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When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
241–250 of 593 posts
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#242> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. This resonates deeply. All that matters for our lived experience and our social interactions is how we train our brains, both individually and at collective scale through agreed symbolic modes of expression. Brains are so plastic that wonderfully different alternatives are possible and we almost certainly have not discovered them all. Ancient bards were learning…
The small silver lining is that there are arguably more people who have access to literature, and who like to read, write, and do math, because generally those things have become more accessible to the wider world.
But when the going gets really tough, those people may try to band together and secede[^1].
One thing I have to add though, as somebody who loves to write, is that I couldn't do it without our modern digital tools. Because I'm not a native speaker, I tend to bungle prepositions and semantics, and it's only with great effort and many Google searches and ChatGPTs and grammar checkers that I dare to afflict[^2] the world with my words.
[^1]: I found this idea in "Homo Deus," blame Dr. Harari!
[^2]: "Afflict": To the point, I used thesaurus.com here to find a suitable synonym of "torment".
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#243I think that this question is also an existential one: how do we want to live our lives? besides the scientific/philosophical discussion about memory and writing, which is fascinating by itself, the question for me is what kind of human beings do we want to be? do we want to let AI's write down everything for us or do we want to leave a mark, leave OUR mark in the world and actually do the things ourselves? also, if we think of every activity as a chore, then we are only looking at its results. but there is also the satisfaction of doing the activity. this view of AI's as a replacement for everything is just the climax of the fantasy of the modern hedonist society addicted to instant gratification.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#244he's missing the point
Firstly, I don't write to think. Its too fucking slow. having had shit hand writing, I've never used the written word as a medium for working stuff out. I suspect a sizeable minority of people don't write to think.
However, When I do write, the words I use are deliberate and compact. This is because writing is laborious and slow.
The real risk is the death of nuance. At a gross scale the example is this:
"Forgive me father for I have sinned" is logically the same as "Sorry daddy I have been bad". However the nuance is fucking miles apart.
Unless you are good at proofreading (spoiler, its a skill and is never taught properly) you are going to have a bad time.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#245Also true of the shortening attention span
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#246"I warn you now, this is going to have unfortunate consequences, just as switching to living in suburbia and driving everywhere did." -- This is a really good comparison by pg. If anything, it will be a sneaky change in human behaviour for most people. Everything seems fine, and then you suddenly realize living without that AI "crutch" is simply too hard.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#247Sometimes 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.
ask it to write like someone else (some established author you know) and it gets much better, you need to play with it a bit
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#248This 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…
> 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 invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; That is correct. I mean, some of that is exactly why I write at lea…
Socrates’ main argument is that the word itself cannot teach but that it takes two parties which are often a student and a text instead of a student and a teacher. If Socrates sat down and explained to a student, he could impart not only the written word but other examples from their own lives. But the word can be uprooted from its context and read by many who will learn just the word instead of the meaning of the whole of it. There’s even a whole class of philosophy who argues _inside_ the definition of words.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#249Earlier 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…
Perhaps having a conversation with an LLM will help thinking even further? I am prone to thinking out loud (in private) and it helps me a lot.
I agree. Instance from today; I have a very novel task at work that nobody seems to know how to approach, I had a hunch that metaheuristics could play a role; I used ChatGPT to help me better formulate the problem and at least now there is a way to tackle the problem.
It made a few errors in at least presenting my ideas, but these errors were a consequence of my misunderstanding and lack of clarity.
The errors themselves, in my opinion, are invaluable because they force you to think, to be clear, and to guide the model into giving me useful ideas to look into.
For all intents and purposes, it was an example of the Socratic method, albeit inverted, where the student is asking questions to an all knowing teacher, and the teacher / LLM responds with ideas and hints. Ultimately, it's up to the student to synthesize the solution, be critical of the data, and tie everything together.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#250This 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…
Well he was right. Do you know anyone that knows a book by memory?
If we wrote entire books in song, they could probably be memorized. Shakespeare attempted some of that work.