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Writing is thinking

nature.com

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Re: Writing is thinking

#91

Post by randcraw »

ysofunny wrote: post #30
jll29 wrote: post #12

To add: Reading is also thinking (ideally). And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during students' formative time, they need to learn how to think in reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc. Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you have a solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but first o…

it's like those kids will live in the future, where there's advanced AI I think we should trust children enought that they'll also figure out a crazy changing technological world. on the other hand, internet millenial ideals are fast dying. the digital dream of cultural and mediatic abundance is turning into a nightmare of redundant content as information wars saturate the figurative airwaves

Nicolas Carr addresses this issue directly in his book "The Shallows" in which he brilliantly recounted how media has reshaped how humans think and communicate, especially how the word streams of other people increasingly reshaped our collective focus and our ability to focus, which alas, has NOT freed us to think more deeply.

Humans always have and always will use tech as a crutch -- to reduce time and effort (and energy expended). The 'physical enshittification' (PE) that has ensued from using mechanical crutches has made us lazy, fat, and sick. And now _mental_ crutches have arrived, which promise to replace our very thought processes, freeing us from all the annoying cognitive heavy lifting once done by our brains.

IMO, there's every reason to believe that the next step in human evolution will be driven by the continued misuse of tech as crutches, likely leading to widespread _mental_ enshittification (ME) -- doing to our minds what misuse of tech has already done to our culture and to our bodies.

Perhaps mankind can avoid this fate. But only if we insist on _thinking_ for ourselves.

Re: Writing is thinking

#92

Post by AceyMan »

allturtles wrote: post #59
IggleSniggle wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holding long epic poems in your memory alone was once a celebrated skill.

AFAIK the dominant theory is that they weren't memorized as a whole text, but composed on the fly with the help of a memorized set of stock formulas. [0] [0]: https://poets.org/glossary/oral-formulaic-method

So, basically the ancient precursor to the skills of a good rapper.

Re: Writing is thinking

#94

Post by jimbokun »

ysofunny wrote: post #30
jll29 wrote: post #12

To add: Reading is also thinking (ideally). And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during students' formative time, they need to learn how to think in reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc. Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you have a solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but first o…

it's like those kids will live in the future, where there's advanced AI I think we should trust children enought that they'll also figure out a crazy changing technological world. on the other hand, internet millenial ideals are fast dying. the digital dream of cultural and mediatic abundance is turning into a nightmare of redundant content as information wars saturate the figurative airwaves

Trusting kids to figure out the unfiltered Internet led to a massive mental health crisis.

Re: Writing is thinking

#95

Post by riantogo »

gilbetron wrote: post #75
jll29 wrote: post #12

To add: Reading is also thinking (ideally). And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during students' formative time, they need to learn how to think in reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc. Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you have a solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but first o…

Reading is thinking someone else's thoughts. Writing is thinking your own thoughts. There's a big difference, and is why writing is so painful for so many people. It's also why writing is critically important. edit: Likewise teaching is really important. Crystallization of thought is incredible valuable and difficult.

Reading is thinking someone else's thoughts => That is true if you are strictly reading passively. Typically what happens is that reading opens many doors that leads to your own thinking. Of course depends on the type of material you are reading as well. But often reading broadens your thinking relative to just putting your own on paper.

Re: Writing is thinking

#96

Post by jimbokun »

zug_zug wrote: post #2

I see a lot of people say "writing is so important," and I think what they mean is "I feel really smart/good when I write." And I think what they are experiencing is that they've been assembling ideas in their heads for weeks, and only when it's all come together are they ready synthesize that information at a higher level, and they mistake this synthesis for the writing itself (rather than the writing being a sympto…

If they tried writing a week prior that would have realized sooner the gaps in the ideas they were assembling, leading to them closing those gaps faster.

Re: Writing is thinking

#98

Post by scroot »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #73
jll29 wrote: post #12

To add: Reading is also thinking (ideally). And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during students' formative time, they need to learn how to think in reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc. Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you have a solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but first o…

Compare it with the invention of writing: > To [Thamus] came Thoth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Thoth in praise or blame of the var…

I recommend Havelock's Preface to Plato and Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy

Re: Writing is thinking

#99

Post by sroussey »

If writing is thinking, then perhaps we should think more about what language would produce the best thinking, and does it exist? How do we go about creating it?

And if thinking is dependent on language, maybe we should create a new language for artificial intelligence rather than feeding it human languages.

Re: Writing is thinking

#100

Post by nijuashi »

pcrh wrote: post #56

I am quite puzzled how an LLM could even start "write" a scientific paper. Say you start with a set of findings, for example, western blots, data from a transgenic mouse engineered for the relevant gene, and some single cell sequencing data. Your manuscript describes the identification of a novel protein, editing the gene in a mouse and showing what pathways are affected in the mouse. What material would you give the…

When we go to grad school, we’re taught how to write a research paper. Each field has a more or less standard format, where different types of data go in specific sections. So if an LLM is trained on enough papers in that field, it can learn to plug in the information you provide according to those conventions.

In that sense, you’d give the LLM the purpose of the paper, the field you’re writing in, and the relevant data from your lab notebook. Personally, I never enjoyed writing manuscripts — most of the time goes into citing every claim and formatting everything correctly, which often feels more like clerical work than communicating discovery.

I don’t mind if LLMs help write these papers. I don’t think learning to mimic this stylistic form necessarily adds to the process of discovery. Scientists should absolutely be rigorous and clear, but I’d welcome offloading the unnecessary tedium of stylized writing to automation.

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