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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

#521

Post by syndacks »

tspike wrote: post #54
kqr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love . One can tell from the opening of your comment. Composition, cadence, vocabulary, repetition. It ties together. I prompted an LLM to produce an enthusiastic expression around writing, but it came up with drivel like > Writing fills my heart with pure delight, igniting my soul and inspiring my mind with boundless creativity. I…

Here was my first try: Prompt: Using profanity and in the style of Allen Ginsberg, write an introductory paragraph in narrative style about why you love writing. ChatGPT: Holy shit, I fucking love this mad dance of letters, this wild waltz of words that paint the goddamn cosmos on a blank page! The rhapsodic rhythm, the sonorous symphony of syntax -- it's like jazz on paper, like Kerouac and Ginsberg on a bender in t…

This fucking sucks, no thanks!

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

#522

Post by maytc »

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.

Is it terrible at the content or the delivery of the content? I find it to be bad at the prior but rather useful for the latter.

If you asked chatgpt to generate a document, its generates one that reads well but has terrible content. Eg. Super broad or just plain contradictory. But given some not so well written piece of writing, it can clean that up fairly well.

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

#523

Post by jjeaff »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #471
liber8 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> "make" money (i.e. create value) See, the harmful confusion right there. Making money and creating value are two separate things. There are people who create value without receiving any money in return. And there are people who receive an obscene amount of money while creating very little value — and sometimes destroying more value than they create. Understanding that the two are separate is the only way you can qu…

Another way to put it would be that the wealthiest people tend to own the assets that are creating lots of value. But owning is not the same thing as creating.

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

#524

Post by felixg3 »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #471
liber8 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> "make" money (i.e. create value) See, the harmful confusion right there. Making money and creating value are two separate things. There are people who create value without receiving any money in return. And there are people who receive an obscene amount of money while creating very little value — and sometimes destroying more value than they create. Understanding that the two are separate is the only way you can qu…

You’re absolutely right. David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” is a good take on this if one wants to start reading into it.

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

#525

Post by saurik »

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…

I remember a study that I presume is that one as it is so similar to what you are saying not saying that that you are better off being given the answer "right away" but that you are better off being given an answer after a bit of struggle, but not like, just letting you off in the desert and hoping for the best... I'd be shocked if it helped to simply give people the answer right away and I just don't remember the study--at least the one I remember--saying that.

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

#526

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

I really love how even the lawyers don't want these gigantic walls of texts they produce.

I totally get the walls of text are needed to a point, and we don't have good options to produce succint contracts. It just feels like an everybody lose situation.

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

#527

Post by pwdisswordfishc »

DiffEq wrote: post #519
jamiek88 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you build your houses from money, they’re not going to stand for very long. Houses are built from bricks.

Though for what it’s worth, the government at least has the advantage that it can print its own money, so it doesn’t need to take it from somebody else, unlike investors.

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

#528

Post by RGamma »

jzb wrote: post #350
Verdex wrote: post #325

I think it's the other way around. With certain thought techniques, you will find yourself writing. I'm sympathetic towards having a mode of thought that allows you to be a prolific writer and then bemoaning the lonely path you're on as new technologies allow people to completely bypass what you are good at. People simply do not understand what they are missing. However, people who don't write weren't going to be wri…

“People simply do not understand what they are missing.” I think you can say this about people who haven’t learned to write well. ChatGPT seems like a great thing because they can get it to excrete a content-like substance that reads well, and call it writing. Prompting ChatGPT to produce a text lets you move faster when you have an idea and want to cut to the finish. The problem is that part of writing is starting w…

Basically: another active thinking activity goes passive. As always with society-level events the fallout will become apparent when it has happened.

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

#529

Post by alxhre »

simonw wrote: post #426

I'm a big fan of writing as a crucial skill for thinking. But I wonder if this concern of AI-assisted writing harming this will actually play out the way people think. Until quite recently, if you wanted to write music you had to learn an instrument first: needing to learn piano or guitar or similar to a point where you could compose your own music was a pretty big obstacle to getting started. Now, thanks to software…

I think your music example actually proves the original point. I would argue the average quality of (popular) music has declined in the wake of new technology. The lack of musical knowledge has led to undifferentiated, simplistic musicianship in modern songs. If artists were forced to learn to play an instrument they would ultimately produce more sophisticated work. The lower barrier to entry is a disservice to their musical development and artistic ceiling. The sad part is we don't even realize what we're missing. Who is writing songs at the level of Bohemian Rhapsody these days? I would genuinely be very happy to know.

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

#530

Post by loup-vaillant »

DiffEq wrote: post #519
jamiek88 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> How many houses did investors build vs how many houses did the government build…

Strictly speaking the answer is zero and zero. They use the money they have to have construction workers build the houses.

> from the money they actually took from somebody else?

Is this supposed to imply someone is taking money from others and the other does not? I know the view that government taxes is basically theft, and I think this view is ludicrous: citizen get that back in the form of infrastructure and public services, and in a functioning democracy it's basically their collective will that decided how to allocate that money. (How functioning the democracy really is is another debate.)

Investors on the other hand… well there are two kinds: those who worked for their money, and those who took it from workers. And it's a spectrum too, it depends how much of your income comes from your work, and how much comes from your possessions. Now I can guess most small landlords like yourself probably paid their houses with money they earned through actual work. Some even have constructed the houses themselves. But if that Second Thought video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1m7WmKJZyQ has any accuracy the majority of rented houses are rented by big landlords, and those definitely did not earn their money through their own work (the clerks that work under them do, but they don't own the houses and are paid a meagre salary, compared to the renting money they manage).

I can't speak for government constructed houses, but given the above, your average investor-owned house was constructed or bought with money that was taken from people working for the investor. (Well strictly speaking the worker creates value for their boss, which gives a salary in return, but there's always a difference between value created and salary returned. That difference is the exploitation/theft part. And I'm glossing over the fact that managing a company is valuable work unto itself.)

> And which houses are nicer, safer and better maintained?

Am I supposed to answer "the investor's houses"? A citation is needed for that answer, and it'd better control for when the house is build (construction norms tend to evolve over time), how much it actually cost, and in some cases who it actually cost. Suburbian houses may be nice for instance, but the car dependency and the unsustainable infrastructure costs definitely are not.

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