[HN Gopher] Writing is thinking
___________________________________________________________________
Writing is thinking
Author : __rito__
Score : 238 points
Date : 2025-07-21 06:30 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| zug_zug wrote:
| I see a lot of people say "writing is so important," and I think
| what they mean is "I feel really smart/good when I write." And I
| think what they are experiencing is that they've been assembling
| ideas in their heads for weeks, and only when it's all come
| together are they ready synthesize that information at a higher
| level, and they mistake this synthesis for the writing itself
| (rather than the writing being a symptom OF the synthesis -- if
| they had tried to write a week prior they would have found it
| unproductive).
| jryb wrote:
| Just one personal anecdote: I definitely find contradictions or
| gaps in my thinking/knowledge when I write. Finding and
| resolving those deficiencies is what I point to when I say
| "writing is thinking".
| __rito__ wrote:
| This is not true for at least me.
|
| Let's say, I am making something concrete by putting ideas,
| thoughts, knowledge into paper. While doing it, I am finding
| gaps and mistakes and finding opportunities to correct them.
| But it is not limited to 'correction', it also opens newer
| dimensions and perspectives- ones that previously didn't exist
| in my conscious mind.
|
| I consider writing as a tool of thinking. Another tool is
| brainstorming with a group, or any group discussion in general.
| These _amend_ to your thoughts, make the existing ones more
| solid, and opens new direction, and unravels connections
| previously not accessible.
|
| Read this essay by Paul Graham: Putting Ideas into Words [0].
| And also refer to his other essays on writing.
|
| There is also a great book by Paul Zissner: Writing to Learn. I
| suggest this book to people.
|
| Writing, when done while learning works akin to teaching- one
| of the most crucial steps in so-called Feynman Technique of
| learning.
|
| [0]: https://paulgraham.com/words.html
| zug_zug wrote:
| Yeah I think I've read multiple PG essays on the importance
| of writing, but they always struck me as no different than
| Katy Perry telling you to sing, or some Grandmaster saying
| "go play chess." That is -- a personal anecdote that doesn't
| necessarily generalize.
|
| I'm not saying that writing can't be a useful tool to
| organize ideas, definitely it can. But I think I've found two
| things:
|
| - Now the best way to "iterate" my thoughts is to rubberduck
| with ChatGPT; it's really amazing how much faster I can learn
| when I admit how little I know, even on something like global
| warming or an advanced math topic.
|
| - By and large, "organizing my thoughts" isn't really a high-
| return activity in my life. Having an intelligently written
| blog that I've put hundreds of hours into has never done
| anything for my career or led to any personal connections,
| and honestly who's to say my time wouldn't have been better-
| spent just coming with some jokes to network better rather
| than having some cohesive theory of everything that nobody
| asked for?
| FrankenDino wrote:
| Anything by William Zinsser is worth reading.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7881675.William_Zinsse.
| ..
| aquariusDue wrote:
| Sometimes I like to test whether I can actually construct or
| assemble a finished something in my mind from an inkling of a
| thought.
|
| For example a few days ago I realized that I found it hard to
| reverse a word in my mind, even a simple one. Try for yourself,
| think of a word and then reverse it in your head with your eyes
| closed.
|
| Some people might struggle with the above, some may find it
| doable in their heads, but most can agree that it's absurdly
| easy if you can externalize it to paper or a text editor at
| least.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| I disagree. Not sure how common this workflow is, but I write
| by putting all the different unsynthesized ideas down and
| rearrange them as the latent structure "reveals itself." At the
| end you have something synthesized.
|
| Sure _some_ type latent structure was there all along (thus why
| I put them down), but it wasn 't necessarily visible to me, nor
| optimal, nor did it include/exclude all the right points. The
| need for iteration itself proves that the act of writing is
| actually _doing_ the synthesis.
| wrp wrote:
| You need to add into consideration that laying things out in
| visual display provides cognitive support, reducing the effort
| to reason about more things. So writing out ideas really does
| allow you to reach a greater scope of synthesis.
| chambers wrote:
| I think you're right. I'll add on: there's a lot of thinking
| that does not need writing, and there's a lot of writing that
| needs no thinking. Deng Xiaoping and other greats wrote pretty
| minimally for their own thinking, if at all. Whereas many of us
| not-so-greats seem to knee-jerk comment without a single
| thought.
|
| It makes sense for our age. Amid a thousand distractions,
| typing on the keyboard gives the illusion of getting a grip.
