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Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

> You can't just skim a math textbook and know all the math. You have to stop and think.

And most importantly you have to write. A lot. Writing allows our brain to structure our thinking. Enables us to have a structured dialogue with ourselves. Explore different paths. Thinking & pondering can only do so much and will reach the limits soon. Writing, on the other hand enables one to explore thoughts nearly endlessly.

Given that thinking is so intimately associated with writing (could be prose, drawing, equations, graphs/charts, whatever) and that LLMs are doing more and more of writing it'll be interesting to see the effect of LLMs on our cognitive skills.

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The impact of writing is immensely undervalued. Even writing with a keyboard or screen is a lot more than non writing. Exercising writing on any topic is still beneficial, and you can find many psychologists recommend having a daily blog of some sort to help people observe themselves from a side. The same goes for speaking, public speech if u want, and therapeutic daily acting-playing which is also overlooked.

I’d love to see some sort of study on people who actively particulate writing their stuff on social media and those who don’t.

If u want to spare your mind from GPT numbness - write or copy what it tells you to do by hand, do not abandon this process.

Or just write code, programs, essays, poems for fun. Trust me - it is and you’ll get smarter and more confident. GPT is a very dangerous convenience gadget, is not going away like sugar or Netflix, or obesity or long commutes … but similarly dosage and counter measures are essential to cope with the side-effects.

The only writing I've ever used ChatGPT for is writing I openly don't give a shit about, and even then I constantly find myself prompting it to write less because holy shit do LLMs love to go on and on and on.

Like not only do I cosign all said above, but I will also add to this: brevity is the soul of wit and none of these fucking things are brief. No matter what you ask for you end up getting just paragraphs of shit to communicate even basic ideas. It's hard to not think this tool was designed from go to automate high school book reports.

I would only use these programs to either create these overly long, meandering stupid emails, or to digest ones similarly sent to me, and make a mental note to reduce my interactions with this person.

It's no wonder the MBA class is fucking thrilled with it though, since the vast majority of their jobs seem to revolve around producing and consuming huge reports containing vacuously little.

not all humans are brief, and not all situations are amenable to brevity, but I get the point, as brevity can be be exceptionaly informationaly dense, but like in humor(sports), it only works if someone else plays the strait guy or set up artist. Also true masters will switch up, happy to join ingeneral blather, and then drop a subtle, brief comment that is the bridge piece for an otherwise huge informational set.Another thing many performers and writers describe is the finding of the voice or stage/writing persona....perhaps quite different from the one that they inhabit at home. The topic at hand leaves out the trap of standing behind a persona, that the person cant then inhabit, and then can be caught out in a real world situation as an imposter, ha!

Similarly, the impact of white-boarding-type activities is undervalued. When discussing problems with a viewpoint, a quick whiteboard usually gets at some easy-to-find underlying issues that others can understand, rather than it devolving into positional framings.

> And most importantly you have to write. A lot. Writing allows our brain to structure our thinking.

There's a lot of talk about AI assisted coding these days, but I've found similar issues where I'm unable to form a mental model of the program when I rely too much on them (amongst other issues where the model will make unnecessary changes, etc.). This is one of the reasons why I limit their use to "boring" tasks like refactoring or clarifying concepts that I'm unsure about.

> it'll be interesting to see the effect of LLMs on our cognitive skills.

These discussions remind me a lot about this comic[1].

[1] https://www.monkeyuser.com/2023/deprecated/

> And most importantly you have to write. A lot. Writing allows our brain to structure our thinking. Enables us to have a structured dialogue with ourselves.

I feel like to goes beyond writing to really any form of expressing this knowledge to others. As a grad student, I was a teaching assistant for an Electrical Engineering class I failed as an undergrad. The depth of understanding I developed for the material over the course of supporting students in the class was amazing. I transitioned from "knowing" the material and equations to being able to generate them all from first principles.

Regardless, I fully agree that using LLMs as our form of expression will weaken both the ability to express ourselves AND the ability to develop deep understanding of topics as LLMs "think" for us too.

Writing is pure magic.It allows so much reflection and so many insights, that you wouldnt otherwise get. And writing as part of the reading process allows you to directly integrate what you are reading as you are doing it. Like cant recommend it enough. Only downside is that its slow, compared to what people are used and want to do, especially in the work environment.

I disagree with this take. I'd say often when exploring new math problems, often it's possible explore the possible solutions paths at lower technical levels first in your mind before anything down--when actually going into details of an approach. I don't think not writing is that limiting if all of your approaches already fail before going into details, which is often the case in early stages of math research.

I can also explore by writing. Writing drafts can help structure my thinking.

"The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement." ~ Billy Collins

> And most importantly you have to write. A lot.

I find this to still be true with AI assisted coding. Especially when I still have to build a map of the domain.

They made a documentary about this actually. You can probably find it on Netflix or something. It's called Idiocracy.

> And most importantly you have to write. A lot. Writing allows our brain to structure our thinking.

Not to be pedantic, but I’d still argue that thinking is the most important. At least when understanding the nature of learning. I mean, writing is ultimately great because it facilitates high quality thinking. You essentially say this yourself.

Overall, I think it’s more helpful to understand the learning process as promoting high quality thinking (encoding if you want to be technical). This sort of explains why teaching others, argumentation, mind-mapping, good note-taking, and other activities and techniques are great for learning as well.

Prompting involves more than an insignificant amount of writing.

But it is not at all the same _type_ of writing. Most of the prompts I've seen and written are shorter, less organized, and most importantly not actually considered a piece of writing. When you are writing a prompt you are considering how the machine will "interpret" it and what it will spit back, you're not constructing and argument. Vagueness or dialectics in a prompt will often just confuse the machine.

Hitting the keys is not always writing.

Prompting is prewriting — which is very important and often neglected. With it, you are:

* Describing the purpose of the writing

* Defining the format of the writing

* Articulating the context

You are writing to figure out what you want.

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