8 ms·
Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone
- dh2022 4mo agoOMG - strong vibes to Einstein crediting Michele Besso, his colleague at the Swiss Patent Office, with helping him discussing some concepts in the special relativity paper: see at the end of the paper https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf
- IAmBroom 4mo agoInteresting. I saw a Facebook copypasta piece that claimed that Einstein's first wife came up with many or most of his ideas, and never got credit because of sexism. No proof whatsoever, other than she was a mathematician and physicist. But "it could have happened!" is more important than even a microshred of evidence for highly emotional, online topics. This anecdote nicely pokes a hole in that conspiracy theory: he was thoughtful enough to share credit with a layman work associate, but (supposedly) not the most important woman in his life - that seems even less likely.
- kodesko 4mo ago[dead]
- joe_the_user 4mo agoThanks, I was wondering about the question of whether people who made very deep discoveries (Einstein and Godel come to mind) had others to talk things through with beforehand. I know Andrew Wiles kept all of his work on Fermat's Last Theorem secret and by that I assume he never talked it through with anyone.
- 383toast 4mo agofwiw Pangram says 100% of the original article was written by AI
- jboggan 4mo agoIn 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 though. Good times.
- kodesko 4mo agoDuckly deserved to actually work. There’s a small irony here: the closest study I found to this, robots specifically built to simulate attentive listening, found they performed no better than an actual inanimate rubber duck for adult engineers. The mechanical signal of listening doesn’t seem to be the active ingredient. Makes me wonder if Duckly would have needed real disagreement to close a gap a duck can’t, not just better natural language.
- jboggan 4mo agoYou're probably on to something with the value of disagreement. I think it's one reason why chatting with current models doesn't create the same stimulation as rubber-ducking used to bring. The models are typically too quick to agree and amplify what you think rather than truly break it down and push back. And thanks for saying it should have worked, I agree. My chagrin has increased over the years as I have realized the magnitude of my ill-timing.
- mncharity 4mo agoHas anyone seen a good set of prompts for that disagreement? For the "skeptical eyebrow-raise" or "confused/doubtful head tilt" aspect of rubber ducks? Agentic uses adversarial expert, steel-man opponent, risk-mitigation and failure-mode analysis. But what about almost brainstorming, but with thought-provoking nudge questions? Or on the other hand, arm-waving fight-club style discussion? Or... It's a big design space. I used to go to lots of research talks at MIT, in assorted departments. The post-talk Q&A question cultures varied a lot. Like encompassing both "leaves the speaker in tears", and "nudge so subtle, you won't quickly get it if you've not already spotted the fatal flaw in the work". So aside from dialing down the "transformative insight!" silliness, there seems a rich multi-agent multi-persona space to explore.
- mikeryan 4mo agoI started my web dev career in 1999 so my main code references were a combination of O’reilly and “for dummies” books. As a wet behind the ears engineer I’d find myself regularly walking over to my more senior friend Dan’s cubicle for help. Half the time on the walk over, trying to frame the question in my mind I’d figure out the answer or at least next step. It got to the point where Dan would see me heading towards him and suddenly turn around and he’d as “Figure it out?” And I’d throw him a thumbs up on the way back to my desk.
- kodesko 4mo ago[dead]
- fellowniusmonk 4mo agoA collection of thoughts on this. Pierces Firstness is exactly what drives this. The move from thinking to semantic conversion is important for investigation/introspection. Arguing with yourself also seems to engage your brains "theory of mind" centers, so different pathways get activated to examine the problem space. The problem with Ai is the fact that it hallucinates and if you're doing anything truly novel in an integration or framing sense it bottoms out very quickly and can't engage. A human operator can decompose the problem and get accuracy checks for known areas in the training data of course. Now to be I'm not saying Ai can't produce novel work on the edge but in my experience it is antagonistic towards those goals. Case in point, CRDTs, many don't use tombstones but they are the minority, and if you try iterate a new CRDT off of one that doesn't use tombstones, let's say diamond-types, it will keep pulling you back to tombstones. The problem is that the number of humans who understand dynamic investigation and the push pull of exploring an idea you don't hold with someone has always been very small, and now with reflexive internet argument culture driving how we view "debate" and "discussion". I don't know if we've reduced the leisure to think or what but things are not great for finding speculative thinking partners.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- kodesko 4mo ago[dead]
- piinbinary 4mo agoWriting is as good, or even better https://www.paulgraham.com/words.html https://www.paulgraham.com/words.html
- kodesko 4mo ago[dead]
- epolanski 4mo agoYou can tell you didn't read the article before jumping into commenting, as this point is addressed.