| Note-taking on my computer gives the illusion of a second
| brain. Ululating on the internet gives the illusion of sharing
| thoughts.
|
| Instead of "writing is thinking", I prefer "thought precedes
| speech" https://inframethodology.cbs.dk/?p=1127; it fits the
| small human mind better though I've yet to learn it properly.
| lukebechtel wrote:
| it depends how you write.
|
| often when I write an idea down, my "inner critic" process gets
| more activated upon seeing the textual representation.
|
| thus I find gaps and flaws more easily.
|
| not true for all domains, but many.
| jimbokun wrote:
| If they tried writing a week prior that would have realized
| sooner the gaps in the ideas they were assembling, leading to
| them closing those gaps faster.
| bGl2YW5j wrote:
| This is a really cynical take. People work differently and get
| value from different things. It's probably safe to assume most
| aren't virtue signalling about writing.
| msarrel wrote:
| Thinking and writing are closely linked.
|
| Thinking and using ChatGPT are not. Overview < Your Brain on
| ChatGPT -- MIT Media Lab https://share.google/RYjkIU1y4zdsAUDZt
| thekoma wrote:
| https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ove...
| sram1337 wrote:
| relevant PG essay https://paulgraham.com/writes.html
| carlesfe wrote:
| While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking"
| is only circumstantially correct. It wasn't always like this.
|
| We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap.
| Yes, we've trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw
| thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods.
|
| I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books
| and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as
| Tolstoi, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their
| mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days.
|
| Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We
| just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap writing
| technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not saying the
| current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the only way to
| think is to write.
|
| Socrates argued that writing would destroy people's memory. He
| wasn't 100% wrong, yet here we are. The criticism towards the use
| of LLMs is so deliciously ironic. The analogy with writing...
| writes itself. Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think
| differently.
| Isamu wrote:
| You seem to be responding to the reverse, "thinking is
| writing", which I agree is not true, you can think without
| writing.
|
| They are making the point that writing is more than dumping a
| completed thought. The act of doing that helps you to critique
| your dumped thoughts, to have more thoughts about your
| thoughts, to simplify them or expand them.
|
| It's easier to go meta once you dump your state.
| carlesfe wrote:
| I think you are right and I understood it the other way
| around
|
| Kind of ironic, though - I wrote, but my thinking process
| wasn't so great :)
|
| Thanks for the correction!
| wrp wrote:
| > writers...developed full books in their mind first
|
| When reading long, closely reasoned passages of medieval
| philosophy, I've wondered about their development process, when
| there was no such thing as scratch paper.
|
| > Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think differently.
|
| People are just glibly saying this sort of thing, but what
| specifically is coming? I'm now wrestling with the problem of
| dealing with university students who don't hesitate to lean on
| LLMs. I'm trying to not be dismissive, but it feels like they
| are just thinking less, not differently.
| malloryerik wrote:
| Yeah, LLMs are entirely different from "writing" because
| they're creative agents. So, writing allows me to give my
| thoughts several passes, to edit over time. It's like I can
| have several of me to think, write and edit, spaced over time.
|
| LLMs are like I have _someone else_ to do some or all of the
| thinking and writing and editing. So I do less thinking.
|
| A bicycle lets my own energy go father. Writing. A car lets me
| use an entirely different energy source. LLMs. Which one is
| better for my physical fitness?
|
| Btw the idea about Tolstoy and others keeping those massive
| books in their head and cranking them out over a month is
| fascinating. Any evidence or others who imagine the same? In
| Tolstoy's case, he was a count and surely had the funds, no?
| carlesfe wrote:
| I've read Tolstoy's diaries and he mentions the thought
| process he uses to write small novels. First he thinks about
| what should happen, then he writes (or dictates) the text.
| Thinking takes a few weeks, sometimes a month, then writing
| is pretty quick. There is some editing, but nothing like we
| do nowadays.
|
| Bigger novels such as war and peace were written
| episodically.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > We learned to think by writing only after writing became
| cheap. Yes, we've trained our brains to develop ideas by
| editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the
| possible methods.
|
| I think you have some misconceptions here. First, the article
| does not claim that thinking is writing, and especially not
| that there is no thinking without writing. They only explain
| that writing is supporting and driving a higher quality of
| thinking.
|
| Second, paper isn't the only medium to write. And writing isn't
| the only persistent form of communication to support and
| improve thinking.
