> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. The target audience of openai.
While I enjoy the act of writing, I dislike the amount of time it takes to do it well.
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
#322Earlier 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…
May I ask - what job do you do that you read 8-12 hours a day?
I’m an enterprise architect. I’ve got a pretty wide set of projects I need to keep up to date on, a lot of industry developments and just following general tech trends. Lots of my role focuses on documenting our designs and projects.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#323This reminds me of the individual who asked, "Is TikTok making us dumber/hurting our focus?" My harsh response was, "You have access to the internet and its wealth of educational information; if TikTok is what you seek out, then you were already dumb to begin with."
I don't think AI makes a person dumb, but rather is a magnet for those BS'ers who'd rather hire a ghost writer or shamelessly plagiarize than expend effort. An intelligent person should want to write, draw, and code regardless of what AI can do. They should understand the joy is in the journey, not the destination. Conversations like this reveal a deeper problem with the culture and its misplaced values.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#324Funny story...
Some of you only know math a certain way as you used programmable calculators etc... i learned math the way of one of the founders of Chaos theory learned via graphing and manual math operations. And the difference is that I can grasp new math fast as my meta-language of math objects in my head is formed of those manual operations and graphing snapshots.
It's the same with human thinking-writing connection as writing helps us refine and enter new meta-language objects into our brains, without it we make our IQ -level die.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#325I think it's the other way around. With certain thought techniques, you will find yourself writing. I'm sympathetic towards having a mode of thought that allows you to be a prolific writer and then bemoaning the lonely path you're on as new technologies allow people to completely bypass what you are good at.
People simply do not understand what they are missing.
However, people who don't write weren't going to be writing themselves anyway. It's similar with math. Everyone talks about how important it is for children to learn math in school. And everyone recoils with primal terror if I so much as mention the most minor of mathematical constructs.
Be joyous that you are good at something. But I don't think you should look down upon those who find a way to survive by not being good at your thing. Even if things would objectively be better if everyone was a mathematician, scribe, and poet, this is probably not a realistic goal.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It'd be fascinating to see a conversion to person-hours to copy one book in medieval times. And I mean fully-loaded, so how much time needed to be spent {farming/military/political administration} to give a monk time to learn to read and write, and then allow them time to copy the book itself.
It's an interesting thought. Challenging because of the fixed costs though. The cost to produce one book would be almost identical to the cost to produce 1000 books; it is the infrastructure more than the marginal resource cost per book.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#327I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. Future generations not only won't learn write, they won't learn to read either. Writing is a technology that "freezes" language and inscribes it onto paper. That was important when you couldn't record speech directly, or broadcast it easily. But now you can just record a video or audio stream and put it on the internet, and that obviates the benefit of transcribing it.
Of course there are a lot of benefits of writing relative to audio/video. But are those benefits important compared to the enormous amount of effort that is required to learn to read and write?
I also don't think it's wise to demean the skill involved in generating good speeches/podcasts/talk shows compared to good writing. Language skills are language skills. The difference in ability of a strong speaker vs a weak one is dramatic and instantaneously obvious.
As the talent pool of good writers shrinks, the benefit of learning to read will shrink as well, leading to fewer readers. And then the incentive to become a good writer will diminish, since there are fewer readers who can consume your work. This will lead to a vicious cycle of reduction in literacy.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
> people you talk to online are just googling up wikipedia articles to base their world view upon on the fly. Well you're lucky if they do; often they just make stuff up on the fly depending on what they saw on some dubious media or social network.
Well that's the human brain for you. It's very good at extrapolating new information from things it's seen and heard that may not be true, without actually telling you that it's basically making shit up as it goes. It's yet another reason why education matters.
I can’t tell if that’s a tongue in cheek criticism of the panic over AI hallucination. Bravo either way.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#329> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. Way more than admit it I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love . Some do it for pleasure, some do it as a career, others do it as a means to an end in their career, and they haven't found value in LLMs. There's writing and writing . If all you're doing is rewording what someone else has already done like a high sch…
> I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love . One can tell from the opening of your comment. Composition, cadence, vocabulary, repetition. It ties together. I prompted an LLM to produce an enthusiastic expression around writing, but it came up with drivel like > Writing fills my heart with pure delight, igniting my soul and inspiring my mind with boundless creativity. I…
Sarcastic critic of the following initial sentence:
> I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love.
Well, well, well. If it isn't the unabashed, unfiltered bard of the 21st century. Look at the sheer depth of passion here, folks! We've got 'fucking love' not once, but twice, because why not? Repetition is the spice of life, after all. And such eloquent use of the F-word, too. Truly, Shakespeare would be jealous.
Also, let's take a moment to appreciate the vague and incredibly relatable 'most people I know.' Because who doesn't know a handful of people who also 'fucking love' writing? Clearly, this is the universal experience we've all been waiting for.
And then, the pièce de résistance, 'and I do mean love.' As if the preceding profanity didn't quite hammer home the sentiment. Thanks for the clarification. We were worried you only 'kinda liked' writing. A masterpiece of modern literature, truly.
Great. Now show us what initial sentence you'd have used, same style. Just one brief impactful sentence with the same level of familiarity.
"Writing is my jam, and I swear, everybody I know is just as stoked about it – and I mean stoked."
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
It'd be fascinating to see a conversion to person-hours to copy one book in medieval times. And I mean fully-loaded, so how much time needed to be spent {farming/military/political administration} to give a monk time to learn to read and write, and then allow them time to copy the book itself.
It's an interesting thought. Challenging because of the fixed costs though. The cost to produce one book would be almost identical to the cost to produce 1000 books; it is the infrastructure more than the marginal resource cost per book.
Could see it going either way. Agricultural efficiency (in terms of person_fed : person_farming) in Europe was pretty low. So the dedicated headcount (monks) might dominate the net cost, which would make it scale more linearly with number of books.