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When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
371–380 of 593 posts
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#372Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.
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…
> I read for probably 8-12 hours a day
Jealous. What's your job?
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#373Quickly scanning the comments here I didn't find anyone mentioning this, a bit further in the thread: > catalinmpit: Too bad the content written by ChatGPT is average at best. > paulg: That's a step up for most people. That's what my impression is: yes, ChatGPT produces mediocre writing and Copilot produces mediocre code, but it's already more legible than many (not sure if "most") people are capable of. I'm not sure…
Yeah. I agree with that. It might give me a boilerplate starting framework for something. Or it might give me a decent parenthetical explanation of a term (though Wikipedia probably would too).
It's mediocre, generally lacks nuance, and is pretty boring for the most part. On the other hand, it's grammatical and, in my experience, mostly not actively wrong. So as paulg says, that's at least no worse than a lot of stuff I skim over from people cranking out thousands of words a day for peanuts.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, we'd never know what he said had it not been written down.
We would, if we retained an oral tradition (as in the case in that Platonic dialogue). And even better, we would know it by heart. Assuning we considered it important of course. But that would be another benefit: it would also filter unimportant works over time. Of course not everybody would know it by heart. That's a third benefit: only people interested and caring enough would know Plato. Not dilletantes.
I disagree with all of the above.
If we never had writing, would the Huns have carried forth Platonic wisdom? Would it really have survived thousands of years of cultural evolution and the decline of Greek civilization itself? Who even is the "we" who should consider it important?
> that would be another benefit: it would also filter unimportant works over time.
How would it even be possible to know what's been lost in the oral tradition without anyone writing things down? Only takes one autocrat to massacre followers of a specific tradition to effectively erase it. Things get filtered based on their ability to survive, which is partially a function of "importance", whatever that actually means at a given time.
> a third benefit: only people interested and caring enough would know Plato. Not dilletantes.
This just seems like unabashed elitism. A "benefit" of the oral tradition is that knowledge is reserved for the deserving? No thanks.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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…
> The Catholic Church is interesting counterpoint. Their religious teaching still openly draws upon tradition, institutional church authority and individuals like the Pope.
IIRC this was their main contention against the Protestant reformation. They believed that just pointing at scripture without some practice of custom and tradition to ensure you're properly interpreting it in a sensible way would lead people to folly and extremism/fundamentalism.
Granted it's sort of a pick your poison deal. You either get the fundamentalism of hardline scripturalists or you get the corruption that comes with a hierarchical institution that requires people to offloading some of their critical thinking. Or you can blend them together and get the worst of both worlds by creating something that looks like the more noxious elements of the American Evangelical movement.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#376This 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…
I have seen this happen before my eyes:
When i was young (~17 y.o) i was able to remember all my family IDs, my friends phone numbers and a lot of data about them. Now i rely a lot on my smartphone to tell me their phone numbers, their birthdays, their address, etc... (Sadly today i dont even know the phone number of my gf, out of pure laziness). As i have become more and more lazy and let the tools do their job i'm losing my own skills on it "because i need my brain for bigger things - sure".
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#377Earlier 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.
I think they viewed the transcription itself as a form of meditative/devotional practice and didn't prioritize efficiency as much. The illumination on some of these manuscripts can get pretty elaborate and, sometimes, kind of whimsical. So they were clearly doing some creative expression while doing it.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#378This 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…
Good thing Plato disregarded Socrates' advice and wrote that down
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#379Eh, 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…
I'm sorry but your job as a homeschooler is to teach your sons to write. That's not a skill you can enter adulthood without, and expect to achieve success. Liking it, not liking it... none of that matters when you're asked to document a process or argue in favor of an idea.
Imagine the value a professional teacher would have provided for them...
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#380Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.
It makes me feel like my grandmother who can’t use search. She can use the browser fine she just lacks any Google Fu and uses the most ridiculous search phrases.