|
| > Thinking used to be detached from writing.
|
| It still is.
| tl wrote:
| As a similar but distinct theory, you might find Larry
| McEnerney's work interesting. Writing has two classes: a
| writing for thought and a writing for communication. Larry uses
| horizontal and vertical spatial metaphors here. Writing for
| thought still pre-dates cheap paper (and Socrates), but is
| mostly a private act. Writing for communication is a broad
| enough brush to span fiction and journalism. For his part,
| Larry teaches classes aimed at thesis writers who struggle to
| bridge the divide of using writing to think about a problem to
| conveying their answer in a paper.
| allturtles wrote:
| Before paper became cheap, wax or wooden tablets were used for
| ephemeral writing.
|
| > I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century
| books and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as
| Tolstoi, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their
| mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days.
|
| I seriously doubt that it was ever common for writers to
| compose a whole book in their head and then write it down.
| Maybe some writers with exceptional memories did this. But
| there's a whole book about how War and Peace was written based
| on textual evidence that wouldn't exist if it had simply popped
| out of Tolstoy's head fully formed:
| https://www.amazon.com/Tolstoy-Genesis-Peace-Kathryn-
| Feuer/d....
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Holding long epic poems in your memory alone was once a
| celebrated skill.
| allturtles wrote:
| AFAIK the dominant theory is that they weren't memorized as
| a whole text, but composed on the fly with the help of a
| memorized set of stock formulas. [0]
|
| [0]: https://poets.org/glossary/oral-formulaic-method
| AceyMan wrote:
| So, basically the ancient precursor to the skills of a
| good rapper.
| carlesfe wrote:
| Not war and peace, which was episodic, but smaller novels
| were thought out in Tolstoy's mind before being written
| wholly. He mentions this in his diaries. Zweig mentions the
| same, too, but of course his novels are generally much
| shorter than the two Tolstoy's masterpieces.
| ysofunny wrote:
| > Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We
| just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap
| writing technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not
| saying the current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the
| only way to think is to write.
|
| I have a better way to frame this:
|
| Learning your own language and culture is a lifelong process.
|
| A big phase, the adult phase, of learning is learning to write
| in your language (I'm implying there's more to writing than
| chosing words; specially in this context of language as
| thinking)
|
| indeed, a lot of modern people never make it out of this big
| phase of learning your language. they never go beyond writing =
| thinking. but some people do learn the next phase
|
| which involves distinguishing language itself from thoughts and
| ideas (is some idea known? understood? perceived?? but the idea
| is "the self" or some other complex notion)
|
| so the only quality of the modern era I admit, is that there's
| a lot of people that only learn rudimentary thinking-writting,
| and too few people that learn 'advanced' languange-thinking
| where writing becomes secondary to thinking.
|
| finally, I learned this idea from reading around the
| meaningness blog/book
| keiferski wrote:
| I'm not sure if writers developed the _entire_ book in their
| head first, but: it was indeed very, very common for people to
| dictate novels, journal entries, and other "written" works to
| a secretary, typist, or tape recorder.
|
| Nowadays that seems to be rare, but my impression from reading
| my journals is that it was often _more_ common to dictate than
| to physically hand write things.
| carlesfe wrote:
| Novels were dictated, that is absolutely correct, but on top
| of it, the whole plot was developed with a high level of
| detail before dictation started. There was some editing, of
| course, but nothing like we do today, where writing books is
| basically an iterative process. We lean on the written word
| too much for our thinking (not being critical, just that's
| how we are taught)
| cubefox wrote:
| That's true, but I would phrase it from a different
| perspective:
|
| It's seems clear that _abstract_ thinking in particular is
| greatly _aided by_ writing, because the written text acts like
| a thought cache. A bit like an LLM context window which you can
| fill with lots of compact, compressed "tokens" (words).
|
| Abstract thoughts are "abstract" because they can't be
| visualized in our mind, so they don't benefit from our
| intuitive imagination ability (Kant's "Anschauung"). So it is
| hard to juggle many abstract thoughts in our working memory.
|
| We can also think of the working memory as the CPU registers,
| which are limited to a very small number, while the content of
| the CPU cache or RAM corresponds to the stuff we write down.
|
| Our "anschauung" (visual imagination) is perhaps something like
| a fixed function hardware on a GPU, which is very good at
| processing complex audiovisual content, i.e. concrete thoughts,
| but useless for anything else (abstract thoughts).
