When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by CatWChainsaw » Wed, May 17, 2023, 3:00 PM UTC

pwdisswordfishc wrote: post #222

jxramos wrote: post #125

“If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.” ― Oscar Wilde The above quote may be apocryphal (I tried to source it once but only found secondary sources) but I shared it at work slack when chatGPT had a lot of action with our tea, chats. Seemed quite fitting much like a pilot rotting their flying skills leaning on the autopilot too heavily. You get…

> “[…] others will do your thinking for you.” ― Oscar Wilde Ironic.

> "Ironic."

Predictable. Unoriginal. Redundant.

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

#592

Post by chui1989 » Wed, May 17, 2023, 6:34 PM UTC

greggyb wrote: post #452

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…

I feel similarly to how you have described. My worry is the innovator's dilemma. Given a few generations (software generations, not human) of continuing exponential improvement in capability of LLMs (or whatever replaces them), I worry that those who have spent much more time learning to co-work with a GPT-alike (or replacement) will move to the fore.

I think these going to the fore will become inevitable. These improvements will make things we do now easier, so why not let them help? Until we as human are totally replaced by AI, we will just coexist with them and then we find something new to work on. Evolution.

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

#593

Post by jeremyjh » Wed, May 17, 2023, 11:32 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #512

jeremyjh wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 subje…

Give it a billion subjective hours. Give it databases and network access. Do you really think it will produce something? You definitely do a good job of explaining one of the limitations an LLM faces compared to a general super-intelligence.