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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

#281

Post by TheBigSalad »

jasoneckert wrote: post #269

As an educator, I wholeheartedly agree with the author's points. The act of writing our thoughts allows us to make connections between concepts in our mind that we wouldn't otherwise make, often reorganizing and assimilating existing concepts in the process. Similarly, rewriting written notes (e.g., from a class) is an incredibly effective study technique. Writing blogs, detailed emails, and articles also provides th…

Writing isn't learning. Learning is learning. Writing a blog post about something is a good way to learn about it, but the learning doesn't come directly from the writing. Needing to write it just inspired you to learn, there are other ways.

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

#282

Post by ewoodrich »

toldyouso2022 wrote: post #20
armchairhacker wrote: post #8

How much is ChatGPT replacing human writing? It still seems to me like most of the articles on HN are human-written, and I heard CNBC tried replacing writers with ChatGPT and it went terribly. But I've also heard anecdotes of freelance writers getting replaced [1] [2] [3], and every once in a while I spot or hear about something ChatGPT-written in the wild. I'm sure ChatGPT replaces boilerplate writing (e.g. legal do…

While reading your post I wondered if it was written (in part) by chatgpt. I hope you don't take offense, I'm not saying that it's written badly, it's more about of paranoia activating when there is long-form content talking about chatgpt writing posts in forums and such.

I don't think it sounded particularly ChatGPTish but yeah for me any longish comment split into three even paragraphs sets off alarms in my head now.

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

#283

Post by jeremyjh »

jiggawatts wrote: post #253
hammyhavoc wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These things have limits, definitely. In almost every use-case I've tried, I've bumped up against them. The trick is to know what they can and can't do, and use them where they're useful enough . Someone here on HN quipped that ChatGPT is "isn't intelligent" because it couldn't come up with a revolutionary new battery chemistry. Like... what are you expecting? A god? LLMs are useful when you can validate the output y…

I think you and I are pretty aligned in our thoughts on ChatGPT. I think its revolutionary, and I use it every day. But I don't consider it generally intelligent, I do think that novel thoughts of demonstrable value are the real test for that, and a useful invention would convince me beyond all doubt.

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

#284

Post by TheBigSalad »

keiferski wrote: post #217

I think this can be generalized to, “when you lose the ability to create a certain Form, you also lose some of your ability to imagine new types of that Form, and instead just rely on shuffling existing versions of it around to generate novelty.” A bit wordy, but I have the skill of drawing/sketching in mind. There is a big difference between sketching an idea on a blank sheet of paper, and using some kind of softwar…

Honestly ChatGPT is hot garbage. I can't find inputs to make anything it writes sound like it comes from a real person. It's very good at sounding like a specific, boring person. It's impressive that it has mastered human language, but is it really close to mastering humanity?

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

#285

Post by auggierose »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #274

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 anywher…

But there is, you said it yourself. A thought leader turns into a dictator. Of course, this can (and will) go awfully wrong at some point, but as a medium-term solution this might be the way.

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

#286

Post by yawnxyz »

BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #131
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…

Plato turned out right. I'm not extremely old and I still remember time before the Internet, when to know something, you had to look it up, which took ages, so you simply had to know it. Yourself. We measured intelligence by the things you knew. We still have shows with questions based on this concept. This concept no longer makes sense in the modern world. But it used to. Writing is a crutch, Internet even more so,…

We measured intelligence by the number of memorized facts we'd internalized, but little did we know that collecting more facts doesn't make us more intelligent

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

#287

Post by blatant303 »

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…

Here's an experiment that showcases GPT-4 deep (meta)semantic abilities:

https://pastebin.com/8FwQzDiE

TL;DR. I start by asking it to generate sentences where subject-object inversion yields a meaningful sentence where the verb's meaning is shifted metaphorically. For instance "I smoke the cigarette vs the cigarette is smoking me". After some back and forth it comes up with:

The painter captures the landscape vs. The landscape captures the painter. The gardener shapes the garden vs. The garden shapes the gardener. The chef creates the dish vs. The dish creates the chef.

Maybe that will change your mind.

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

#288

Post by spacebanana7 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #272
spacebanana7 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

I largely agree about the administrative difficulty although I‘d emphasise the written word over the printed word in this context.

Using thousands of monks to copy documents by hand instead of using printers was incredibly resource expensive, but affordable for the Medieval Church.

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

#289

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

lifeonlars wrote: post #256
futureshock wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But the only purpose of writing that paper is for you to practice doing research, thinking and writing. Most people who write deep, thought-provoking work started out doing assignments like that. What could possibly be the point of getting a computer program to do it for you?

That you never have to learn how to do it yourself.
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