| infogulch wrote:
| Even _speaking_ is thinking. This is why free speech is the very
| First Amendment. Whoever denies your right to speak freely _is
| controlling your thinking_.
|
| Writing is thinking with a superpower. It's like using the
| "Pensive" from Harry Potter, depicted in the scene where Harry
| and Dumbledore pull memory whisps out of their temple to rewatch
| in a mirror pool. Writing enables you to apply your attention to
| an idea at multiple levels of analysis with significantly less
| effort than doing the same while also preserving the idea in your
| head manually.
| Tsarp wrote:
| https://voicebraindump.com
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Even speaking is thinking. This is why free speech is the
| very First Amendment. Whoever denies your right to speak freely
| is controlling your thinking.
|
| There's an excellent podcast (Radiolab, possibly) about how
| this conception of what the first amendment means is rather
| recent (1910s-1920s) and that the ideas of what "free speech"
| meant before that are really radically different.
| jll29 wrote:
| To add: Reading is also thinking (ideally).
|
| And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate
| it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during
| students' formative time, they need to learn how to think in
| reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc.
|
| Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you have a
| solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but
| first one ought to learn how to calculate mentally and using pen
| and paper. If for no other reason, to check whether we made a
| typo when entering our calculation, e.g. when the result is off
| by 100 because we did not press the decimal point firmly enough.
|
| I am very concerned that young people delegate to LLMs before
| reaching that stage.
| ysofunny wrote:
| it's like those kids will live in the future, where there's
| advanced AI
|
| I think we should trust children enought that they'll also
| figure out a crazy changing technological world.
|
| on the other hand, internet millenial ideals are fast dying.
| the digital dream of cultural and mediatic abundance is turning
| into a nightmare of redundant content as information wars
| saturate the figurative airwaves
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Of course I trust my kids to make the most of the environment
| they are given, and given that their environment will differ
| from the one I am adapted for, they will likely surpass me in
| being well adapted to the environment of the future; it's
| still my responsibility to prepare them as best as I can for
| it.
|
| You might put a baby in a pool so it can learn to swim, but
| you make sure their environment is such that drowning is an
| impossibility. A child destined to be an Olympian swimmer
| still requires guidance, even if their natural ability and
| inclinations outpace both their peers and their elders.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Yeah, I think there are environmental things for which our
| culture cannot prepare us, yet I also think many of our
| inherited behaviors and beliefs will help us because the
| environment may not change that much.
| randcraw wrote:
| Nicolas Carr addresses this issue directly in his book "The
| Shallows" in which he brilliantly recounted how media has
| reshaped how humans think and communicate, especially how the
| word streams of other people increasingly reshaped our
| collective focus and our ability to focus, which alas, has
| NOT freed us to think more deeply.
|
| Humans always have and always will use tech as a crutch -- to
| reduce time and effort (and energy expended). The 'physical
| enshittification' (PE) that has ensued from using mechanical
| crutches has made us lazy, fat, and sick. And now _mental_
| crutches have arrived, which promise to replace our very
| thought processes, freeing us from all the annoying cognitive
| heavy lifting once done by our brains.
|
| IMO, there's every reason to believe that the next step in
| human evolution will be driven by the continued misuse of
| tech as crutches, likely leading to widespread _mental_
| enshittification (ME) -- doing to our minds what misuse of
| tech has already done to our culture and to our bodies.
|
| Perhaps mankind can avoid this fate. But only if we insist on
| _thinking_ for ourselves.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Trusting kids to figure out the unfiltered Internet led to a
| massive mental health crisis.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| I really think the effects of LLMs on thinking is the exact
| same as a calculator. It shortcuts some forms of thinking to
| open up other forms of thinking.
|
| My thinking has increased with the use of LLMs, not decreased,
| most likely because LLMs take the edge off of grind work like
| reading a lot of noise to capture the 1% signal, formulating
| accurate statements for abstract ideas, and bringing together
| various domains that are beyond your area of expertise.
|
| Now will you make mistakes? Sure, but you would have made the
| same mistakes at a slower pace without LLMs anyways. Or more
| accurately, you just wouldn't do the research or apply domains
| not in your area of expertise, and your thinking would be a lot
| more narrow.
|
| The strawman is thinking that banning LLMs will induce rigorous
| thinking. Just like banning calculators does not make everyone
| good at math.
