6 ms·

I 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 impres

• nfw2 4mo ago
  I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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.
    • unfitted2545 4mo ago
      I think I've got this from growing up with a narcissist. Thoughts are constructed and seemingly endlessly whittled to try and create a sentence that can avoid getting belittled. It's hard to talk in groups, because you have to have a sentence mentally critiqued by 3/4 people in turn, so the topic has usually changed before you can say your piece.
    • lazyasciiart 4mo ago
      What? It's never occurred to me that this isn't entirely normal, I've done it all my life. I thought people without an inner monologue were the unusual ones.
      • ubercore 4mo ago
        I'm not wading into the schizophrenia part, but inner monologue doesn't necessarily imply constructing a fully formed sentence you then repeat to yourself.
      • crims0n 4mo ago
        I think there is a difference between having an inner monologue, and imagining a conversation with another person in your head.
        • innerconvo 4mo ago
          Created a throwaway for this, but is this not what people do? Not so much imagining a conversation in your head, but playing through a conversation with "the other side" of the coin (be it an idea, plan, problem, solution etc) which are both yourself if that makes sense. Is this not what the inner monologue to yourself is? Your inner is conversing with your outer monologue. Hard to explain. Would consider myself to be both physically and mentally stable, no conditions etc.
  • zenoprax 4mo ago
    I'm with you there. I have to either hear the full sentences narrated by my internal voice or see the words flashing in my mind in order to "think". This is great for building and maintaining deep mental models but it is also highly susceptible to "bit rot" (such as forgetting the rationale or evidence for a specific assertion or position) days/weeks/years later. I have a friend who simply can't understand how inter-linked note systems (like the kind Obsidian enables) are helpful. It's just a bewildering mess to them and they think more linearly. Thus, writing things down is a necessity for me: it's not for a need for structure but rather that my "context window" gets filled too quickly. I can counter my own arguments but it's more fun, and often quicker, to do with someone else. Besides, there is such a diversity of thinking out there it would be foolish to not take advantage!
  • kreyenborgi 4mo ago
    Same here. When I was younger I liked imagining having conversations with people from the past like Plato or something, thinking about their reactions to The Future. (Though I guess I only really imagined my own side of the conversation.)
  • MaysonL 4mo ago
    Different people’s minds work very differently. More differently than most people imagine.
    • 9x39 4mo ago
      I was reading the parent and thinking the same thing - I can't do that. There's no "voice" in my head like some people describe. If I want to model speaking like a mock conversation, I have to write it or ... speak it, even silently, to convert from the visuals that are my thought. As an aside, I end up having to organize certain types of thoughts through speaking, which requires some adaptations and limiting functions :-)
      • Propelloni 4mo ago
        Agreed. I have to write stuff down, with a pen, on paper, for this to work. Typing into a machine works sort of, but not on the same level.
  • dwd 4mo ago
    There has been many a time where the process of thinking through in my head how I was going to describe the problem to someone else on the way over to them, that a testable idea pops up. Could probably have gone for a walk around the block instead, but the formulation of the problem to be able to explain it to someone else seems to be key.
    • japanuspus 4mo ago
      This is what I miss from (the early) Stack Overflow: often the process of writing up a well-framed question ended up solving the problem. I sometimes put out the question anyway and added an answer. Never quite figured out if this was considered bad style.
      • dwd 4mo ago
        Jeff Attwood in his Coding Horror post about Rubber Duck Debugging mentioned that as well. I would think he wouldn't have considered it bad style. https://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/
• joe_the_user 4mo ago
  It seems like you saying that people who can do alone what most people do alone, have an advantage. Sure but seems more like an agreement with the article than otherwise.
• itsamario 4mo ago
  One can't think aloud. It's illogical to use one word when another is more concise and succinct like talking and speaking in this case. Some words are self-explanatory like thinking.
  • loopmonster 4mo ago
    The post you're replying to didn't say that, but regardless, I would say 'thinking aloud' is a pretty good descriptor for the word-by-word narration kind of thinking where you sort of both say and hear it in your head. I have heard that some people who who experience 'inner monologue' experience their thoughts nearly exclusively like this.
• oever 4mo ago
  The value of writing an AGENT.md might be more in the writing of project overview than in the subsequent ability to run an LLM on the project.
• Chance-Device 4mo ago
  This was my first thought too. Thought, I will say that even though I think in speech for basically everything conceptual, and find it difficult to imagine even being able to not do this, I do often have these… ill defined ideas. Notions of something or other. I have a few words to describe them and they just sort of point in a direction rather than being fleshed out. It’s this sort of thing, like a thought-stub, that benefits the most from inspection and being forced into a better defined form. These are also often the more difficult things, and the reason they’re fuzzy is that it takes a lot of effort to make them sharp.
• fugaziboutit 4mo ago
  "When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it." - The House at Pooh Corner
• zahlman 4mo ago
  From my own experience chatting with LLMs: reading the responses definitely does help with thinking, even when you can see obvious flaws or hallucinations. It gives you something to think about, which a rubber duck can't do.
• jaggederest 4mo ago
  I find this whole concept very interesting, because unless I'm translating it for external reception, my thinking is largely non-verbal - generally more spatial-visual, proprioceptive, or purely tacit than auditory, and I find words to be, at least by that standard, frustratingly limited.
  • Unearned5161 4mo ago
    I think that’s part of the point. Execution at its core is mastering the art of projection onto a lower dimensional space. Taking anything from up in the mind out into the real world, be it a physical action, a speech, an artwork, requires you to make decisions about what’s load bearing and what’s not. So the more practice you get translating your thoughts into words (or another medium), the better you get at executing.
    • jaggederest 4mo ago
      The "another medium" is doing a lot there, I think the translation between my understanding and expressing it in words is the weakest aspect of software development at the moment, in addition to the entire physical world. Dancing about architecture, if you like.
• aaron695 4mo ago
  [dead]
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• utopiah 4mo ago
  My own efficiency ranking : - genuine dialog between 2 peers with overlapping knowledge on the topic, both being kind, patient, open-minded yet critical, able to point flaws in reasoning or provenance without being hurtful - genuine dialog between 2 peers with overlapping knowledge on the topic - genuine dialog between 2 peers - genuine dialog between 2 persons - thinking out loud in front of someone listening - thinking out loud alone thinking of someone listening - thinking out loud alone The "trick" here, and that's why I wanted to write it down, is that having an actual person, real or imaginary, does force one to actually explain. A typical fallacy is the "proof left out to the student" which actually happens to be terribly complex or even infeasible. I believe trying to explain to someone forces you to identify the gap into their knowledge and your point. It's precisely mapping where knowledge does NOT overlap. So instead of making a lot of assumptions they have to be laid out, at the very least made in part explicit. Doing so forces you to stop skimming parts that are challenging for you. The part that you might not feel so sure. Obviously the whole problem is that this peer, who is both knowledgeable and kind is good in their field and popular, thus busy. Consequently their time is very VERY precious. Hopefully you yourself are that peer. That means that often we have to go down the list and find the next best person. So... I do think duck debugging is better if you genuinely trust in the kindness of the duck, not see it as a piece of plastic ;)
• 383toast 4mo ago
  fwiw Pangram says 100% of the original article was written by AI