- piinbinary 4mo agoOnly as > the act of writing out a problem to a model still forces the same sentence-level precision described earlier (model referring to LLM here) but not as writing for writing's sake
- Myrmornis 4mo agoThe string "writ" only occurs once in an article about how to develop ones ideas on non-trivial subjects. Pretty telling.
- hyperific 4mo agoSee also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
- irishcoffee 4mo agoI keep a rubber duck on my desk and have for at least 10 years, because of this. Great conversation starter.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- mc3301 4mo agoHarvard's cs50 had a "Rubber Duck debugger" which was an LLM trained on all their educational content with specific guardrails in place to not give any answers. It would chat back with you planting little ideas to help push your understanding just a little bit. I loved it so much, because I was learning programming completely by myself usually after midnight while taking care of a new-born. I had nobody to pair-program with, no lead dev nor teacher to speak with. It was years ago, but such an amazing implementation of an LLM for education.
- irishcoffee 4mo agoThat sounds horrible, honestly.
- mc3301 4mo agoIt was a tough time, indeed. But I feel that had I used an "all unknowing and answering" LLM, my retention and understanding of the class material would have been significantly lower. But I didn't have any choice as to having anyone to actually chat with back and forth. So it worked for me.
- K0balt 4mo agoLLMs are really good rubber ducks.
- Congeec 4mo agoCommunicating ideas helps, but thinking out loud may not work better to some people. Thinking silently fits Asian Americans better than Euro Americans*. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-murder-and-the-meaning-life/201801/does-thinking-out-loud-help-your-performance-or-hinder https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-murder-and-the-m...
- wrathofquan 4mo agoThank you for sharing this. Growing up Asian American many teachers disciplined me and made assumptions about my intelligence for not being as vocal as the other kids. Culture shapes cognition and vice versa.
- kodesko 4mo ago[flagged]
- msteffen 4mo ago> The Enigma of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017): their argumentative theory holds that reasoning evolved for social rather than individual epistemic purposes, to produce and evaluate arguments in group contexts. Yes! I love that someone wrote this down! This seems so obvious to me now. I often ask LLMs to cite their sources (they do hallucinate from time to time), and they often give me sources that don't say what is claimed. "How would the LLM know not to give this to me?" I wonder. They're trained to explain but not to convince, so they don't know what's convincing, and they should. I think humans hallucinate at least as much as LLMs—arguments of any complexity are impossible to formulate without leaping at least a bit—but other humans ground us. That's why when people become socially isolated, they join cults or adopt conspiracy theories or the like. Conversely, "this is convincing to an expert" converges on “this is true" as our collective expertise grows over time. This is the foundation of the scientific method, of progress in all engineering disciplines, etc.
- kodesko 4mo ago[flagged]
- semiinfinitely 4mo ago[dead]
- Havoc 4mo agoI 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 critique. Same with rubber duck debugging. The verbal part means you need to articulate it clearly but it's not the speaking that helps. Same with writing a detailed spec/prompt for an LLM - I know if its too fuzzy ("set an appropriate timeout") the LLM will spin it's wheels so it forces clarity. Also suspect that a big part of who we consider intelligent is linked to this. Maybe their internal monologue is just more crisp - closer to what they'd tell a rubber duck.
