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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

#451

Post by mandmandam »

liber8 wrote: post #444
loup-vaillant wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> how do you explain the increase in the standard of living over the last 100 years?

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

That will catch up to us. It already has, in many parts of the world, and it's not looking like it'll get better soon.

And let's not forget, it's not just people who have paid the price.

> The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate, the historically typical rate of extinction (in terms of the natural evolution of the planet); also, the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

The ecocide which we've inflicted on the planet for the last 100 years will some day be seen for what it is - an atrocity.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

All of which is to say nothing about the inequality in how that shareholder wealth is distributed, which is incredibly short-sighted for literally billions of reasons. 8 Americans own more wealth than 4 billion humans. It's perverse beyond comprehension.

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

#452

Post by greggyb »

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…

I feel similarly to how you have described.

My worry is the innovator's dilemma. Given a few generations (software generations, not human) of continuing exponential improvement in capability of LLMs (or whatever replaces them), I worry that those who have spent much more time learning to co-work with a GPT-alike (or replacement) will move to the fore.

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

#453

Post by nerpderp82 »

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.

You are wrong.

LLMs are the single biggest advance in mass learning since the printed book. They are infinitely patient and can be reprogrammed, or repurposed with three sentences. Debate partner, editor, quiz master, literally anything. Every new tool can be abused, of course we can't structure education the same, but we should always be re-evaluating our methods and techniques in the face of new technology and knowledge.

I am dreaming when physics students can have an electronics TA that can projection map over a breadboard to help kids understand and debug their circuits. For 70% of physics undergrads, hands on electronics classes are the hardest classes they took.

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

#454

Post by nerpderp82 »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #298
noobermin wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recall a study whose result said that beginners improve faster when they're told the solutions right away, and experts improve faster when they're given time to figure things on their own. Struggling as a learning tool is important, but there's a good chance the fastest path to expertise is to start with examples of how to do it, and delay that struggle a bit. What you don't want is to keep the crutch forever and n…

It would be trivial to configure multiple LLMs to track a student's progress in real time and ensure the optimal difficulty gradient for maximum learning. It could even detect when you should go outside and play.

The rejection of LLMs for education by otherwise intelligent people is disheartening.

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

#455

Post by al2o3cr »

vagab0nd wrote: post #369
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.

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.

How is #3 supposed to work when #2 applies?

Especially when folks are already out there LLM-generating SEO-spam, so even "well the answer also came up in a Google search" isn't a sign of accuracy.

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

#456

Post by deegles »

I'm thinking about buying a personal voice recorder and keeping it on me 24/7. I could run the audio through Whisper every day and then slowly build up a database of facts that I could query. Like every day if I learn someone's birthday or meet a new person, I could quickly say "I met XYZ at the meeting and we talked about AI bots. Their birthday is May 11th", or "remember to pay the phone bill on the 21st of every month". And then every day the assistant could query that database and tell me who's birthday it is, or which task I need to take care of. If it was realtime then we get closer to a "Her" style AI assistant.

The biggest issue I have is with the models being cloud hosted. I want to own and control all of my data especially personal things like voice recordings... any company will promise the moon when talking about their data security, but we should be 100x more worried about the risks in the long term.

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

#457

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #445
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #50

This 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)

Sure, the game of différance [1] can be played till the end of the universe. Socrates is well known as an aporia [2] lover, but at the end of the day even he had to take an executive decision, leave the agora, and go home to the nagging wife [3]. Ancient Greek misogyny aside, Xanthippe can be interpreted as Socrates' aporia solver, in the same manner his 'daemon' [4] would only tell him "No", Xanthippe would tell him "Yes".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthippe

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon#Socrates

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

#458

Post by majormajor »

Oversimplifying, there's two sorts of writing out there: the sort from people who put a lot of focus on developing writing and language skills; and the sort from people who don't.

For the folks who aren't writing with care, does a language model flowering-up a message like "be there tomorrow to paint walls 7am" reduce any thinking effort? There are people who are making their way in the world without a detailed writing-driving thought process; I don't see how this harms them. (If anything, an inquisitive, precision-driven LLM bot could help, by asking questions to clarify when it detected ambiguity in their original message and such - but that would be a specific product with a specific tayloring towards helping like that that I have rarely seen out of ChatGPTs default "write me a..." behavior.)

And on the other hand, if you care about the LLM-bot-generated message's clarity, accuracy, etc, you're gonna have to proofread it, you might go back and forth, and you will still be going through that process of asking yourself "does this actually say what I mean? did I fully know what I meant when I started"?

I guess the suggestion is that this is going to push people who today struggle through writing because they care about the accuracy of the result into a lower-struggle process where they might unconsciously get worse results... but I'm not sure I agree. If I'm anxious about what the final text I send looks like, I'm anxious regardless of if I used a bot, or asked a friend for help, or whatever.

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

#459

Post by ethbr0 »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #339
ethbr0 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could see it going either way. Agricultural efficiency (in terms of person_fed : person_farming) in Europe was pretty low. So the dedicated headcount (monks) might dominate the net cost, which would make it scale more linearly with number of books.

The market price 1 medieval book was roughly the same price for 5 pigs according to this analysis [1] Price of 7 books = £5 = 100s -> 14s per book / Price of 1 Pig in London = 3s 14 / 5 => roughly 5 pigs per book Note £1 = 20s [1] http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html

Today I learned! Thanks!

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

#460

Post by vagab0nd »

al2o3cr wrote: post #455
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.

How is #3 supposed to work when #2 applies? Especially when folks are already out there LLM-generating SEO-spam, so even "well the answer also came up in a Google search" isn't a sign of accuracy.

Example: I want to buy some construction material that I've seen somewhere. I don't know what to search for since I don't know the term. Prior to LLM, the only way was to ask someone familiar with it, e.g. a plumber. Now I can ask GPT. And then I just do a quick image search to verify.

This doesn't always work, as some stuff is harder to verify. But what's valuable to me is it allows me to ask a vague question and have follow-ups. I usually learn just by having the conversation.

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