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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

#271

Post by voidhorse »

I don't typically agree with pg, but I think he's right here. I was thinking about this topic yesterday.

I've already seen people start using using these tools to help them craft messages (email, text) to family members and friends. Do we really inhabit a world in which the average person is that creatively bankrupt and lazy that we'll start mediating our intimate social relationships through these tools? It's pretty pathetic.

The outliers who are able to produce truly novel styles that the models can't replicate yet (since they aren't in the dataset yet) are going to increase in value 10000x as soon as model produced language becomes the norm.

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

#272

Post by ethbr0 »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #166
dalbasal wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's better to think of these as different, rather than superior... especially given our times' proliferation of mediums with differing cognitive implications. Is Twitter > books? Is HN > podcasts? Every medium has its tendencies... positive, negative and complicated. We don't actually choose between them. It's useful to keep an eye on losses, not just gains. Oral traditions, for example, naturally evolve and…

> This is, largely, the story of monotheist religions. Whether or not they had sacred scrolls in ancient times, the religions were mostly based in folk traditions, temple authority, prophets, judges... people. As the moved from oral tradition to authoritative canon, the religions became extremely stiff an unyielding. The Catholic Church is interesting counterpoint. Their religious teaching still openly draws upon tra…

But the body of canon law would have been impractical to standardize and disseminate without the printed word.

See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in medieval times (admittedly, the Catholic Church was also much more a political-nation-religious entity then vs now)

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

#273

Post by orbital-decay »

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.

To apply the scientific method and prove correctness, you need to define the subject first. Meaning is ill-defined, just like consciousness, intelligence, and others.

LLMs can clearly grasp higher order abstractions and concepts just by reordering the words. In fact, embeddings (developed much earlier) are specifically intended to represent the semantical meaning extracted from text using just statistical methods; until the introduction of transformers they lacked a good architecture to demonstrate the usefulness of that.

This makes many people argue that being a sentence builder is enough to be intelligent, as they also received most of their intelligence from the same source (concentrated experience of someone else - social intelligence).

"Honesty" and other forms of self-introspection is just a high level construct which current models aren't trained for, and likely not a fundamental issue with being a stochastic parrot.

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

#274

Post by smugglerFlynn »

What is interesting to me is that thought leaders are always optimising for some X - be it productivity, some higher good, low poverty, efficiency etc.

But two things humanity, as a whole, consistently optimises for is *short-term survival* and *lesser day-to-day friction*.

ChatGPT/AI seems to be just another friction optimisation, and truth is, we don't know if this optimisation leads us to the world that is anywhere close to 'pretty' by modern standards. People from pre-industrial world would be shocked to see modern people enjoying all the air and noise pollution, but there is no way to avoid falling into such local optimum, because we do not optimise for clean air or quality of life, only for lower friction and survival.

This seems to put us randomly into some local optimums all the time, until unsolved problems pile up so high that they start endangering our survival - rinse and repeat.

What I'd argue is there is no way known to mankind that allows to steer this globally in a different way.

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

#275

Post by School-Cotton »

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.

Just to make sure, are you selecting the GPT4 model at the top of the conversation in ChatGPT?

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

#276

Post by febeling »

voidhorse wrote: post #271

I don't typically agree with pg, but I think he's right here. I was thinking about this topic yesterday. I've already seen people start using using these tools to help them craft messages (email, text) to family members and friends . Do we really inhabit a world in which the average person is that creatively bankrupt and lazy that we'll start mediating our intimate social relationships through these tools? It's prett…

The thought in the last paragraph resonates. Not sure which shape it will take, but the extreme inflation of reasonable and orderly text that the models produce will make it lose all its value. It might be an opportunity for the better, in the end. Maybe quirkiness, authenticity, and personality will see a revival.

It might be better, because the long-winding and formulaic text from the models is something also only models can read well :)

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

#277

Post by EGreg »

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…

Actually, I always found this part much more interesting:

You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.

Because it is now not the case, and AI trained on a corpus of many books can in fact say something new.

That and Meno's paradox!

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

#278

Post by ZephyrBlu »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #210
jiggawatts wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat? Neat!? Generally speaking, Kofax -- or any other off-the-shelf OCR tool -- can't process tables properly. They get confused by headings, total rows, and the like. Hence the R&D effort by that Microsoft team to develop a purpose-built AI-driven tool that can specifically identify these elements and then output the result not just as ASCII text, but as a spreadsheet. Either way, whether you are talking about the…

And yet, my default go-to example with me being personally unimpressed with ChatGPT 3 and 4 is getting it to output a valid NGINX configuration without hallucinating, despite feeding it the required documentation, the original Apache .htaccess file, and telling it what URL rewrites would be required. This should not be a difficult thing, but it constantly hallucinates things that aren't there because it's an LLM, and…

I'm really surprised it cannot output a valid NGINX config when you give it that amount of context.

Can you share the prompt and your expected output? I'm interested to see where it goes wrong.

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

#279

Post by bravura »

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…

I’ve argued that if ChatGPT means that motivated students spend less time doing expository writing, and more time:

* learning to ask good questions

* learning to fact check

* learning to edit the writing of others

Then they have truly learned the Socratic method. Which is a much more valuable tool than writing from scratch solipsistically: being able to actively engage with the writing of others.

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