|
| But allowing calculators WILL make those who like math reach
| much deeper into the field than without.
| nicolapede wrote:
| >> But allowing calculators WILL make those who like math
| reach much deeper into the field than without.
|
| Have you ever run into any mathematician that praised the
| calculator for his/her career? I'd be really curious to read
| about that.
| tartoran wrote:
| Calculators are taken for granted but many mathematicians
| use computers extesively in their careers.
| wenc wrote:
| Pure math people probably don't reach for calculators. But
| engineers do all the time. Back of the envelope
| guesstimating is bread and butter.
|
| The modern equivalent of a calculator is Excel.
| bombela wrote:
| Google search has worsened so badly. That right know it's
| impossible to resist using one of those free for a taste LLM
| service.
|
| And the feeling is similar to how using Google on the
| 2004-2014 web was.
|
| It used to be Google would return a huge list or relevant
| links. Loading all of them was quick. Skimming the content
| was quick.
|
| Now every search is a massive ad. Every site is slow to load
| full of ads and useless slop. Slop which was written manually
| at first, then accelerated with Markov chains, now at light
| speed with LLMs.
|
| So an LLM is required to filter through the LLM slop to find
| the tiny bit of real content.
| JyB wrote:
| There is something much deeper going on when you force yourself
| to actually write things down. This is especially relevant in
| engineering. That is why "RFCs" are so prevalent in many tech
| companies. They are often just as useful to the writer as they
| are to the reviewers.
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| Compare it with the invention of writing:
|
| > To [Thamus] came Thoth and showed his inventions, desiring
| that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit
| of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their
| several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as
| he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time
| to repeat all that Thamus said to Thoth in praise or blame of
| the various arts. But when they came to letters, this, said
| Thoth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better
| memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.
| Thamus replied: O most ingenious Thoth, the parent or inventor
| of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or
| inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in
| this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a
| paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute
| to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of
| yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because
| they will not use their memories; they will trust to the
| external written characters and not remember of themselves.
|
| -- Plato, _Phaedrus_
|
| We've been having this same conversation for over 2,000 years
| now. And while I actually think Thamus is probably _correct_ ,
| it doesn't change the reality that we are now using reading and
| writing for everything.
| fladrif wrote:
| I think this exposes a pattern, but not necessarily on the
| subject or antithetical to OP's point. I interpret the above
| passage to implicate that we lose abilities as we adopt tools
| that can do it for us, but writing specifically stunts our
| ability to memorize facts. I would argue that this enabled us
| to spend less mental energy on memorization but on processing
| information instead, able to do more complex calculations.
| This doesn't negate OP's point that by using LLM's we give up
| another kind of ability to a tool, in the case reasoning.
|
| Now whether or not this will in the abstract become leverage
| for another type of skill or multiplier is to be seen.
| pklausler wrote:
| Or, from the perspective of memetics, writing has always been
| using _us_ for everything.
| _m_p wrote:
| Sounds profoundly anti-humanist.
| pklausler wrote:
| What you mean by "humanist" does not seem to be what
| philosophers mean by it.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Skullface sends his regards. I kneel Hideo Kojima.
| scroot wrote:
| I recommend Havelock's Preface to Plato and Walter Ong's
| Orality and Literacy
| tehnub wrote:
| IMO it's not the recording of ideas that is thinking, but
| rather the act of putting thoughts into language. To me there
| isn't a big cognitive difference between conversing about a
| topic (during which you put thoughts into words) and writing
| about it.
|
| When you speak or write instead of just think, you create
| something that did not previously exist: new words and
| sentences. When you write instead of speak, you aren't
| exactly creating something new -- you're often just recording
| words that just as well could have been spoken. Using an LLM
| is much closer to the first case. It's creating something
| that didn't previously exist (an expanded thesis on a brief
| thought provided by you), and therefore seems to possibly
| risk the user's ability to think atrophying.
| mont_tag wrote:
| > IMO it's not the recording of ideas that is thinking, but
| rather the act of putting thoughts into language.
|
| I agree with you but that article itself says, "for
| example, handwriting can lead to widespread brain
| connectivity."
| gilbetron wrote:
| Reading is thinking someone else's thoughts.
|
| Writing is thinking your own thoughts.
|
| There's a big difference, and is why writing is so painful for
| so many people. It's also why writing is critically important.
