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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

#311

Post by nashashmi »

dalbasal wrote: post #154
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…

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 religion.

This is largely the story of religions, especially old pagan religions. Myths and folklore came about. The moment when religions went scriptural, the message became firm and technical. And gave rise to law as a study.

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

#312

Post by pcblues »

If anything, writing froze ideas (see religion), whereas speaking them from generation to generation allowed the dross to slough off good ideas. Does good science require writing? That's a good debate to have. Are written notes essential for scientific progress/discovery? Maybe. If failures are recorded and researchable, then I would argue yes, because it is likely only the successes were transmitted with spoken word.

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

#313

Post by ethbr0 »

_glass wrote: post #158
marginalia_nu wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the contrast should be between studying and internalizing a subject versus having the ability to look up a subject. That seems the most true to Plato's intention. It's common and easy to fall into considering the things you could look up as things you already know. What's the difference, one might ask? What's the problem with offloading some of this knowledge and free up space in your head? Well the thing whe…

Exactly. My compsci prof was forcing us to learn so much by heart, but then it's internalized and you start to think in those terms. Right now I am writing my PhD thesis in management and in the beginning I didn't have all of those papers really in my head. But now slowly that knowledge accumulates and I can think through things I couldn't think before. But on the other hand, I now think, how could I not understand t…

I think of it in terms of computer memory levels.

There are some computations (synthesis) that require so many (non-front loadable) memory accesses that it's impractical to do them from memory with significant delay (books), because the number_of_accesses * access_time dominates the project time.

Instead, you must have a working set of core information (or at least pointers to information) in low-latency memory (your brain).

Example: How much longer would it take me to do a multi-digit multiplication if I had to look up the process for multiplication in a book for every digit multiplication I did? And what if that multiplication were just one of many in the higher-level math problem I was trying to solve? (Then generalize to any problem that requires a core base of knowledge)

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

#315

Post by QuadrupleA »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #300

There are multiple ways to interpret this, as evidenced by the diversity of comments here; prejudice was the first thing that came to mind for me. Dyslexia is a condition that makes writing arduous due to such challenges as visual confusion between symbols, lack of memory for unusual spellings and difficulty comprehending abstract concepts from words alone. It's not merely a matter of preference to 'hate' writing. To…

Can definitely confirm. Someone close to me is very smart but dyslexic, and ChatGPT had been a godsend - almost like a prosthetic limb.

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

#316

Post by loup-vaillant »

donkeyd wrote: post #292
noobermin wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is this will rob a whole generation of that learning. To struggle to learn to write, code, and all that is how you become a professional. A lot of people will never develop these skills, and the chasm between the talented and untalented will only grow.

I'm not sure. With every generation some tech pops up that'll make every next generation worse off and in the end there's just something else people spend time on. My generation built their own PC's, struggled to install Windows by popping tons of floppies in a drive and hoping none of the steps failed, our internet connection made sounds and we learned DHCP the hard way. The generation after me is hardly able to res…

> They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time.

I think you meant hoard incredible wealth?

There's a limit to how much wealth you can actually create with immaterial entertainment alone. Even a best seller book: it takes time to read, so while it provides value to millions of readers, it also removes value in the form of opportunity cost. No way around choosing what to do with your own time.

Other alternatives have more potential. Educational content could lift some people out of incompetence and help them build actual wealth (say a very good programming or sawing tutorial). Writing useful software could also create wealth, even more so if it's Free (and free). And of course, building stuff (while taking care not to deplete our resources or burning up our planet…).

We say that people "make" money, but that's a dangerously misleading idiom. They don't actually make money, they extract money. Hopefully this money is actually earned in proportion to the value they actually injected into society (make a chair, get paid for the chair, all fair and square). But never forget that the people who "make" the most money generally do so by taking it from other people. Employers, landlords, stakeholders… who get most of their "earnings" not from what they do, but from what they own.

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

#317

Post by smugglerFlynn »

auggierose wrote: post #285
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.

I'm struggling to come up with examples where one man would consciously steer the mankind into some different direction - closest we have to such "steering committee" is probably UN. So I don't see Paul or any other individual significantly impacting the way AI is adopted (at least not in a way it is portrayed today - as a global game changer / new era enabler).

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

#318

Post by ethbr0 »

stevenhuang wrote: post #231
dumpsterdiver wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> also useful to point out that historical verbal tradition trained a very specific type of memory recall I'm genuinely curious, why do you think this is relevant? How would you differentiate "specific types of memory recall" scientifically?

Cued recall in the form of verbal tradition is often criticised to be subject to inaccuracies as, for one example, stories accrue embellishments over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_(memory)

In Appalachia that's just called storytelling. :)

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

#319

Post by bigwavedave »

pcblues wrote: post #312

If anything, writing froze ideas (see religion), whereas speaking them from generation to generation allowed the dross to slough off good ideas. Does good science require writing? That's a good debate to have. Are written notes essential for scientific progress/discovery? Maybe. If failures are recorded and researchable, then I would argue yes, because it is likely only the successes were transmitted with spoken word…

I would argue that broad collaboration requires the written word. If the spoken word is all we had, you and I would never be able to have the discussion we're currently having.
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