Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 593 posts

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

#551

Post by BurningFrog »

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.

The history of progress is full of machines robbing people of learning to master difficult tasks.

On balance, it's been hugely positive.

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

#552

Post by mgkimsal »

schwartzworld wrote: post #549
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.…

This is exactly what I don't understand about it. I copied your question directly from your comment into google and the top-ten results were all sufficient to answer the question. The nature of common tasks is that the answers are also common, so where's the value in paying for a service that regurgitates them to you?

Somewhat agreed on chatgpt specifically. Having in-IDE tooling that can take context and provide info, corrected for context, is more useful than having to jump to a browser, then copy paste. It's usually not much of an effort itself, but it does help minimize drift and helps keep focus. Every time I jump to a search engine to search, or SO, I'm bombarded with loads of info to filter out, then more to judge for relevancy. Tools that help reduce that filtering burden, and more context-aware relevancy, help.

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

#553

Post by lxgr »

squirtlebonflow wrote: post #486
admax88qqq wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes a chair more valuable to society than entertainment?

You can't rest your legs on an entertainment

Yet the entertainment I'm getting out of my chairs is limited.

But I think this is a false dichotomy: A comfortable armchair and a good book go well together.

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

#554

Post by hnfong »

joelfried wrote: post #440
admax88qqq wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes a chair more valuable to society than entertainment?

Many of us have the ability to entertain ourselves entirely within our own minds on the regular. None of us can snap our fingers and summon a chair from nothingness. Do you know anybody who owns zero chairs?

There are cultures that don't use chairs.

The Japanese generally didn't use them (I think?) before they came into contact with European civilization.

I don't think any civilization could survive without entertainment though.

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

#555

Post by hnfong »

agalunar wrote: post #520
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.

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 marketp…

> 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.

FWIW, Adam Smith has argued that this is unlikely. The world seems to prove him correct.

That said I do disagree with the way GP's argues the point. While the dominant economic system is likely more effective at creating dominating economies, it's not a given that it is good at being fair. Shutting down discussion while claiming that "capitalism is the best so far" because nobody else has come up with an alternative reeks of willful ignorance. It's easy to believe something is the best if you don't actively look for alternatives and demand others to serve it to you on a silver platter.

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

#556

Post by hnfong »

cainxinth wrote: post #544
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.

Before books, everyone had to memorize information they wanted to preserve. Books robbed a hundred generations of that learning. So it goes.

Not really. Many cultural traditions emphasize reciting every single word from classical texts as part of the learning process.

(I hated it, but it's still there 2000+ years after books were invented.)

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

#557

Post by hnfong »

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…

(Former law student here...)

Definitely agree with your approach to drafting, but I think you could be overreacting a bit here. Even the shortest contracts might seem like a "wall of text" to the lay person, and short paragraphs stringed together is a wall of text.

At any rate the preferred format in most legal contexts is still "`wall' of text" (whether big or small wall, as opposed to diagrams, spreadsheets, or conversations), which is what I think was the original point.

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

#558

Post by hnfong »

arp242 wrote: post #532
DoreenMichele wrote: post #341

Eh, the title here is one possible framing of a series of short tweets expressing his concerns about the potential impact of ChatGPT. I homeschooled. My sons had trouble learning to write and one really hated writing. I spent several years having him verbally explain material to me, having him learn grammar and vocabulary and other essentials from entertaining videos and graphic books and such. Thinking and writing d…

When people say "writing is thinking" what they're really talking about is not so much the "writing" or even "thinking" per se, but rather the "crystallizing your thoughts in to something concrete". Certainly my own thinking tends to be somewhat vague until I actually write it down, at which point I tend to get less sure of things because "oh, but what about this?" start to turn up, or I spot fallacies in my argument…

In addition to what you mentioned, I also often come up with new and interesting ideas while writing on a topic. I guess when the mind is tasked with crystallizing the ideas, it forces the mind to systematically sort out the clutter, and allows novel ideas to form.

I've lost count of how many times I've started writing on a topic, and then scrapping it altogether in favor of a better idea on a tangentially related thing.

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

#559

Post by hnfong »

raincole wrote: post #181
hammyhavoc wrote: post #25

> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. Way more than admit it I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love . Some do it for pleasure, some do it as a career, others do it as a means to an end in their career, and they haven't found value in LLMs. There's writing and writing . If all you're doing is rewording what someone else has already done like a high sch…

Do people really hate writing? If so the comment sections of HN and Reddit, the timelines of Facebook and Twitter, the whole Medium... would be so empty.

I can write thousands of words if they're on a topic I'm thinking intensely about and need to write it down to sort out my thoughts.

But if anyone just throws me a random topic and ask me to write 2000 words on it, I'd tell them to go ___ yourself. (Yes, I hated writing essays in school...)

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

#560

Post by nerpderp82 »

noduerme wrote: post #482
nerpderp82 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong. LLMs are the single biggest advance in mass learning since the printed book. They are infinitely patient and can be reprogrammed, or repurposed with three sentences. Debate partner, editor, quiz master, literally anything. Every new tool can be abused , of course we can't structure education the same, but we should always be re-evaluating our methods and techniques in the face of new technology and kno…

Which is worse, having no debate partner, editor, or quiz master? Or a debate partner who insists they're right when they're wrong, an editor who injects false references and made-up citations, and a quiz master whose accuracy is essentially random?

All those things are already true. Debate isn't about being right, it is about winning a debate. It is literally rhetorical combat. A quiz master that is wrong, how delightful! A chatbot is the multiple choice test you can argue with!

If those things are a problem, we have already failed. Because if your current education system is built upon taking things at face value, the harm is not in the shoveled knowledge but in building a student who accepts what is presented as unquestionable fact.

My child is an phenomenal bullshit discriminator. So much so that they have been correctly correcting all of their teachers in every grade they have been in. The real education is learning how to use the tools we have available to learn anything you want. And in that way, the LLM is most powerful thing we have since the printed book.

Post reply on HN