overwhelmed with the inescapable presence of archangel Gabriel who commanded him to "Read!" . This directive of Gabriel to Mohammad is held to be the first verse of t…

> the reflect phase. For some this occurs prior to writing. Others, take time when writing to pause and reflect.

First you load the dataset then you train the model.

Re: The Need to Read

#22

Post by TekMol »

wskish wrote: post #20
TekMol wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a "prompt prefix" a thing in GPT-3 or do you mean you combine that prefix with the text of the page into a prompt?

We prepend the prompt prefix to the page text to create the actual model prompt. GPT doesn't have any such abstraction.

And GPT-3 remembers the prefix at the end of a long story and writes a summary?

That sounds very surprising to me. I would have strongly expected it continues the story.

Re: The Need to Read

#24

Post by throwboi123 »

zktrust wrote: post #3

have you seen nassim taleb's recent comments about this guy? Taleb while harsh, always is truthful to the truth. I'm too young to know the story behind Hacker News and ycombinator, but reading some of the recent stuff makes me question prevailing sentiments about PG.

Link?

Re: The Need to Read

#25

Post by mikebenfield »

zktrust wrote: post #12
wskish wrote: post #5

Here is the output of GPT reading and summarizing this (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33748363 ). Model seems to be hallucinating the author. Any thoughts on how to improve it? "The Need to Read is an essay written by Kevin Kelly. In it, he argues that reading is essential not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning how to write. He cites the example of a science fiction book in which reading has be…

i think that's also rubbish, just like PG's written opinion piece. How on earth did we then get the great work by William Shakespeare. ShakeSPeare born a time when reading a lot wasn't even possible. There was little to none good content material out there. He was writing more than he could have possible read anywhere else.

So you are under the belief that the written output of one man born in 1564 was of greater quantity than all “good” writing prior to his time? Are you sure you thought this through?

Re: The Need to Read

#26

Post by personjerry »

It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing. And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year.

I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing.

If you want to be a thinker, you have to write.

It really forces you to address your ideas more formulaically and concretizes your theses.

Start a blog! If you're reading this chances are you know how to buy a domain and spin up a blog in less than 30 minutes. Try Wordpress, or hugo with templates if you want more control. And if you don't know what to write about, this link was recently shared on HN, I thought it was pretty useful: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/

And yes, it's important to publish it. It makes your thoughts real. And ideas were meant to be shared.

Re: The Need to Read

#27

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

npunt wrote: post #13

There’s much more to the story than writing is a way of thinking, and reading is a big input into writing. Specifically, how each interplay with ideas, as most of us after all are in the business of creating things. And here, the most important bit is not reading, its curiosity. Curiosity about others’ ideas drives reading, curiosity about one’s own ideas drives writing. The time we spend chasing each type of curiosi…

Excuse me if this is rude but there is an irony to using others' words to argue one should think for themselves more.

Re: The Need to Read

#30

Post by npunt »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #27
npunt wrote: post #13

There’s much more to the story than writing is a way of thinking, and reading is a big input into writing. Specifically, how each interplay with ideas, as most of us after all are in the business of creating things. And here, the most important bit is not reading, its curiosity. Curiosity about others’ ideas drives reading, curiosity about one’s own ideas drives writing. The time we spend chasing each type of curiosi…

Excuse me if this is rude but there is an irony to using others' words to argue one should think for themselves more.

Hah on the surface I suppose. But I’m not arguing whether people should think for themselves, I’m arguing that it matters when people should think for themselves. If you’re more curious about others ideas on a given topic than your own ideas, then you should absolutely read!
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