- nfw2 4mo agoI think there are tradeoffs though, and this has been a thorn in my side during technical interviews where you are expected to think out loud because: 1. Sometimes you have a vague sense of the shape of the solution, and ime it can be helpful to sit with it for a while before trying to shape it into words. 2. Talking out loud forces structure but it also rate-limits how quickly you can iterate through ideas to find one that plausibly solves the problem at hand
- slwvx 4mo agoI 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
- dgeiser13 4mo agoI assume your anecdotal experience is rare.
- felooboolooomba 4mo ago> 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.
- slwvx 4mo agoI wonder if there's a difference between people who have a strong inner voice and those with no inner voice (Anendophasia). I.e. do people w Anendophasia do better on their own than those with a strong inner voice?
- myself248 4mo agoFurthermore, it helps to talk with people who think differently from you. Maybe they studied the same subject but at a different school, or maybe they specialize in something else entirely. Maybe their first language is different from yours, since language idioms can affect the way we frame problems. Maybe they want to get into the field you're working on, and your thinking can also be teaching. For me, this is a big part of the value of a hackerspace/makerspace. The tools are nice, but the intellectual environment is amazing.
- THansenite 4mo agoThis makes sense when you think about the divided state of the USA today. People were isolated during COVID and had no feedback on opinions formed then. When they started creating bubbles after lockdown, they wanted validation for the opinions they formed without that feedback. Now, people constantly argue online because that feedback they needed while cementing those ideas wasn't there and we aren't willing to take that communication feedback to tweak our opinions based on common sense because we all believe we are right. This article makes a lot of sense.
- Terretta 4mo ago> Now, people constantly argue… Ah yes, the newfound pastime of arguing online – sure miss those pre-COVID days of online's universal consensus…
- cadamsdotcom 4mo agoThis is so true! 1. Talking or writing requires thoughts to be sequenced so they come out in a way someone can follow Thinking in your head won’t organize your thought. 2. Talking or writing to someone invites feedback and forces you to make sense, fit in socially etc. Chatting with an AI or writing in your diary won’t refine or improve your thoughts.
- jsbg 4mo agoEveryone inherently knows this, that's why they reach out to others when stuck on a bug (see also rubber-ducking). But why is it so hard to convince individuals and organizations of the benefits of pair programming?
- bogrollben 4mo agorubber-ducking and pair programming have wildly different investment costs
- jsbg 4mo agoAre you saying the reason people don't like pair programming is because it's considered more expensive than it's worth?
- BurningFrog 4mo agoDoing pair programming well is a skill you have to learn from someone. Putting two regular programmers together in front of a computer will typically annoy both and not accomplish much. I was fortunate to learn from experienced people, and I've had very good experiences with it.
- assimpleaspossi 4mo agoThis proves nothing but, in my earlier days, I'd come home with something on my mind from work and tell my wife about how I couldn't get something to work the way I wanted. She had no clue what I was talking about but she'd offer up clues and suggestions to which I would try to explain to her how things actually worked. Somewhere in that process it would lead to a solution that I would bring to work the next day!
- LtWorf 4mo agoWhy are you making your wife work for free :(
- baggy_trough 4mo agoStrange perspective. They are partners.
- apparent 4mo agoIt's simpler than this. Explaining a question/issue to someone involves going back to basics and covering all the foundational info that a third party would not have. When thinking alone, you gloss over this, and may not realize that a foundational assumption is incorrect. When you are forced to explain every step explicitly, these errors or gaps can become apparent without any intervention by the listener. I have my younger kid explain each math problem to me before she submits it on Khan Academy. My older kid thinks in her head how she would explain a problem before turning in a test. It's a good habit to form.
- THansenite 4mo agoAs 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.
- apparent 4mo agoYes, 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 ways to do various operations, and there are plenty of youtube videos that students can turn to if what they have been taught does not resonate for them.
- wolpoli 4mo agoIn 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.
- PaulHoule 4mo agoSome of the value I get coding with LLMs is like that. Like I am working on some code that I 80% understand and going back and forth I get to 100%.
