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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

#511

Post by DiffEq »

TFYS wrote: post #496
DiffEq wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, in the many thousands of years of men trying every which way…this has not happened. So, unless someone has found a better way capitalism is the best way so far.

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

#512

Post by jiggawatts »

jeremyjh wrote: post #283
jiggawatts wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These things have limits, definitely. In almost every use-case I've tried, I've bumped up against them. The trick is to know what they can and can't do, and use them where they're useful enough . Someone here on HN quipped that ChatGPT is "isn't intelligent" because it couldn't come up with a revolutionary new battery chemistry. Like... what are you expecting? A god? LLMs are useful when you can validate the output y…

I think you and I are pretty aligned in our thoughts on ChatGPT. I think its revolutionary, and I use it every day. But I don't consider it generally intelligent, I do think that novel thoughts of demonstrable value are the real test for that, and a useful invention would convince me beyond all doubt.

> a useful invention

In my opinion, the mental model you should use when evaluating LLMs-vs-Human capability: When asked a question, the LLM has to answer without being able to iterate, back-track, or even use a scratch pad such as pen&paper or a text editor. Basically it's the same as an "oral exam", where you have to stand in the middle of a room and get grilled by a professor to determine your knowledge on a subject.

Don't compare "human with tools and unlimited time" to "LLM with no tools and seconds of time". Compare "human being interrogated in an empty room" and then it is much more clear where an LLM rates.

GPT 4 is definitely super-human in some areas, such as general knowledge and translation between languages.

No human knows as much, or can speak as many languages.

Ask yourself this: can any human, when asked to "invent something", just do it, then and there?

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

#513

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

dctoedt wrote: post #494
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…

> 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…

"The lawyer" is probably a bad name, but I've definitely worked with this sort of person before. "The novelist" might be a better name.

Of of my ex-bosses preferred long, well-written emails to just about any other form of communication. He was a really bright guy with a degree in English Literature that somehow stumbled his way into the software industry. When he wanted to start working with a new technology, he'd ingest a small pile of driest textbooks on the subject over the course of a week or so, understand and retain all of it, then start running laps around the folks who had been working with the tech for years. He's still the only engineer I've ever met that preferred learning-by-reading over learning-by-doing.

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

#514

Post by mandmandam »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #489
mandmandam wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You only see the curves go upward. But if you look very detailed, you see that a plateau is coming. A downward trend will follow. When the going gets tough... About the inequality : it is really bad, but hundreds years ago, the poor were starving because of lack of food, in stark contrast with landlords and knights and kings. Today an equal amount of or more, people die from too much food than of too little. My point…

> a plateau is coming. A downward trend will follow.

The plateau is not coming fast enough, not even close. Scientists are very clear on this point.

We used all that oil and gas to get more work done, but we're still working more hours per year than those feudal peasants.

> people die from too much food than of too little.

We still have thirteen million hungry children in America. 700 million hungry people worldwide.

It's all very solvable, we just don't. We could end world hunger by eating like, two or three rich [0]. Knights and Kings have nothing on our oligarchs.

These trends of irresponsible emissions and rising inequality won't fix themselves. Not in time. Not without radical action.

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/13/e...

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

#515

Post by jamiek88 »

DiffEq wrote: post #511
TFYS wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, in the many thousands of years of men trying every which way…this has not happened. So, unless someone has found a better way capitalism is the best way so far.

What? Of course this has happened.

I grew up in a council house. I.e. a house created by pooled money in the form of taxes.

Houses must exist. Landlords are an inefficiency to be optimized out.

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

#516

Post by melagonster »

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.

unfortunately, this just happens. I trust let baby watch YouTube from the fist of their is not a good idea, too. but we are here.

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

#517

Post by jjeaff »

dctoedt wrote: post #494
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…

> 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…

You are describing the "good lawyer". Judging by the absolute walls of text given in the terms of service and contracts of almost every big company out there, most lawyers are not "good lawyers".

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

#518

Post by mbrochh »

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 idea what you are doing there, I've been using ChatGPT Pro and Copilot since four weeks and it literally blows my mind every single day.

Give it a Django model and ask it to create a data visualisation. It'l perform complex ORM queries with filters, annotations and aggregations, then load it into a pandas dataframe, then create more columns in the dataframe, does more aggregations, then spits out matplotlib code to draw the chart. The time typing the prompt is time I would have needed even in the pre-GPT-era, since I would have to think about what I want to achieve anyways, now I'm typing it into ChatGPT, which makes the thinking process more structured as well!

I have built more tools in the last three weeks (for work and personal) than I have in the last three years combined. All thanks to OpenAI's brain constantly pushing me into the right direction.

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

#519

Post by DiffEq »

jamiek88 wrote: post #515
DiffEq wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in the many thousands of years of men trying every which way…this has not happened. So, unless someone has found a better way capitalism is the best way so far.

What? Of course this has happened. I grew up in a council house. I.e. a house created by pooled money in the form of taxes. Houses must exist. Landlords are an inefficiency to be optimized out.

How many houses did investors build vs how many houses did the government build…from the money they actually took from somebody else? And which houses are nicer, safer and better maintained?

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

#520

Post by agalunar »

DiffEq wrote: post #511
TFYS wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, in the many thousands of years of men trying every which way…this has not happened. So, unless someone has found a better way capitalism is the best way so far.

It's completely plausible that a nation with a wealth of natural resources but an economic system that treats people terribly could win a series of wars and establish its economic system as the dominant one in the world, and then use its power to maintain status quo.

A marketplace of ideas does not necessarily lead to the best outcomes, or even good outcomes.

Suppose the marketplace of ideas is an unregulated marketplace. Then the wealthy and powerful can use their wealth and power to determine the world that other people see, getting those people to mistakenly fight for things that help the wealthy and powerful.

But suppose it's kept a fair marketplace. Fairness is not natural – it's a human value that we have to actively maintain. But suppose we succeed. Even then, the marketplace may not select the best ideas, because people have emotional needs – like belonging to community – that will cause them to stubbornly reject good ideas. But we accept this because it's the only way for us to live with each other; if I want you to let me disagree with you, I have to let you disagree with me.* The price of intellectual freedom is very, very steep, even if it's worth it.

So I don't believe the fact that capitalism is dominant is good evidence that it's the best idea so far. In fact, I think we have little evidence of it at all.

* There are of course complications of the Popperian, paradox-of-tolerance sort, where we do have to fight to the death, so to speak. If someone repeatedly demonstrates an unwillingness to compromise or act fairly, they've left you the choice of letting yourself perish or eliminating them, which is a shitty situation to be in.

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