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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

#461

Post by [deleted] »

marvin wrote: post #132
revelio wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, on macos the preview tool can do this. You can drag and drop pages between documents using the sidebar and reorder them the same way.

That's interesting and relevant to know if you'd be doing this a few times. And it doesn't invalidate your point at all, but the time savings of having a machine tell you really fast how to do something simple is valuable. I recently had to do a 'git pull' on 120 repositories, and of course we already had an in-house tool to do that. Of course I could google a script to do it. But it saved me 5 minutes to just have C…

[deleted]

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

#462

Post by ecshafer »

sva_ wrote: post #446
chasing wrote: post #407

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 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…

Plato here is often brought out as a counter example for why saying a technology will damage cognition is obviously wrong, but I don't think its that simple. Writing and the proliferation of knowledge is an obvious good, but I think plato is otherwise correct here. Societies without reading and writing seem to have people who are able to memorize much larger amounts of information, the early muslims memorized the koran at first, which is quite a feat, before writing it down. A more accurate view is that there are trade offs.

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

#463

Post by natch »

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 don’t know how you’re using it but it seems to step up its game if you challenge it more. You can also ask it to refrain from dumbing things down.

Copilot wasn’t useful for me because I want a back and forth conversation to straighten out concepts. With Copilot you don’t get that and it just sprays out little messes of code.

I use GPT4 like a rubber duck in the sense of “rubber duck debugging” and it can be surprisingly supple and creative in its solutions… many bad ones, but again, push back on those and you get to good ones.

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

#464

Post by nickfromseattle »

chasing wrote: post #407

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 marketin…

> or marketing copy

I don't think marketing copy deserves to be grouped with 'boilerplate' and 'canned responses'.

It takes a lot of brain power to create marketing copy that isn't boilerplate / canned / generic.

Good marketing copy persuades people to take a specific action, and figuring out what this takes just as much critical thinking, iteration, and getting your reps in as any other compelling content.

Which is why most marketing copy feels bland / generic / boilerplate / canned.

It's not easy.

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

#465

Post by pazimzadeh »

chasing wrote: post #407

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 marketin…

Writing is a form of thinking.

It only takes one or two manic episodes to realize that they're not always super correlated.

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

#466

Post by wwweston »

chasing wrote: post #407

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 marketin…

> Use tools, of course

"Tools are the subtlest of traps. We become reliant upon them and in their absence we are vulnerable, weak, defenseless..."

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

#467

Post by lo_zamoyski »

naravara wrote: post #375
spacebanana7 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

> 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.

I don't think it is fair to say the latter leads to "corruption" or "offloading some of their critical thinking". This phobia is largely a feature of radical individualism and the lack of humility that the notion of radical self-sufficiency (intellectual or otherwise) entails. The paradox of individualism is that it actually weakens the ability to be an individual. Human beings are social animals whose lives are relatively short and therefore whose experiences are limited. And because individualism atomizes the individual, the effect is that this social animal becomes subject to greater levels of fear and stress about his isolation, and when isolated from the social and from tradition, he becomes easy prey for weird ideologies.

In this specific case, scriptural canon was compiled by the Catholic Church. You obviously cannot appeal to the canon to codify the canon, so some extra-biblical body of knowledge and understanding must exist that would allow such a canonical body of scripture to be identified. This body of knowledge and understanding is called Tradition, and it is guarded, refined, and transmitted by an unbroken chain of authority found in the apostolic succession. (Tradition is the basis for the transmission and development of all knowledge in human history; there is likewise a scientific tradition without which there could be no science.) The notion that an individual could do better alone without relying or drawing on tradition is belied by the presence of over 40,000 Protestant sects in the US alone, each claiming to be able to interpret scripture. And how do they interpret scripture? However they want! In most cases, it means interpreting it according to whatever happens to be fashionable at the time. So much for "critical thinking". This is very visible in the mainline Protestant churches that, not so incidentally, are shrinking very rapidly. Where this Protestant mindset has leeched into Catholic circles, it has produced the same deadly effect.

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

#468

Post by loup-vaillant »

admax88qqq wrote: post #435
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…

What makes a chair more valuable to society than entertainment?

I did not say it was.

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

#469

Post by jjk166 »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #406
jjk166 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not a single person has claimed that 100% of all writing will be done by machine and that AI is already superior to the best writing ever done.

LLMs will replace writers the way cars replaced horses. People still ride horses, and there are plenty of things horses can do that cars can't, but the typical person trying to go from A to B is probably not going to ride a horse there.

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

#470

Post by lo_zamoyski »

ethbr0 wrote: post #272
spacebanana7 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But the body of canon law would have been impractical to standardize and disseminate without the printed word. See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in medieval times (admittedly, the Catholic Church was also much more a political-nation-religious entity then vs now)

I'm not following. The parent, I believe, was not talking about canon law specifically (which is changing and to be distinguished from doctrine which only undergoes development, but never revision). I also don't understand what papal crises have to do with anything in this context. And what is meant by "political-nation-religious entity"? The Church is a religious institution whose bishops (including the pope) have also exercised distinct secular political authority in addition to religious authority. It was never "national" in character, only supranational (hence, "catholic").
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