- baumgarn 4mo agoHeinrich von Kleist – On the gradual production of thoughts during speech is a classic german text from 1805 on this subject that I have always valued deeply https://franxfiction.com/on-the-gradual-fabrication-of-thoughts-during-speech/ https://franxfiction.com/on-the-gradual-fabrication-of-thoug...
- nakedneuron 4mo agoReally interesting someone brings this up here. It's kind of an obscure little piece of text. But I always thought, yeah, this is more or less how we produce thought, and how LLMs operate, too.
- Jevon23 4mo ago> The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure. They have a subject and a predicate. I already think in sentences so idk what this guy is on about, sounds like a skill issue.
- Myrmornis 4mo agoDoes anyone really sit there thinking and make much progress? You write.
- observationist 4mo agoSometimes 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.
- dzonga 4mo agousing the audio recorder works as well. wish I had discovered that trick sooner.
- aljgz 4mo agoTangentially, Regarding pair programming (as a special case of thinking together): Programming is serializing ideas into the computer language. Communicating them with someone else first serializes them into human language, which is already much less abstract compared to the thought cloud in your head. In the case of an effective pair programming collaboration, you also get to debate approaches, discuss details, alternate between coding and watching. It also helps that the presence of someone else helps avoid many common distractions. Reading non-urgent private messages and checking out HN (I'm no longer so addicted to any other platform to check it out at work).
- Terretta 4mo agoYes, and, this is how experts should be using e.g. Claude Code.
- AngryData 4mo agoSpeaking out loud makes you translate your weird personal brain logic into structured instruction meant to inform others. And taking that other person's view, in order to explain what they don't know, gives you an alternative perspective. I feel like trying to explain it to yourself as if you were ignorant of the problem may give similar insights.
- cindyllm 4mo ago[dead]
- theendisney 4mo agoSomething funny i discover: i had thoughts or tried to explain something decades ago and made a drawing. Some of these are just a circle with some arrows. Turns out it is really hard to make a drawing bad enough that you dont know what it is. It sometimes works better than even a written description. So you can just doodle in a notebook and tell yourself you've written it down. If you look at it regularly im sure recall will be even more perfect. If you dont write anything down you wont be alle to access an orderly array of thoughs.
- jackyinger 4mo agoI draw a lot to figure out engineering details. I used to make beautiful drawings in diagramming software (draw.io and the lil). But man, it took a lot of time. Now I scribble on printer paper unless it’s something I plan to share.
- mc3301 4mo agoFellows devs at my company think I'm strange, but I always have a cheap coil-notebook. It has diagrams, notes, doodles, minutes, checklists, mostly not even in order. I try to remember to write the date at the top of each page. I just counted, 11 notebooks (b5, 60 pages) in two years, so just about a new notebook every 2 months. Funny thing is, coworkers will now ask to use my pen and paper to flesh-out something together, as I'm certain it's the only paper and writing utensil in the building. And yeah, draw.io or even an ipad with a whiteboard app aren't good replacements for me.
- zahlman 4mo ago> even an ipad with a whiteboard app aren't good replacements for me. Curious. My first thought would have been "... because the line is physically displaced from the pen, of course"; but that doesn't apply there.
- mc3301 4mo agoI can't really explain it; it's simply a preference. It may not actually be optimal efficiency. But I like the pen and paper.
- pessimizer 4mo agoI don't really buy any explanation here. The reason why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone is because when I'm alone I'll loop a lot more. My reactions to thoughts that I myself have had are stereotyped and repetitive (every reaction is typical of me.) Reactions to me that come from another person are going to be different than those, and in turn stimulate me differently. Thinking tends to be an enumeration (then elimination) of possibilities, and that random input helps with the enumeration part by keeping me out of local minima.
- h4kunamata 4mo agoThinking out loud with yourself helps the same way.