|
| edit: Likewise teaching is really important. Crystallization of
| thought is incredible valuable and difficult.
| riantogo wrote:
| Reading is thinking someone else's thoughts => That is true
| if you are strictly reading passively. Typically what happens
| is that reading opens many doors that leads to your own
| thinking. Of course depends on the type of material you are
| reading as well. But often reading broadens your thinking
| relative to just putting your own on paper.
| biomcgary wrote:
| I think the best way to actively read is to write down your
| own thoughts as commentary.
| seydor wrote:
| No , reading is filling up your mind's LLM with the context
| given by someone else. Your thinking is what happens after
| reading.
| pfoof wrote:
| I would also compare reading to being reprogrammed like EEPROM.
| Although the process is slower, the changes feel more permanent
| when learning: you need to create connections yourself from
| examples compared to someone demonstrating it on the video.
| pryelluw wrote:
| Writing what someone else wrote is thinking what someone else
| thought. My favorite learning technique is reading, listening or
| viewing something and then typing it into libreoffice. Specially
| useful when it is something that is transcribed. Works really
| well for code, too. Give it a try!
| markhahn wrote:
| We think by association. We can sometimes tighten up the process
| when there's a formal logical framework that applies, but it's
| not as natural or automatic.
|
| What writing changes is that in words, you have to make it
| explicit how one thing leads to another. Partly, that's just due
| to the imposition of sentence structure.
|
| Ironically, this is precisely the crazy thing about Trumpspeech:
| it's just associations - vibe-chaining if you will.
| fehu22 wrote:
| writing is logical original
| empath75 wrote:
| It is interesting to hold in one's head the following two
| beliefs:
|
| Writing requires thought.
|
| LLMs do not think.
| zahlman wrote:
| "Writing is thinking" does not entail "writing requires
| thought".
|
| Which has a lot to do with how people intuit when text is LLM-
| generated.
| Ezhik wrote:
| With the latest technology we can fix that. Page full, head
| empty.
| cubefox wrote:
| This is an important point:
|
| > For example, LLMs can aid in improving readability and grammar,
| which might be particularly useful to those for which English is
| not their first language.
|
| I don't know whether this has been empirically confirmed, but I
| have the strong belief that a manuscript with poor grammar, by a
| non-native English speaker, has a much higher probability of
| being rejected than the same manuscript but copyedited by
| something like Grammerly or a SOTA LLM.
|
| Ideally writing style should matter much less than the quality of
| the research, but reviewers are not just influenced by objective
| criteria but, unconsciously, also by vibes, which includes things
| like writing style and even formatting.
| zahlman wrote:
| Meanwhile, more and more posts on discussion forums etc. is
| clearly "copyedited" by these tools and the result is quite
| grating for the regulars.
| cubefox wrote:
| Probably less grating though than broken English.
| (Copyediting is also different from pure LLM replies which
| don't involve editing anything.)
| precompute wrote:
| Broken English still has its charm and brings the structure
| of the writer's native language to the fore, which makes it
| relatively easier to parse and glean intentions from than
| polished LLM-speak.
| cubefox wrote:
| That might be true, but I think it's false. Or more
| precisely, I think manuscripts with broken English have
| statistically a higher probability of being rejected than
| ones that are copyedited with AI.
| motohagiography wrote:
| the act of writing takes raw experience, puts it in front of the
| eyes, and then filters it back through your critical faculties so
| you can refine and reason about it. the iteration makes it higher
| quality thought.
|
| making writing valuable is another skill (see this evergreen
| lecture from the university of chicago leadership lab:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFwVf5a3pZM)
|
| however when I encounter people with low written or verbal
| acuity, they have to survive somehow, so it's wise to observe
| what tools of cunning they tend to reach for.
| poindontcare wrote:
| They are delusional if they think that the only use of LLM for
| scientific research is to correct grammar.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| We may enter a vicious loop where writing is increasingly
| generated by LLMs. Then, LLMs have to train on their own output
| leading to model collapse.
|
| Hence, the models depend on human writing.
| abound wrote:
| This intuitively makes sense (like deep-frying a JPEG), but it
| doesn't seem to happen in practice, as modern models are
| frequently trained on text both output from other models, and
| curated from other models.
|
| Realistically, going forward model training will just need to
| incorporate a step to remove data below some quality threshold,
| LLM-generated or otherwise.
