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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

And a corollary to this: There is probably an intellectual cost of returning to oral culture, which seems to be what's happening at the moment at a large scale [1].

It's been happening with social media already, but having non-human entities take over "written thought" for many is probably going to have pretty significant consequences. I'm finding a lot of utility in LLMs, but at the same time I'm concerned about what parts of my cognitive faculties it'll cause to atrophy when overused.

Then again, maybe this is just yet another inevitable (albeit much bigger than the ones before) step on the same path we've been on since the onset of cognitive tradeoff [2] in early humans?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-02-07/we-re-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_tradeoff_hypothesis

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It's worth to distinguish writing for yourself (to think) from communication.

Recently I discovered a lecture about technical writing in academics (from my "writing to think" folder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM) that drove this point home: If you're an academic, your default mode of writing is "writing to think", and you have to make a conscious effort to avoid this mode when you communicate.

I think it also goes the other way: If you mostly write for others (or read what they write or say in public), then you need to make a conscious switch to "writing to think", which is a different skill where you worry less about being misunderstood and more about connecting to your personal knowledge.

Yes. It's time to return to McLuhan. The medium is the message and our current media are a mess.

I don't have instagram, but I sometimes overhear it while relatives are using it. It's a shocking experience. A series or random, wholly unrelated noises play in rapid succession, often ranging from harsh loud screams to the latest pop hit. From the outside looking in, it seems obvious that subjecting yourself to that daily would be cognitively deleterious.

What shocks me is how addictive everything is. It seems like people of mostly any age or persuasion can get into some kind of slop media or another. For video in particular, I refrain from going out of my way to watch any, but sometimes when I happen to see a friend engaged in watching, I start watching too and find it hard to escape. I can't speak to the cognitive effects confidently, but we agree on the vibe that it causes harm.

> And a corollary to this: There is probably an intellectual cost of returning to oral culture, which seems to be what's happening at the moment at a large scale [1].

If you talk about oral culture in the sense of having shorter messages, then it doesn’t necessarily have to be so much worse I think because there is a certain elegance to having clear and short messages. Like Forrest auto reviews on Youtube [1]. It’s so short that it allows more people to watch reviews for many cars. The information density is really high.

What I think is the problem is playing into emotions and especially fear. Once fear and anger kick in it’s really hard to keep thinking logically.

[1]: https://youtube.com/@forrestsautoreviewsofficial

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