- thelastgallon 4mo agoExhibit A: All episodes of Dr. House
- mgc_blackbox 4mo agoExternalizing a thought forces you to make it concrete. Most of the “magic” comes from that translation step.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- galaxyLogic 4mo agoWouldn't writing out loud do it too?
- satheon9 4mo ago[dead]
- kimi 4mo agoI find it very useful to talk to my dog. When I have a problem I'm banging my head against, just explaining it to him from first principles makes my head "click". When that works, his dog treats are billed as "consulting".
- whateverboat 4mo agoWhat field is he a dogtor in?
- tgrowazay 4mo agoGreenfield projects
- moinism 4mo ago[flagged]
- lowdude 4mo agoIt started out as an interesting read, until I got to this paragraph: > The value didn't come from what was said at that moment. It came from what had been built across many such moments: a pattern of mutual recognition, a shared context, a baseline of trust that made the later exchange possible. The relationship was the infrastructure. The conversation was where it had been built, one cup of coffee at a time. And that made me immediately question the worth of the entire piece. I get it, LLMS can rewrite an entire blog post in a minute, which can be quite tempting for people that don't enjoy writing itself, but it just takes so much variety away. I think people should stick to grammatical corrections only, and not rephrase entire paragraphs (never mind letting an LLM write everything in the first place).
- stuaxo 4mo agoSimilar: as soon as I see that LLM style I bail out, you can't trust the content. If they can't be arsed to write it, why TF should I be arsed to read it.
- 383toast 4mo agofwiw Pangram says 100% of the original article was written by AI
- theK 4mo agoPangram is a cool idea. It can be wildly wrong though.
- partyficial 4mo agoseems the author removed that paragraph from the article after reading this comment
- theshrike79 3mo agoIf I smell AI writing, I ask my AI to condense it to a few bullet points
- brandnewideas 4mo ago
- Etymon 4mo agoIn the nineties I was a junior copywriter at BMP DDB in London. The creative department was made up of loads of small offices, each with a two-person creative team working out loud all day. The best ideas rarely came from one person thinking alone. Someone would say something half-formed about a brief and their partner would catch it, often bouncing ideas back and forth. Reckon the whole building ran on that. Well, apart from the late and brilliant John Webster, who had his own office at the top of the corridor. We were lucky enough to have ours opposite his.
- 383toast 4mo agobtw Pangram says 100% of the original article was written by AI
- oska 4mo agoThe Buddha famously thought out loud with a good buddy, while pursuing Enlightenment under the Bodhi tree
- LeoDaVibeci 4mo agoGreat write up, thanks for posting. I think I could have avoided so many mistakes in my life if I had just spoken to someone about my plans first. And not necessarily just based on their feedback, but just hearing the words come out of my mount and predicting their reactions would have helped a ton.
- noir_lord 4mo agoI always found explaining the problem to one of my cats was a good way of getting to the solution, sadly I had to put the last one down on Monday and now my office feels empty and lifeless. I'd wait a bit and get a kitten but having lost both cats inside a year frankly it hurts too much and they don't live long enough.
- jmaw 4mo agoSorry for your loss.
- noir_lord 3mo agoThanks, she was older for a cat and the prognosis of surgery wasn’t great and in the best case she’d have suffered recovery for low odds, still felt horrible holding her in my arms as the vet injected the sedative, she was trying to play with the vet prior to that, I had her (and her brother) their entire lives bar a few weeks, neighbours found the litter and we took a pair. My ex wanted cats, I was never a fan but her and her brother wormed their way into my heart in a way I never expected, I’m not going to get another though, my missus isn’t a huge fan but more than that they don’t live long enough compared to us and it really hurts too much because of that.
- AtlasBarfed 4mo agoSocial engagement circuitry in your brain is in other parts than dedicated internal conversation logic thought streams. By talking to someone else, you're simply mobilizing a different set of circuitry and thinking approaches. It's like you switched llm models I don't think this is particularly a complicated phenomenon
- 383toast 4mo agobtw Pangram says 100% of the original article was written by AI