History repeats itself - from oral to written, now to AI. Fear not, it's a shift, not a shutdown. Writing didn't dull minds, it sparked ideas. AI isn't the end of thinking, it's a new chapter.
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
#492it's the opposite, your ability to think is your ability to write
anyone can write, even a machine, but do they think?
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#493Paul Graham on the benefits of good writing is like Helen Keller offering her reflections on what makes a great Broadway show.
> Really, has there been a backlash against me? I hadn't noticed any change. I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really like to avoid it.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#494Just 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…
> The lawyer. Needs walls of text.
Lawyer and law professor here: No, no, NO!
Wall-of-words text is a sign of a L.O.A.D. — a Lazy Or Arrogant Drafter.
I teach contract drafting to 3Ls and stress The Two Great Rules of Readability:
1. SSSSP: Short, Simple, Single-Subject Paragraphs. https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin...
2. BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin...
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#495[dead]
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#496Earlier 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…
I think your viewpoint stems in a belief that there is only so much money to go around. Your view about a landlord taking money is kind of a micro view. I am a landlord…the house I rent I actually built. It is an asset that people are willing to give me money to use for a while…they get a place to live…IF I could not have ever rented it out I would have never built it…it would be a worthless piece of ground that nobo…
So if you didn't build the house, no one would've and people would live on the streets? No, people need a place to stay and the house would get built even if renting was impossible. We would just figure out different ways to pool money to build houses. House prices would also come down if wealthy people couldn't store their money into land.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#497pretty silly comments. historically, people have always made such stupid comments on things they didn't understand, and I think they will continue to do so.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
Writing is a form of thinking. It only takes one or two manic episodes to realize that they're not always super correlated.
Don't even need manic episodes to understand this (and if you went through one I'm terribly sorry, they can be such cruel events people disregard), music is a good example. You can be so profoundly moved by a song in an entirely different language you don't understand not because of writing, but because of what the person conveys through sound. Instruments as another example of this. What our thoughts are made up of…
I totally agree with you. Had a similar discussion in a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35683027
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#499I'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…
This is overly optimistic. If this were true, most people driving an automatic transmission would be safer drivers in light of the lighter cognitive load. But that's not what happens. Instead the brain is overwhelmed by autonomous friending and vending apps until the car becomes an autonomous ending machine. My n=1 experiment with driving a manual for 40 years in urban environments coast to coast is that I can't focu…
The automatic transmission and modern infotainment aren't really the same thing, they're different parts of the car. I think even if automatics had never existed, infotainment systems would still be around as we know them today.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plato turned out right. I'm not extremely old and I still remember time before the Internet, when to know something, you had to look it up, which took ages, so you simply had to know it. Yourself. We measured intelligence by the things you knew. We still have shows with questions based on this concept. This concept no longer makes sense in the modern world. But it used to. Writing is a crutch, Internet even more so,…
We measured intelligence by the number of memorized facts we'd internalized, but little did we know that collecting more facts doesn't make us more intelligent
Well, "intelligent" has always been a murky term, and as tech is rapidly surpassing us in every way, it'll become even more meaningless as times goes on.