Wait, didn't Paul Graham leave twitter?
When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
331–340 of 593 posts
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#332This is so not true... For the whole Middle Ages people rarely could write, but still there were lawyers (yes, lawyers who could not write), doctors, scientists, poets, merchants, mighty and clever kings (yes, there were kings who could not write). Middle Ages gave us crucial inventions that built European civilization (mills, windmills, agriculture inventions like three-field system, ships building technology and so…
The moyen age had plenty of writing, it's just that most of it was religious writing: hymns and saints' and martyrs' lives, and treatises on the soul and so on. You have most likely seen the beautiful illustrated manuscripts produced by the monks in monasteries all over Europe.
The other thing that I have noticed is that a great deal of the art from the time is wonky and out of proportion. I was recently at the Musée Cluny in Paris and it was really striking how much of the art in there is pretty badly made, as if by very inept creators. La Dame à la licorne stands out in part because it's not that badly made (though mainly because it's an epic multi-piece tapestry that you'll never see the like of anywhere else). I also remember a statue of a saint whose creator was named (I don't remember the name but it was something like "Le maitre de St. Joseph" or perhaps he had the name of a city) and that was obviously head and shoulders above everything else around it in terms of craftsmanship, which had an almost modern quality.
Then I went to the Louvre and I noticed again how the art before and after the middle ages very clearly lacks this shoddy and haphazard quality of European middle ages art. The Greeks in particular practically worshipped proportion, and the Italian masters would not be caught dead painting an unbalanced figure, by the looks of it. But also Egyptians and Assyro-Babylonians, and all the earlier cultures seemed to take well-crafted art pretty seriously (the bad artists were probably flayed alive early on ... brrr).
So something definitely happened in the middle ages that did not do good to art and culture. Whether it had any impact in everyday life, the ability of people to produce food, build houses, etc, I don't know. There's certainly plenty of architecture that's survived from that time, so clearly not everything deteriorated.
Btw, I think it was the same in the Eastern middle ages too. You can see slap-dash ecclesiastical icons in Byzantine churches of the time. And when you visit Ravenna, and see the mosaics in St Vitale (which are from the very early middle ages), it is clear that something was lost in the ensuing years.
Perhaps we're about to sink into a new "dark age" (regardless of how "dark" was the original "dark ages"). Maybe we'll get lucky this time too, and the light will not be forever extinguished.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#333This 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…
It's true. People can memorize 100'000s of words of text and this ability was common place among learned people. The pali canon is an example. I found myself remembering huge amounts, having just read a text, with no intentional effort to recall after a month in a forest monastery and in the 4 months I was there but afterwards when exposed to the internet and sensory stuff again found my ability to recall texts had g…
> [W]hen exposed to the internet and sensory stuff again [I] found my ability to recall texts had gone.
The overstimulation could be part of it as well, couldn’t it? There isn’t a lot of other information-rich inputs in a monastery.
Holding a summer school in a forest or on an isolated resort seems like exploiting a similar idea, and it does work quite well (for a month or so, before isolation sets in).
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#334Wait, didn't Paul Graham leave twitter? https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168
For about two weeks, then right back to tweeting 5x/day. Just like most who "left twitter" in the past year.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It is very similar to caching performance impacts. And like you say, sometimes performance is just faster, and sometimes it actually enables functionality…
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#336This 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'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…
> the brain replaces them with a pointer.
And, unfortunately, as you get older and memory starts to fill up, the pointers get overwritten.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you turn the handle on a mechanical computer and get an output, has the computer gained the ability to understand maths or think? No. When you give the LLM an input and you get an output, has it gained the ability to understand or think? No.
I just love how recurrent this argument gets. Obviously LLMs are not human brains, and we could be all day listing ways in which the two are different just for the pleasure of it. But when we dig, and rip away all the layers of civilized dialog and cognitive philosophy, what we find at the bottom of the pit is our brains brilliantly doing what evolution wants them to do: to fight for our survival. The core of the arg…
>> So we must fight to death to convince the world they are inferior.
That only makes sense if you assume they are superior. In which case, there isn't really anything to discuss because you've obviously already made up your mind and you will take anything anyone says as some desperate attempt to twist the truth for the sake of survival.
Which is what many people do on this kind of subject and that's why no more debate can be had on the internets about the value of LLMs and "AI".
It's also very annoying. It's like trying to talk to someone who keeps answering with jeers and sneers. It's childish and unproductive.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#338"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 .
Would you be willing to explain how that comparison makes any sense at all? How is living in a city "too hard" for people in suburban and rural communities?
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The market price 1 medieval book was roughly the same price for 5 pigs according to this analysis [1]
Price of 7 books = £5 = 100s -> 14s per book / Price of 1 Pig in London = 3s
14 / 5 => roughly 5 pigs per book
Note £1 = 20s
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#340Earlier 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…
I remember MUCH, much better things that I once had written, not just read.
I remember better when I hand-write things rather than typing them, too.