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Eh, the title here is one possible framing of a series of short tweets expressing his concerns about the potential impact of ChatGPT. I homeschooled. My sons h
by DoreenMichele 3y ago
Eh, the title here is one possible framing of a series of short tweets expressing his concerns about the potential impact of ChatGPT.
I homeschooled. My sons had trouble learning to write and one really hated writing.
I spent several years having him verbally explain material to me, having him learn grammar and vocabulary and other essentials from entertaining videos and graphic books and such.
Thinking and writing don't have to be so closely intertwined as they are in Paul Graham's mind. He's a writer and writing helps him think.
Some people think while taking long walks, working out at the gym, drawing their ideas, etc.
The kind of thinking Paul Graham does may become less common. I have no reason to believe that's some kind of holy grail and thinking via other means is inherently less valuable.
I say this as a blogger who may be even more guilty than Paul Graham of using writing to help me think.
- ghaff 3y agoThe key is probably explaining/creating something in a way that doesn't have a lot of latitude for just glossing over the details. I'm not sure long-form writing is especially better than giving a presentation to an audience or working through a problem/creating an artifact of some sort/etc. The key is that you can't just read something and go "Yeah yeah I totally get it." Though I suspect some outputs can be easier to handwave through than others--I know I've done it to some degree on presentations. ("This aspect is complicated and we don't have time to get into it today.")
- DoreenMichele 3y agoYou make me think of the anecdote about the professor who had half the class graded for making one amazingly beautiful piece of pottery and the other half graded by total weight of the work they created. In the end, those graded by weight had nicer pieces as it involved more practice with producing something.
- ghaff 3y agoIn the case of writing/presenting/many things, there's definitely a case for doing something regularly even if a lot of that output is pretty routine and pedestrian. So there's probably a limit to the degree to which you can automate away the routine stuff and still expect to parachute in and produce something killer on demand every few years when you need to.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoAbsolutely.
- Zetice 3y agoI'm sorry but your job as a homeschooler is to teach your sons to write. That's not a skill you can enter adulthood without, and expect to achieve success. Liking it, not liking it... none of that matters when you're asked to document a process or argue in favor of an idea. Imagine the value a professional teacher would have provided for them...
- larve 3y agoWhich is exactly what the op did, patiently over several years. Homeschooling vs “professional” education is a different discussion.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoAfter five years of not being forced to write while learning grammar etc some other way, he discovered fan fiction and began writing thousands of words per day. But he didn't learn to write by writing because he had dysgraphia and emotional baggage about writing from public school when I pulled him out. His blog writing gets more traffic than mine. He's a writer by trade, though he doesn't yet make much money at it.
- Zetice 3y agoI misunderstood the situation. Apologies.
- thoughtpeddler 3y agoThe level of mature, respectful, civil discourse on HN never ceases to impress me. I see this less and less on other discussion boards.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoI've never actually seen its equal anywhere else.
- arp242 3y agoWhen people say "writing is thinking" what they're really talking about is not so much the "writing" or even "thinking" per se, but rather the "crystallizing your thoughts in to something concrete". Certainly my own thinking tends to be somewhat vague until I actually write it down, at which point I tend to get less sure of things because "oh, but what about this?" start to turn up, or I spot fallacies in my argument (the better reason to learn about fallacies is to spot them in your own arguments, not to bludgeon other people's arguments with). In my experience writing is a very good way to do that, but if verbally works better for some then that's fine too. In that sense I do agree with Graham that "I have some thoughts about X and I'll let ChatGPT take care of the details" is perhaps not entirely ideal. All of this also applies to code by the way, in more or less the same way.
- hnfong 3y agoIn addition to what you mentioned, I also often come up with new and interesting ideas while writing on a topic. I guess when the mind is tasked with crystallizing the ideas, it forces the mind to systematically sort out the clutter, and allows novel ideas to form. I've lost count of how many times I've started writing on a topic, and then scrapping it altogether in favor of a better idea on a tangentially related thing.