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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

#401

Post by quickcheque »

hosh wrote: post #394
Night_Thastus wrote: post #388

I'm not really a fan of ChatGPT, I think it's overhyped and oversold, and very fundamentally limited. But I also completely disagree with his take, it's too broad and sweeping. Offloading some cognitive load does not suddenly make people stupider. It just means that their focus can go elsewhere. Nor do tools that abstract away some processes. A good example is driving. Does a manual transmission require more focus an…

I don’t think pg is talking about the short-term, cognitive deficiencies of using AIs during execution of a specific task. I read it as the long-term decline in capabilities because you don’t regularly exercise certain things: - being able to organize and compose your thoughts - being able to synthesize disparate ideas into a cohesive whole - tuning word choice, diction, and flow for a particular audience - choosing…

Sounds like an ideal labor force.

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

#402

Post by nashashmi »

jiggywiggy wrote: post #360
nashashmi wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not really, that only really happened in the reformation for Christianity. The romans were already pretty good at law.

I had judaism in mind.

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

#403

Post by tjr »

quickcheque wrote: post #401
hosh wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think pg is talking about the short-term, cognitive deficiencies of using AIs during execution of a specific task. I read it as the long-term decline in capabilities because you don’t regularly exercise certain things: - being able to organize and compose your thoughts - being able to synthesize disparate ideas into a cohesive whole - tuning word choice, diction, and flow for a particular audience - choosing…

Sounds like an ideal labor force.

For what kind of labor?

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

#404

Post by jononomo »

futureshock wrote: post #186
rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes 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…

You read for 8-12 hours per day? I guess you get paid to read? What do you spend 8-12 hours per day reading?

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

#405

Post by smolder »

nologic01 wrote: post #180

> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. This resonates deeply. All that matters for our lived experience and our social interactions is how we train our brains, both individually and at collective scale through agreed symbolic modes of expression. Brains are so plastic that wonderfully different alternatives are possible and we almost certainly have not discovered them all. Ancient bards were learning…

> (just like we are becoming obese through the ready availability of massive amounts of fatty foods)

Not to derail, but: fat in food isn't what leads to fat people. As far as diet, the culprit is too many calories, and particularly foods which lead people to overconsume calories for various reasons.

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

#406

Post by hammyhavoc »

jjk166 wrote: post #385
hammyhavoc wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, very interesting at a technical level. However, on the other, it's cheesy, horribly unoriginal and bland in its output, and that doesn't just apply to just this example. Nothing I've seen from an LLM thus far would be winning any awards or get recommended by a critic. Structure-wise, the output is generally very formulaic, even with additional descriptors.

> Nothing I've seen from an LLM thus far would be winning any awards or get recommended by a critic. What paragraph have you written that won awards or was recommended by a critic? I have none to my name. These are tools whose goal is not to produce something superior to what any human could ever write, it is useful merely to improve upon what a typical person would write.

That's not the topic at hand, the greater implication is that people are saying LLMs are going to replace writers and writing as a whole because they are apparently as good as humans and apparently also more creative.

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

#407

Post by chasing »

Writing is thinking. You do it as much for yourself as you do your readers and having to put effort into it is how you realize gains. Like strength training.

Use tools, of course, but don't let them do the hard part for you. It'd be like buying a robot to go to the gym and move weights up and down — sorta misses the point.

(Before I get the usual sorts of replies: I'm not talking about writing boilerplate or marketing copy or canned responses to e-mails or just generating reams of prose so you can slap ads on it and make money or whatever. I'm talking about writing with the purpose of getting your personal thoughts and ideas out into the world.)

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

#408

Post by Firmwarrior »

jononomo wrote: post #404
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…

You read for 8-12 hours per day? I guess you get paid to read? What do you spend 8-12 hours per day reading?

Slack, email, Jira, StackOverflow?

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

#409

Post by ericmcer »

rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes 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.

Try coding in a language/style you are not familiar with.

It is not revolutionary for areas you specialize in, but if I try using it for something like setting up a web scraper with python (something I understand conceptually but have never done) it feels pretty amazing.

My one concern is that if I use it for JS I can immediately spot issues with it, but I am too ignorant of python to spot subtle problems.

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

#410

Post by nluken »

jiggawatts wrote: post #179
hammyhavoc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How impressed or unimpressed you are by it is a direct reflection of yourself and what you are trying to achieve with it. I find zero value in it. Others are very impressed by it, but I'm not very impressed by what they hold up as an example of its output. Sometimes I can only laugh when it's horribly wrong, but they herald it as amazing. The whole thing reminds me of the blockchain hype train. Still using and loving…

You're not impressed!? Here on HN, a few days ago, there was a post about Microsoft publishing a GitHub repo that contained a "table recognizer AI". Basically, you feed it PDFs that contain horrible scanned images of finance records, and it spits out Excel spreadsheets. For some reason, Microsoft had just "thrown this over the fence" and released it to the public for free. This, despite man-years of effort developing…

So what you're saying is that one piece of software with years of labor from a team of engineers can match another piece of software with years of labor from a team of engineers? You're incorrectly comparing the creation of the software with the usage of the software. Yeah, now all you need to do is give ChatGPT the file and prompt it for a solution, whereas before, you... gave the file to a different piece of software and hit a button.
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