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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

#341

Post by DoreenMichele »

Eh, the title here is one possible framing of a series of short tweets expressing his concerns about the potential impact of ChatGPT.

I homeschooled. My sons had trouble learning to write and one really hated writing.

I spent several years having him verbally explain material to me, having him learn grammar and vocabulary and other essentials from entertaining videos and graphic books and such.

Thinking and writing don't have to be so closely intertwined as they are in Paul Graham's mind. He's a writer and writing helps him think.

Some people think while taking long walks, working out at the gym, drawing their ideas, etc.

The kind of thinking Paul Graham does may become less common. I have no reason to believe that's some kind of holy grail and thinking via other means is inherently less valuable.

I say this as a blogger who may be even more guilty than Paul Graham of using writing to help me think.

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

#343

Post by ulrashida »

petercooper wrote: post #342

Just because I wasted too much time thinking about it: "Within a year the median piece of writing could be by AI." What does/could "median" mean in this context?

I believe it implies that looking at the volume of writing produced over a period, more than half of it would be AI-generated. It may also suggest a quality lens: all writing average and below would come from AI directly or through AI support.

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

#344

Post by fnordpiglet »

Verdex wrote: post #325

I 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 wri…

This is precisely what I came in here to say. People who say writing and thinking ability are hand in hand are typically good writers who were told they’re good thinkers because their writing ability set them apart. Similarly, the ability to do rote math skills once set people apart as geniuses, literal computers in the classic sense of the word. I see these tools, as applied to this task, as an equalizer of sorts that lets people who have great ideas express them in a compelling way.

In my own life I was terrible at arithmetic, and I grew up at a time when memorizing the multiplication tables was a key life skill. I couldn’t to save my life. I strongly believed I was bad at math and struggled through on sheer willpower and mediocre grades, until I went back to college after I couldn’t make it through calc 1 and dropped out a decade earlier. This time they allowed calculators, graphing at that. I got top marks in every math class from then on and graduated summa cum laude in a top engineering computer science school.

How many people have been marginalized because they couldn’t express their thoughts as clearly and compellingly as a better writer? Maybe a leveling of the fields away from mechanical abilities and towards completeness of thought isn’t a bad thing? Will people lean on it and lose what has been a core skill? Some will no doubt. But will it hurt them? Only as much as it hurts to use a calculator to do your menial math.

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

#345

Post by Bran_son »

Last5Digits wrote: post #157
bayindirh wrote: post #64

Earlier 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 know this is HN, but can we please stop drawing these vague parallels between basic programming concepts and the functioning of the human brain? No, the brain does not "replace written information with a pointer". I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it, but I can tell you that you can construct computer analogies in support of either case. I could posi…

The abstract idea of a 'pointer' is a piece of information to the location of some other information. It is not even an analogy - it is literally the same thing, differing only in implementation details.

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

#346

Post by JustSomeNobody »

noobermin wrote: post #261
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…

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 would agree. At least for some people. The act of trying to code something and failing and then failing again before I finally get it right is what I enjoy about coding. Sitting down to write code and it just works each and every time is boring. It's like writing boiler plate UI code. But... other people want to succeed quickly so they can show people they succeeded quickly. For them, ChatGPT is like a super power.

Edit: I've had conversations with people who write. We have come to an agreement that there are writers who love the process of writing. They want to BE writers. Then there are people who want to HAVE BEEN a writer. ChatGPT was meant for these people.

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

#347

Post by ghaff »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #341

Eh, the title here is one possible framing of a series of short tweets expressing his concerns about the potential impact of ChatGPT. I homeschooled. My sons had trouble learning to write and one really hated writing. I spent several years having him verbally explain material to me, having him learn grammar and vocabulary and other essentials from entertaining videos and graphic books and such. Thinking and writing d…

The key is probably explaining/creating something in a way that doesn't have a lot of latitude for just glossing over the details. I'm not sure long-form writing is especially better than giving a presentation to an audience or working through a problem/creating an artifact of some sort/etc. The key is that you can't just read something and go "Yeah yeah I totally get it." Though I suspect some outputs can be easier to handwave through than others--I know I've done it to some degree on presentations. ("This aspect is complicated and we don't have time to get into it today.")

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

#348

Post by DoreenMichele »

ghaff wrote: post #347
DoreenMichele wrote: post #341

Eh, the title here is one possible framing of a series of short tweets expressing his concerns about the potential impact of ChatGPT. I homeschooled. My sons had trouble learning to write and one really hated writing. I spent several years having him verbally explain material to me, having him learn grammar and vocabulary and other essentials from entertaining videos and graphic books and such. Thinking and writing d…

The key is probably explaining/creating something in a way that doesn't have a lot of latitude for just glossing over the details. I'm not sure long-form writing is especially better than giving a presentation to an audience or working through a problem/creating an artifact of some sort/etc. The key is that you can't just read something and go "Yeah yeah I totally get it." Though I suspect some outputs can be easier…

You make me think of the anecdote about the professor who had half the class graded for making one amazingly beautiful piece of pottery and the other half graded by total weight of the work they created.

In the end, those graded by weight had nicer pieces as it involved more practice with producing something.

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

#349

Post by whatever1 »

Writing is killing creativity.

Out of the dozen branches of thought, writing forces you to commit to just one and expand on it. That is nice for that one thought, but now you left unexplored the other 11 ones which will be forgotten.

When you are thinking you can jump between multiple trains of thought without friction.

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

#350

Post by jzb »

Verdex wrote: post #325

I 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 wri…

“People simply do not understand what they are missing.”

I think you can say this about people who haven’t learned to write well. ChatGPT seems like a great thing because they can get it to excrete a content-like substance that reads well, and call it writing.

Prompting ChatGPT to produce a text lets you move faster when you have an idea and want to cut to the finish.

The problem is that part of writing is starting with an idea, thinking about how to express it, and then realizing that your initial idea might be flawed or need work.

Sure - ChatGPT seems fine for spitting out web copy or something where the role of the writer isn’t to examine an idea, but just to go from start to done as quickly as possible.

But I think he’s talking about the types of writing that involve wrestling with an idea and, for example, trying to persuade others. ChatGPT will happily spit out copy in that form. But it won’t trip over a paragraph and say “hey, shit, now that I write this out, I think it’s wrong or not well-expressed.”

People bemoan co-workers who coast by on people skills and bullshit over people who have expertise and do the work. ChatGPT is likely to be similar - helping people who can’t write (express or work with ideas effectively) sound authoritative and generate more content that they don’t really even understand.

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