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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

#81

Post by dredmorbius »

bombolo wrote: post #58
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #50

This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful: "For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have inven…

Well he was right. Do you know anyone that knows a book by memory?

Books (largely) aren't written for memorisation these days, with possible exceptions of some poetry, or children's books.

Classic oral literary traditions are based on rhyme, meter, repetition, simile, metaphor, and references to cultural touchstones and themes, for the most part, all of which strongly assist with memorisation. These are not only necessary for a literature which isn't written down and instead is passed on through generations orally, but also quite likely represents a survivorship bias in that works which didn't exhibit these patterns didn't survive. And of course the versions we know are the end of a long pipeline of transmission (or the world's largest and oldest game of telephone), captured in writing and then passed on to us as (among) the first written traditions.

I've committed a few poems and homilies to memory, one example for nearly thirty years now. I do refresh that recollection from time to time (and realised I was dropping a stanza consistently). It's an interesting counterexample.

Then again, I turned up a piece earlier today I'd written myself about eight years ago and had all but no recollection of.

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

#82

Post by BiteCode_dev »

RugnirViking wrote: post #39
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.

I find copilot and chatgpt constantly useful as just a simple way of automating what would otherwise be tedious work. I think the most important thought in using them is that as you use them more you get a sense if what they are going to be able to do and what they aren't, which lets you know when you can use them (and therefore use them with more confidence and more often) Especially in refactoring or working with p…

That's the gist of it.

People want to use LLM hammers like screw drivers and are disapointed.

Also, since the quality of the context matters a lot for completion, copilot will be way more useful on clean code with beautiful variable names and nice structure flows than on code-golf snippets. Same got chatgpt: write good prose, and it will help you better.

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

#83

Post by newswasboring »

I expected something more than a person's unsourced opinions if the link is on the front page of HN. I know it's PG, but he isn't an authority on any of this. Feels like it's here because it's cool to hate on LLMs. I usually flag such stuff and move on, but I want to make my own doom proclamation. The cynicism for anything which will change the status quo is going to be our down fall as an industry and society. I understand raising concerns, but my god man at least pretend to balance it with some excitement. I've truly lived long enough to see the heralds of new technologies turn into doomsayers.

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

#84

Post by jimmySixDOF »

andsoitis wrote: post #12

The risk isn’t so much losing the ability to think (I think that is exaggeration), but rather that interacting with it is changing how we think, or, indeed, what we think.

This also plays out over time and assuming future LLMs will be trained ever more on the generative output of todays LLMs we could end up communicating using a Language itself that will become frozen in time as it cycles through the same feedback loop. As John Culkin said: “We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.”

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

#85

Post by carlmr »

bombolo wrote: post #60
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.

> it is a really terrible writer Most people are terrible writers, and never read anything at all. So they have no way to judge if the wordy informationless crap gpt wrote is good or not. It's long, thus is good.

>It's long, thus is good.

It's also somewhat structured, which puts it at above average for writing tasks.

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

#86

Post by lordnacho »

bayindirh wrote: post #74
anon-3988 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps having a conversation with an LLM will help thinking even further? I am prone to thinking out loud (in private) and it helps me a lot.

An LLM is not a conscious entity, and while it can babble and assemble meaningful sentences, it has no guarantee of correctness, a baseline honesty, and other small bits and pieces we value in a conversation. It's just a sentence builder. As a result, it can't replace a real human being backed by real experience and thoughts, hence it can't be as useful. I converse with myself, too, but it's not the same either with…

> no guarantee of correctness, a baseline honesty, and other small bits and pieces

Humans for sure do not guarantee this either.

I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. It's heard of everything, and it always responds with something that sounds like it came from the same sphere. You have to use your own mind to figure out if it's meaningful, but this is not so different from conversing with a person. People can babble too.

> There are higher orders of information carried implicitly

You're not always looking for those in a conversation. Sometimes you really are just checking that you've thought things through. Like if someone asks you what the arguments in favor of democracy are, you want a list of points so you can check you haven't forgotten something.

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

#87

Post by safety1st »

weinzierl wrote: post #23

I think pg underestimates the amount of trivial and mundane copy most people write day in day out. Be it stupid Jira tickets, spec documents, school essays with standardized expectations or formulaic messages and emails. Not much ability to lose there, but AI is a tremendous timesaver. A pg quality essay is a whole other story but I doubt AI is much useful there in its current state.

> The brain images after the process of writing showed reduced activity in the amygdala and area of the brain that is activated by fear and emotion. The same images showed increased activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the area that regulates emotions, to keep evenness and mental balance. [1]

The mere act of writing, regardless of the subject, seems to exercise the rational part of the brain and calm us down a bit. (The effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy seems to support this idea, though the existence of Twitter does not...) I think we have to at least entertain the possibility that a post-reading/writing world could be a much less rational place.

[1] https://www.gettingsmart.com/2016/03/26/exercising-student-b...

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

#88

Post by lordnacho »

bombolo wrote: post #58
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #50

This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful: "For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have inven…

Well he was right. Do you know anyone that knows a book by memory?

Isn't it a thing of honor in the Islamic world to be Hafez (?), someone who has memorized the Quran?

Of course I have no way to check whether it's done correctly, but from what I hear a lot of people have done this.

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

#89

Post by jbj »

Especially on my phone I have actively disabeled all spelling control, and successively suggestive typing.

writing a sentence while making it, I feel too much the words are being forced on me.

Where as it can be a great tool, I like to exercise my mind, the same reason I calculated all Matrix determinants with pen and paper when I started my engineering degree.

Some people may go to the gym and work out, but I am like to just squeese in exercise within my bicyle commute.

Sometimes there may be greater projects requiring more heavy tech, but for housekeeping I honestly dont mind harvesting the synergies of planning and doing things by myself.

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

#90

Post by bombolo »

esjeon wrote: post #11

I don't think most normal people will spam their own SNS/blogs using LLMs. If you hate writing, you won't be writing at all, instead of using LLMs to generate stuffs. If you have a message to send, you'll be taking much of your time creating a piece even with LLMs. Obviously, there can be many exceptions here (e.g. trolls, flamers), but the key point is that using LLMs only can reduce the cost of act of writing, but…

Think of all the blogspam that is on medium, or all the clickbait done to get impressions.

That isn't born out of passion.

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