Does anyone really sit there thinking and make much progress? You write.
Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone
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Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone
#62Writing is as good, or even better https://www.paulgraham.com/words.html
You can tell you didn't read the article before jumping into commenting, as this point is addressed.
The string "writ" only occurs once in an article about how to develop ones ideas on non-trivial subjects. Pretty telling.
Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone
#63Does anyone really sit there thinking and make much progress? You write.
Sometimes you might sit and stare at the same text, grappling with it in silence.
For technical problems, I find the act of writing out a request for help, even just into a text editor, is often sufficient for me to solve the problem at hand. Writing things out is a way of organizing and structuring your thinking, and is itself a powerful troubleshooting tool. Things will become obvious that, unwritten, you might not even notice. I think this is very similar to thinking out loud; when you listen to what you say, or read what you have written, your mind is somehow keyed to react in a useful way.
That response might not be what you want or need for problems that need to be wrestled with, chewed, and pondered on deeply, though.
Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone
#64Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as people make fun of "new math", it is really neat to see my 3rd grader working through a math problem step by step in a way that makes sense to them instead of the rote memorization I had to do as a kid. While they don't like showing their work, it helps them to work through each step to make sure their assumptions are correct, like you said.
Yes, it is nice that there are more ways that are taught now. It can turn into too much, however. Some parents I know dislike that their kid is taught 8 different ways to do long division, at the expense of having sufficient time to practice any of the methods. They end up taking the kids to math tutoring so that they can actually learn how to do the mechanical steps. But it is for sure good that there are multiple w…
In computer science, we have classes on memorizing/implementing various algorithms so that we may understand their behavior. Could anyone name the reason why grade school students memorize and execute the long division algorithm? I certainly hadn't used long division since grade school.
Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this: >The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure. I often construct full sentences in my head. And have conversations with my mental model of some other person. In full sentences
> I often construct full sentences in my head I've only ever heard that associated with schizophrenia, but I don't even know if that's true or not.
Haha, I found this genuinely funny. It’s called an internal monologue. Google tells me that it’s the majority position with 30 to 50 percent not having one.
Personally, I find it very difficult to understand how people could not think in words, like you were speaking to another person. Obviously you also have mental imagery and sound etc, so not everything is just words. Internal speech is one channel of thought, but for anything complex I would have thought it was mandatory.
Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone
#67In 2017 LLMs weren't powerful enough to generate working code on their own, but my goal was to at least create a chatbot that could help you rubber-duck-debug your way to a solution. Unfortunately the tech wasn't quite strong enough for that, and not enough engineers even knew what rubber-duck-debugging was. RIP Duckly. Trying to train an LLM on two 1080ti's on the StackOverflow corpus in my living room was a vibe th…
2017 is a bit early to refer to them as LLMs. I'm not sure when exactly we started to refer to LMs as 'large', but I don't think it was before GPT2 (2019). That said, from the NLP work I've done, it was much more interesting working on small specialized models.
Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone
#68I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this: >The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure. It's not unlike what people like PG say about writing improving thinking...it's the being forced to go from fuzzy directional notions to something you can put on paper in that will stand up to critiqu…
I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this: >The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure. I often construct full sentences in my head. And have conversations with my mental model of some other person. In full sentences
Same here. When I was younger I liked imagining having conversations with people from the past like Plato or something, thinking about their reactions to The Future. (Though I guess I only really imagined my own side of the conversation.)
Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone
#69I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this: >The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure. It's not unlike what people like PG say about writing improving thinking...it's the being forced to go from fuzzy directional notions to something you can put on paper in that will stand up to critiqu…
The value of writing an AGENT.md might be more in the writing of project overview than in the subsequent ability to run an LLM on the project.
Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone
#70I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this: >The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure. It's not unlike what people like PG say about writing improving thinking...it's the being forced to go from fuzzy directional notions to something you can put on paper in that will stand up to critiqu…
This was my first thought too. Thought, I will say that even though I think in speech for basically everything conceptual, and find it difficult to imagine even being able to not do this, I do often have these… ill defined ideas. Notions of something or other. I have a few words to describe them and they just sort of point in a direction rather than being fleshed out. It’s this sort of thing, like a thought-stub, that benefits the most from inspection and being forced into a better defined form. These are also often the more difficult things, and the reason they’re fuzzy is that it takes a lot of effort to make them sharp.