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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

#501

Post by noobermin »

donkeyd wrote: post #292
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'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…

Just a thought, why is it ok these skills were lost? You never really said whether it was good or bad, just that it happened.

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

#502

Post by ethbr0 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #470
ethbr0 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Parent was observing that the Catholic Church was an exception to GP's point that the written word stiffened and froze monotheistic religious practice, as it blended oral and written transmission.

I was observing that the modern Catholic Church (post-printed word) has offified in exactly that way, with the printed word allow direct dissemination of the "agreed" canon (i.e. pope / hierarchy) to the entire church, thereby unifying them into a single practice.

In counterpoint I offered the number of papal crises and schisms that abounded during the medieval and pre-medieval period (i.e. before printed material became cheap and available).

Ergo, the use of the printed word allowed the Catholic Church to unify and standardize in a way it had not before -- GP's point.

It's indicative that the majority of monotheistic religious splits within Catholicism happened before the printing press, when intervening human parties could reinterprete the canon as it flowed through them.

For political-national-religious entity, the Catholic Church / Holy Roman Empire partnership allowed the Church to become a nation in all but land, by the power its blessing conveyed upon a chosen leader.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_law#Catholic_Church

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

#503

Post by andersentobias »

shadowtree wrote: post #443

Just 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…

Interesting. Is this really true, that every person prefers at most one of these?

Also a quotation link would be appreciated.

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

#504

Post by dragonwriter »

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)

> But the body of canon law would have been impractical to standardize and disseminate without the printed word.

Would it? The Bible, which is much larger, was practical to standardize and disseminate without the printed word, and its not like there was a proximate relationship between the availability of printing (presumably with movable type, in the 15th century) and the codification of canon law in the 20th. The idea that this was waiting on printing is…hard to defend.

> See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in medieval times

The really durable schisms after the 11th Century emerged after or just before (and became crystallized because of) printing, though.

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

#505

Post by mh- »

digging wrote: post #389
barrkel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack Overflow searches for common tasks. An example I had last night: how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them back together again (I replaced one of the pages with a scanned signed version). This is a basic task, a beginner's task in the world of pdf munging, but I didn't know the answer off the top of my head.…

> The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack Overflow searches for common tasks. Interesting, because I still find it faster/easier to do a quick DDG search, with a click on the first relevant SO post, and scrolling straight to the top answer. Asking the same question to ChatGPT means waiting for its output, which may be objectively a few ms faster but creates the perception of slowness ( = irrit…

I see these complaints about ChatGPT's verbosity, but this is no different than when crafting an effective google query was a skill in the early 2000s.

Here's a GPT4 response to a (poorly written) prompt from me to answer the parent question and try to satisfy your desire for a straight-to-the-point response.

https://i.imgur.com/OmsHaXO.png

> Using only the command line, answer the following question (also, keep it terse, no extraneous narrating please): how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them back together again

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

#506

Post by hammyhavoc »

nluken wrote: post #410
jiggawatts wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not impressed!? Here on HN, a few days ago, there was a post about Microsoft publishing a GitHub repo that contained a "table recognizer AI". Basically, you feed it PDFs that contain horrible scanned images of finance records, and it spits out Excel spreadsheets. For some reason, Microsoft had just "thrown this over the fence" and released it to the public for free. This, despite man-years of effort developing…

So what you're saying is that one piece of software with years of labor from a team of engineers can match another piece of software with years of labor from a team of engineers? You're incorrectly comparing the creation of the software with the usage of the software. Yeah, now all you need to do is give ChatGPT the file and prompt it for a solution, whereas before, you... gave the file to a different piece of softwa…

ChatGPT isn't a complete workflow and doesn't even get off the starting blocks for doing what OmniPage Ultimate does.

This is like saying you could do CAD via ChatGPT, sure, but it's an objectively crappy experience versus an actual piece of CAD software with an appropriate UX.

Using different pieces of software isn't a problem for most adults.

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

#507

Post by hammyhavoc »

passion__desire wrote: post #433
hammyhavoc wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stephen King writes about 6 pages a day or about 2000 words. Let's say that takes about 4-6 hours. Now imagine spending that much time with ChatGPT and guide it towards whatever goal you have in mind. It took me just 2 minutes to craft the prompt and ChatGPT did the rest. You do the math. Humans use other sense modalities and base their writing inspired from those experiences. If and when future models incorporate th…

Stephen King is expressing himself, he already knows what he wants to say before he writes it. "Guiding" something isn't the same as self-expression.

Generative art, anyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art?wprov=sfla1

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

#508

Post by digging »

mh- wrote: post #505
digging wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack Overflow searches for common tasks. Interesting, because I still find it faster/easier to do a quick DDG search, with a click on the first relevant SO post, and scrolling straight to the top answer. Asking the same question to ChatGPT means waiting for its output, which may be objectively a few ms faster but creates the perception of slowness ( = irrit…

I see these complaints about ChatGPT's verbosity, but this is no different than when crafting an effective google query was a skill in the early 2000s. Here's a GPT4 response to a (poorly written) prompt from me to answer the parent question and try to satisfy your desire for a straight-to-the-point response. https://i.imgur.com/OmsHaXO.png > Using only the command line, answer the following question (also, keep it t…

Ok, but that's not an answer to my actual point, because now it's more work than doing a web search for the same solution.

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

#509

Post by waboremo »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #498
waboremo wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thank you for linking that! I enjoyed reading the responses and also the Kurt Vonnegut passage linked within, such a great connection to how we think.

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

#510

Post by Karrot_Kream »

noobermin wrote: post #501
donkeyd wrote: post #292

Earlier 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…

Just a thought, why is it ok these skills were lost? You never really said whether it was good or bad, just that it happened.

Okay in the sense that nobody really mourns their loss aside from a few and it has no material impact on our understandings of underlying phenomena. My partner's grandfather was a wizard on the abacus, my grandfather loved his slide rule, but a calculator and now smartphone can do all of that much better. Has computation been retarded due to the lost knowledge of operating the abacus? There's probably been thousands of skills that have been lost that doesn't really affect our everyday lives.
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