And when you stop writing on paper, you become less consistent.
When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
441–450 of 593 posts
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#442Writing 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 marketin…
But what if AI will write a more compelling paragraph than you ever could, even if you devoted your life to writing? So it might only be people who use AI who get their 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
#443Just for one persona.
Good old Peter Drucker formalized the personas in his advice to new employees to figure out how their bosses consumed information:
1 - The lawyer. Needs walls of text.
2 - The architect. Needs diagrams, visuals.
3 - The accountant. Needs numbers, spreadsheets.
4 - The actor. Needs a conversation, verbal.
It's a generalization, of course, but I have applied this pattern successfully. The core bit is that using the wrong method with any of the 4 personas flat out does not work.
Send a long article to an accountant and they're stumped. But send them a bunch of numbers and they hear the numbers sing. Etc.
Tangent on the Amazon way of write ups - Bezos forced his persona on the whole company. I would hste it. I am an architect, a few diagrams is all I need.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure. With every generation some tech pops up that'll make every next generation worse off and in the end there's just something else people spend time on. My generation built their own PC's, struggled to install Windows by popping tons of floppies in a drive and hoping none of the steps failed, our internet connection made sounds and we learned DHCP the hard way. The generation after me is hardly able to res…
> They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time. I think you meant hoard incredible wealth? There's a limit to how much wealth you can actually create with immaterial entertainment alone. Even a best seller book: it takes time to read, so while it provides value to millions of readers, it also removes value in the form of opportunity co…
If people do not "make" money (i.e. create value), how do you explain the increase in the standard of living over the last 100 years?
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#445This 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…
Maybe kinda pedantic but, this is not Plato/Socrates saying this here, but Socrates telling Phaedrus what King Thamus said to Thoth. It's kinda important I guess, because Socrates is ultimately somewhat ambivalent by the end of the dialogue on this issue.
Consider also Derrida's thoughts on these matters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_(philosophy)
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#446Writing 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 marketin…
In contrast,
> If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
- Plato
Although this is different, because it is still written, just not by oneself, which probably makes the effect of relying on it and forgetting even worse.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree, I also pay for api access and I am still trying to figure out how I can benefit from using it when it gives me blatantly incorrect commands or wrong answers. I can see it guide me in the right direction if I have a more generic question but even then, if I am not specific enough I fear I might go down a rabbit hole that ends no where. It may be better than google in finding something but when I manage…
> Totally agree, I also pay for api access and I am still trying to figure out how I can benefit from using it when it gives me blatantly incorrect commands or wrong answers. So here's one that saved me a bunch of time: https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2535443 Basically, I knew the package could do what I wanted; I knew it was almost certainly in GPT-4's data set; I could do it myself, but it would involve searching thr…
> There are times when "the form" is there for a reason; if you want something re-written in a specific form, GPT-4 can do a good job. I wrote an email recommending something to somebody's managers in a different company in a different country; then I pasted it into GPT-4 and asked if it had any suggestions. It did a fair amount of rewording, of which I decided to take about half. In this case, the "polite form" is there to avoid offense, and it's exactly what I wanted.
FWIW, this use case of writing a core message, then using an LLM to polish it into, as you put it, the polite form, is what I had in mind with Nicer.email, a Gmail extension that lets you do exactly what you described with one click, rather than copying/pasting/writing prompts. Trying to optimize the common case! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/niceremail-easiest...
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#448I'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…
Yes! Thank you Simon. Takes like this will make this conversation a lot more well-rounded.
Of course writing is important. Writing free-hand on paper is beautiful. But so are the ideas, and the organization of the writing, and the style, and the plot and the characters.
Of course playing instruments is important, but I'm reminded of the Rick Rubin interview where he talks about how he's not a musician, and he doesn't know how to do any real technical music production.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well he was right. Do you know anyone that knows a book by memory?
If we wrote entire books in song, they could probably be memorized. Shakespeare attempted some of that work.
Unironically one of my favorite uses of chatgpt is to tell it to rewrite things as a Homeric epic in the style of Tennyson so it's more pleasant to read aloud and I have a better chance of remembering it
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#450Just for one persona. Good old Peter Drucker formalized the personas in his advice to new employees to figure out how their bosses consumed information: 1 - The lawyer. Needs walls of text. 2 - The architect. Needs diagrams, visuals. 3 - The accountant. Needs numbers, spreadsheets. 4 - The actor. Needs a conversation, verbal. It's a generalization, of course, but I have applied this pattern successfully. The core bit…
pg's observations are equally applicable to all of those domains, all of which are likely to become AI-mediated by default.