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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

#221

Post by discreteevent »

INGELRII wrote: post #204

I completely agree with PG. Writing is not just communication with others, or writing down information for later. Writing is not just writing down something that already exists in the mind. Writing is a part of thinking process. You talk to yourself few seconds or minutes later. It's back-and-forth. Marshaling thoughts and ideas, reading them back, reflecting, to be processed then writing them down again. Writing is…

He is also right about laziness. The tragedy might be that some people will never be challenged to write and so they will never develop the potential that they might have. I would not have bothered to make the effort to write somewhat clearly if I had not been criticized for sloppy writing. And, like you say, writing is thinking - so it's a lot more important than the words that end up on the page.

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

#222

Post by pwdisswordfishc »

jxramos wrote: post #125

“If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.” ― Oscar Wilde The above quote may be apocryphal (I tried to source it once but only found secondary sources) but I shared it at work slack when chatGPT had a lot of action with our tea, chats. Seemed quite fitting much like a pilot rotting their flying skills leaning on the autopilot too heavily. You get…

> “[…] others will do your thinking for you.” ― Oscar Wilde

Ironic.

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

#224

Post by steveBK123 »

He's right though. Working in an industry that uses a lot of NLP, its funny to me that people are also so excited about generative LLM.

Soon we won't have to read or write! It will be AI expanding content and producing sentences for other AI to condense back down.

Less words good, me like nice computer talk for me

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

#225

Post by hsjqllzlfkf »

futureshock wrote: post #186
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 e…

May I ask - what job do you do that you read 8-12 hours a day?

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

#226

Post by coldtea »

largepeepee wrote: post #100
marginalia_nu wrote: post #93

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…

It's also useful to point out that historical verbal tradition trained a very specific type of memory recall but that doesn't automatically make anyone wise. Just because you memorized 10000 random articles on Wikipedia, doesn't mean you now have the wisdom to apply that in a particular circumstance. Very much like early AI models.

>Just because you memorized 10000 random articles on Wikipedia, doesn't mean you now have the wisdom to apply that in a particular circumstance.

It's much more likely that you can, that someone who would only look them up "on demand", however, as you at least are aware of the possibilities in those domains.

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

#227

Post by coldtea »

mike_hock wrote: post #116
marginalia_nu wrote: post #93

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.

We would, if we retained an oral tradition (as in the case in that Platonic dialogue).

And even better, we would know it by heart.

Assuning we considered it important of course. But that would be another benefit: it would also filter unimportant works over time.

Of course not everybody would know it by heart. That's a third benefit: only people interested and caring enough would know Plato. Not dilletantes.

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

#228

Post by klibertp »

Quickly scanning the comments here I didn't find anyone mentioning this, a bit further in the thread:

> catalinmpit: Too bad the content written by ChatGPT is average at best.

> paulg: That's a step up for most people.

That's what my impression is: yes, ChatGPT produces mediocre writing and Copilot produces mediocre code, but it's already more legible than many (not sure if "most") people are capable of. I'm not sure in what way exactly, but I think this alone will change a lot in how we communicate online. The best result would be for people to learn from ChatGPT and eventually reach its level and beyond, but... it doesn't go that way too often, historically speaking...

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

#229

Post by INGELRII »

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…

You understood the argument "When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think." very literally. Too literally.

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

#230

Post by blagie »

futureshock wrote: post #186
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 e…

I would add: And doing the same thing over and over.

I find GPT very useful in that I can quickly become mediocre in any domain. Need a legal filing? I can get a good-enough legal filing. Need some code in a framework I've never used? I can get it instantly. Need something written in the language of some esoteric field of science? I can get that instantly from a bullet point list.

It doesn't do the hard parts well: What's being written, and how it's structured. That's where I fit back in.

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