| zahlman wrote:
| Related (from a few days ago)?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641669
| azangru wrote:
| > Current LLMs might also be wrong
|
| Current humans might as well :-)
| alliancedamages wrote:
| While the article's point seems intuitively true, it cites only
| two papers related to the benefits of _handwriting_. But it's
| argument is stronger than that. Is there peer-reviewed evidence
| to support the stronger claim of the benefits of typewriting?
| iambateman wrote:
| Using an LLM is also thinking, when used as such.
|
| This morning I asked ChatGPT a question about how Quickbooks
| handles charts of accounts compared to NetSuite. It answered my
| question better than anything else would have.
|
| Also, I'm currently using Claude Code to fix some bugs -- it's
| handling the heavy lifting while I think about what needs to
| happen.
|
| I'm in favor of human writing as an underrated tool of culture-
| making...but the scope of what counts as "thinking" is expanding.
| nicholast wrote:
| The best way to learn a subject is to teach it.
| pcrh wrote:
| I am quite puzzled how an LLM could even start "write" a
| scientific paper.
|
| Say you start with a set of findings, for example, western blots,
| data from a transgenic mouse engineered for the relevant gene,
| and some single cell sequencing data. Your manuscript describes
| the identification of a novel protein, editing the gene in a
| mouse and showing what pathways are affected in the mouse.
|
| What material would you give the LLM? How would the LLM "know"
| which of these novel findings were in any way meaningful? As far
| as I'm aware, it is unlikely that the LLM would be able to do
| anything other that paraphrase what you instruct it to write. It
| would be a return to the days before word processing became
| common, and researchers would either dictate their manuscripts to
| a typist, or hand the typist a stack of hand-written paper.
|
| The actually hard part of writing scientific papers is not
| putting the words "down on paper" so to speak, but deciding what
| to say.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| > How would the LLM "know" which of these novel findings were
| in any way meaningful
|
| Given that they are trained on all of arXiv, ..., it's much
| more likely they are aware of all public relevant papers than
| your average researcher.
| pcrh wrote:
| A researcher on any particular topic is not supposed to be an
| "average" researcher, but already deeply familiar with their
| subject.
| dboreham wrote:
| The LLM can make a plan or outline first, which is also
| writing.
| pcrh wrote:
| Any researcher already has this in their head long before any
| writing takes place.
| polairscience wrote:
| I must be a bad researcher then because every paper I've
| written starts as a very vague "here are the overarching
| implications and important results". But the detailed order
| of results and the nuts and bolts of how to argue out the
| conclusions gets decided in drafting. Only the simplest of
| results I've had is essentially pre-written.
| pcrh wrote:
| >"here are the overarching implications and important
| results".
|
| That's the outline.
|
| I doubt an LLM would help much in deciding how best to
| present the finer details, as they will be very specific
| to your particular manuscript.
| nijuashi wrote:
| When we go to grad school, we're taught how to write a research
| paper. Each field has a more or less standard format, where
| different types of data go in specific sections. So if an LLM
| is trained on enough papers in that field, it can learn to plug
| in the information you provide according to those conventions.
|
| In that sense, you'd give the LLM the purpose of the paper, the
| field you're writing in, and the relevant data from your lab
| notebook. Personally, I never enjoyed writing manuscripts --
| most of the time goes into citing every claim and formatting
| everything correctly, which often feels more like clerical work
| than communicating discovery.
|
| I don't mind if LLMs help write these papers. I don't think
| learning to mimic this stylistic form necessarily adds to the
| process of discovery. Scientists should absolutely be rigorous
| and clear, but I'd welcome offloading the unnecessary tedium of
| stylized writing to automation.
| pcrh wrote:
| I am experienced in writing scientific papers, so I know what
| it takes.
|
| I remain to be convinced that the tasks you propose an LLM
| could do contribute any more to the process of writing a
| paper than dictating to a typist could do in the 1950's. It's
| impressive for a machine, but not particularly productivity-
| boosting. Tedious tasks such as correctly formatting
| references belong to the copy-editing stage (i.e. very last
| stage of writing a paper), where indeed I have seen journals
| adopt "AI" approaches. But these processes are not a
| bottleneck in the scientist's workflow.
|
| I certainly don't think the performance of LLMs that I'm
| familiar with would be any use at all in compiling the
| original data into scientifically accurate figures and text,
| and providing meaningful interpretations. Most likely they
| would simply throw out random "hallucinations" in
| grammatically correct prose.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Writing needs a conceptual split analogous to the split between
| math and calculating.
