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I think it's the other way around. With certain thought techniques, you will find yourself writing. I'm sympathetic towards having a mode of thought that allo

by Verdex 3y ago

I think it's the other way around. With certain thought techniques, you will find yourself writing. I'm sympathetic towards having a mode of thought that allows you to be a prolific writer and then bemoaning the lonely path you're on as new technologies allow people to completely bypass what you are good at. People simply do not understand what they are missing. However, people who don't write weren't going to be writing themselves anyway. It's similar with math. Everyone talks about how important it is for children to learn math in school. And everyone recoils with primal terror if I so much as mention the most minor of mathematical constructs. Be joyous that you are good at something. But I don't think you should look down upon those who find a way to survive by not being good at your thing. Even if things would objectively be better if everyone was a mathematician, scribe, and poet, this is probably not a realistic goal.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
This is precisely what I came in here to say. People who say writing and thinking ability are hand in hand are typically good writers who were told they’re good thinkers because their writing ability set them apart. Similarly, the ability to do rote math skills once set people apart as geniuses, literal computers in the classic sense of the word. I see these tools, as applied to this task, as an equalizer of sorts that lets people who have great ideas express them in a compelling way. In my own life I was terrible at arithmetic, and I grew up at a time when memorizing the multiplication tables was a key life skill. I couldn’t to save my life. I strongly believed I was bad at math and struggled through on sheer willpower and mediocre grades, until I went back to college after I couldn’t make it through calc 1 and dropped out a decade earlier. This time they allowed calculators, graphing at that. I got top marks in every math class from then on and graduated summa cum laude in a top engineering computer science school. How many people have been marginalized because they couldn’t express their thoughts as clearly and compellingly as a better writer? Maybe a leveling of the fields away from mechanical abilities and towards completeness of thought isn’t a bad thing? Will people lean on it and lose what has been a core skill? Some will no doubt. But will it hurt them? Only as much as it hurts to use a calculator to do your menial math.
jzb 3y ago
“People simply do not understand what they are missing.” I think you can say this about people who haven’t learned to write well. ChatGPT seems like a great thing because they can get it to excrete a content-like substance that reads well, and call it writing. Prompting ChatGPT to produce a text lets you move faster when you have an idea and want to cut to the finish. The problem is that part of writing is starting with an idea, thinking about how to express it, and then realizing that your initial idea might be flawed or need work. Sure - ChatGPT seems fine for spitting out web copy or something where the role of the writer isn’t to examine an idea, but just to go from start to done as quickly as possible. But I think he’s talking about the types of writing that involve wrestling with an idea and, for example, trying to persuade others. ChatGPT will happily spit out copy in that form. But it won’t trip over a paragraph and say “hey, shit, now that I write this out, I think it’s wrong or not well-expressed.” People bemoan co-workers who coast by on people skills and bullshit over people who have expertise and do the work. ChatGPT is likely to be similar - helping people who can’t write (express or work with ideas effectively) sound authoritative and generate more content that they don’t really even understand.
- RGamma 3y ago
  Basically: another active thinking activity goes passive. As always with society-level events the fallout will become apparent when it has happened.

by Verdex 3y ago

fnordpiglet 3y ago

This is precisely what I came in here to say. People who say writing and thinking ability are hand in hand are typically good writers who were told they’re good thinkers because their writing ability set them apart. Similarly, the ability to do rote math skills once set people apart as geniuses, literal computers in the classic sense of the word. I see these tools, as applied to this task, as an equalizer of sorts that lets people who have great ideas express them in a compelling way. In my own life I was terrible at arithmetic, and I grew up at a time when memorizing the multiplication tables was a key life skill. I couldn’t to save my life. I strongly believed I was bad at math and struggled through on sheer willpower and mediocre grades, until I went back to college after I couldn’t make it through calc 1 and dropped out a decade earlier. This time they allowed calculators, graphing at that. I got top marks in every math class from then on and graduated summa cum laude in a top engineering computer science school. How many people have been marginalized because they couldn’t express their thoughts as clearly and compellingly as a better writer? Maybe a leveling of the fields away from mechanical abilities and towards completeness of thought isn’t a bad thing? Will people lean on it and lose what has been a core skill? Some will no doubt. But will it hurt them? Only as much as it hurts to use a calculator to do your menial math.

jzb 3y ago

“People simply do not understand what they are missing.” I think you can say this about people who haven’t learned to write well. ChatGPT seems like a great thing because they can get it to excrete a content-like substance that reads well, and call it writing. Prompting ChatGPT to produce a text lets you move faster when you have an idea and want to cut to the finish. The problem is that part of writing is starting with an idea, thinking about how to express it, and then realizing that your initial idea might be flawed or need work. Sure - ChatGPT seems fine for spitting out web copy or something where the role of the writer isn’t to examine an idea, but just to go from start to done as quickly as possible. But I think he’s talking about the types of writing that involve wrestling with an idea and, for example, trying to persuade others. ChatGPT will happily spit out copy in that form. But it won’t trip over a paragraph and say “hey, shit, now that I write this out, I think it’s wrong or not well-expressed.” People bemoan co-workers who coast by on people skills and bullshit over people who have expertise and do the work. ChatGPT is likely to be similar - helping people who can’t write (express or work with ideas effectively) sound authoritative and generate more content that they don’t really even understand.

RGamma 3y ago
Basically: another active thinking activity goes passive. As always with society-level events the fallout will become apparent when it has happened.