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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

#421

Post by JadeNB »

idlewords wrote: post #416

Paul Graham on the benefits of good writing is like Helen Keller offering her reflections on what makes a great Broadway show.

> Paul Graham on the benefits of good writing is like Helen Keller offering her reflections on what makes a great Broadway show.

I think you can dunk on someone's writing without ableism. (Observing that a blind and deaf person isn't likely to enjoy a Broadway show isn't necessarily ableist, but gratuitously bringing them into a discussion that doesn't involve blindness, deafness, or Broadway shows is.)

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

#422

Post by ivanhoe »

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…

> Having high-level languages instead of having to write assembly does not make programmers worse. It just means that instead of having to worry about byte alignment, structure packing and nuanced cache details - they can instead focus on providing more features and functionality to the end user - which is a good thing!

It also means that now we seriously lack people capable of working close to the bare metal - and the same will happen to many other skills and niche knowledge that AI will be able to replace (e.g. why school statics engineers, if AI can solve the math for architects directly).

That will IMHO result in some bad things as well:

- There will be no one left to oversee and improve the work done by AI,

- It will further slow down the overall progress because the most of people will lack deeper insights into how things work and AI will probably still be of the limited use for making ground-breaking original discoveries,

- And finally, though as individuals we will probably keep our IQs, just entertaining them with something else, as whole our civilization will loose some knowledge and skills - making us all dumber in a way.

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

#425

Post by oldsklgdfth »

In general, taking the easy route stiffs development. Relying on AI to speak for you is a major crutch.

"The Art of the Essay"[0] describes the process of formalizing thoughts and ideas into structured arguments and logically unfolding them as a result of trying to put them in writing.

This also dovetails into the notion that communication mediums can support only certain information. "The medium is the message" [1] is the phrase coined for this idea.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

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

#426

Post by simonw »

I'm a big fan of writing as a crucial skill for thinking.

But I wonder if this concern of AI-assisted writing harming this will actually play out the way people think.

Until quite recently, if you wanted to write music you had to learn an instrument first: needing to learn piano or guitar or similar to a point where you could compose your own music was a pretty big obstacle to getting started.

Now, thanks to software like GarageBand, you don't need to develop those skills first. You can jump straight to the fun bit.

I wonder if the act of sweating over word choice and spelling and grammar in order to explore your ideas might turn out to work in a similar way?

Maybe we'll find out that people who didn't spend years developing their fundamental writing skills will be able to excel in a new, LLM-assissted world where ability to write well is no longer a pre-requisite to using writing to explore, develop and share their ideas.

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

#427

Post by hosh »

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.

That is indeed what factories preferred since the beginning of industrialization.

I’m not concerned so much about AI taking over my livelihood as I am of businesses treating humans as automatons, and have been for over a century, if not more. We even adapted our education system to crank out more automatons (John Taylor Gatto’s book).

The flip side is understanding what a true autonomous agent is from the lens of Promise Theory. At the core of it, you trust humans to do what they promise to the best of their abilities. This is the heart of voluntary cooperation. For AIs to be truly autonomous, they cannot be proxies for promises humans make to each other. (Being a proxy for humans is how AI safety ethicists are approaching this). Instead, AIs have to be capable of making and keeping promises in their own right, and we have to trust they do what they promise to the best of their capabilities. … but not every business can’t seem to do that with humans.

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

#428

Post by whinenot »

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?

hacker news, obviously

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

#429

Post by jonahx »

d23 wrote: post #413
vagab0nd wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense but you are almost certainly using it wrong. Consider the following: 1. Use it when you know how to do something but don't want to. 2. Use it when you don't know something, and don't know how to find the answer. 3. Never trust. Verify. Clearly, this means the examples that impress others will often not impress you.

It’s very difficult for me to wrap my head around people that aren’t blown away by both this and generative image AIs, and I tend to be in the skeptical side when it comes to fancy tech adoption.

It is astonishing, even more so that some in this camp are smart people.

I chalk it up to "hype aversion" -- an internal heuristic that anything with so much hype around it must be bullshit. For some, there might also be good old resistance to change, to the unknown consequences of all these developments.

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

#430

Post by Tainnor »

simonw wrote: post #426

I'm a big fan of writing as a crucial skill for thinking. But I wonder if this concern of AI-assisted writing harming this will actually play out the way people think. Until quite recently, if you wanted to write music you had to learn an instrument first: needing to learn piano or guitar or similar to a point where you could compose your own music was a pretty big obstacle to getting started. Now, thanks to software…

> Now, thanks to software like GarageBand, you don't need to develop those skills first. You can jump straight to the fun bit.

It might just be me, but I find it weird that one would consider the act of actually playing music not to be precisely the fun bit.

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