|
| Just as a calculating can be implemented on a computer which has
| low cognitive abilities but high algorithmic and procedural
| abilities, we need to extract out the word-smithing capabilities
| from writing separate from the thinking portion. Our lack of
| distinction in terms reflects a muddled conceptual framework.
|
| LLMs are excellent wordsmiths completely divorced from the
| concept of thinking. They break the correlative assumption - that
| excellent writing is corresponds with excellent thinking. Until
| now, we've been able to discern poor idea because they have a
| certain aesthetic, think conspiracy rants in docx saying
| something about a theory of everything based on vibrations. But
| that no longer holds. We have decent enough word-smithing coupled
| with a deficit of thinking. Unfortunately this breaks our
| heuristics with consequences ranging from polluting our online
| commons to folks end up believing nonsense like ChatGPT named
| itself Nova and they are a torchbearer for spiritual
| gobbledygook.
|
| My point is that we're in the process of untangling these two and
| as a result, we're likely to see confusion and maybe even
| persistent misunderstanding until this distinction becomes a more
| common part of how we talk about and evaluate written work.
| They're living in an AGI-world and we're just..not.
| zkmon wrote:
| Whenever I need to do some hard thinking and things are not
| clear, I fire up my sublime text and write down the context in
| the simplest terms and short lines (only few words per line).
| While doing this, I will be absolutely rude to myself asking
| extremely basic and direct questions to bring out the real
| context, real goals and real path. It's like answering an under-
| world boss. No bullshit, no pretense, no regard to any norms, no
| impressing someone. Then the whole thing falls into a meaningful
| structure. I leave it when it produces some immediate action
| items.
| omot wrote:
| I wonder how much of this applies to coding. Is coding thinking?
| danieljacksonno wrote:
| It seems obvious to me. Just like drawing and sketching helps
| thinking about design, coding helps thinking about programming.
|
| It's one of the reasons for the "one to throw away"-idea of
| writing shitty code first just to get it to work, and then
| remake it after you have thought through the problem by coding
| it.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| To quote Paul Graham: "Writing is thinking. To write well you
| have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard. In fact
| there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You
| can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport did: If you're
| thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking. So a
| world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than
| it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots."
|
| https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html
| MichaelRo wrote:
| To write something you must form a "theory of the system", which
| is orders of magnitude more difficult than feeding on fodder.
| It's the difference between being fluent in a language and sort
| of understanding something.
|
| It's quite similar in hard sciences as it's in natural languages.
| For instance I don't understand Hungarian at all. Few words
| "igen", "jo napot kivanok" doesn't a knowledge of the language
| form.
|
| Then German. I had to learn it in school so I have orders of
| magnitude better grasp at it because I can actually say a few
| statements that form in my mind: "Nein, ich brauch nicht ein
| anderes stuck Steak". Might not be 100% correct gramatically and
| vocabulary wise but it conveys the message and also transmits
| that I understand the context.
|
| And then come English which I speak since 33 years. I actually
| THINK in English a lot of times and there are concepts I can't
| easily express in my native Romanian language without resorting
| to a painfully long and sometimes unsuccessful software-driven
| (as opposed to FPGA-encoded) translation process.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| My experience with writing is that it's often a matter of simply
| noting down what comes pouring from my subconscious, with the
| most taxing task being keeping ahold of some given connection,
| sentiment, or wording (as that subconscious seems to generate
| more than my working memory can keep track of).
|
| Sometimes I struggle to fit those sentiments and connections to
| wording that I imagine will make sense, to someone else or even
| to myself. I guess that would be the, "Writing is thinking,"
| part, but it seems more like, "Effective and coscientious
| (self-)communication is thinking."
| xiande04 wrote:
| I've been saying this for years.
| ghaff wrote:
| A former manager (and editor) used to say writing is discovery
| which is more or less the same thing. I agree.
| CrackerNews wrote:
| If this were to be an analogy to AI, would inference discover
| information that wasn't found during training? Is this where
| hallucinations come from?
| sroussey wrote:
| If writing is thinking, then perhaps we should think more about
| what language would produce the best thinking, and does it exist?
| How do we go about creating it?
|
| And if thinking is dependent on language, maybe we should create
| a new language for artificial intelligence rather than feeding it
| human languages.
| ndgold wrote:
| True. Writing by hand is even better.
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