Comment by jsrozner

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.

> 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/

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. 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.

> 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.

Prompting involves more than an insignificant amount of writing.

I found that I just really have to do the work, to develop the mental models, to articulate and to re-articulate and re-articulate again. For different audiences in different ways

Yes definitely!

I'd say that being able to turn an idea over in your head is how you know if you know it ... And even pre-LLM, it was easy to "appear to know" something, but not really know it.

PG wrote pretty much this last year:

in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.

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://paulgraham.com/writes.html

Probably because you learned it during that brief period in your development in which humans are most impressionable.

Now think about the effect on those humans currently using LLMs at that stage of their development.

The last fast food place you went to, what does the ceiling look like? The exact colour/pattern?

The last phone conversation you had with a utility company, how did they greet you exactly?

There's lots that we do remember, sometimes odd things like your example, though I'm sure you must have repeated it a few times as well. But there's so much detail that we don't remember at all, and even our childhood memories just become memories of memories - we remember some event, but we slowly forget the exact details, they become fuzzy.

I also think the claim that "the brain does not retain information it does not need" is an insufficient explanation, and short-sighted. As an example, reading books informs and shapes our thinking, and while people may not immediately recall a book that they read some time ago, I've had conversations where I remembered that I had read a particular passage (sentence, phrase, idea) and referred to it in the conversation.

People do stuff like that all the time, bringing up past memories in spontaneity. The brain absolutely does remember things it "doesn't need".

To nitpick, your subconscious is aware computers have memory constraints even now and you write better code because of it even if you do javascript...

Because these are core memories that provide stepping stones to later knowledge. It is a part of the story of you. It is very hard to integrate all knowledge in this way.

I think because some experiences are so profound to your brain ( first impression, moments that you are proud of ) that you just replay them over and over again.

Probably because there was some reward that you felt at the time was important (most likely playing a DOS game).

I did this for a living at a large corp where I was the 'thinkpad guy', and I barely remember any of the tricks (and only some of the IBM stuff). Then Windows NT and 95 came out and like whoo cares... This was always dogshit. Because I was always an Apple/Unix guy and that was just a job.

Agreed. We remember many things that don't serve us anymore.

memmaker - a cheat, but it is still in my quick-access memory.

Closer to the truth is that the brain never completely forgets something, in the sense that there are always vestiges left over, even after the ability to recall or instantly draw upon it is long gone. Studies show, for example, that after one has "forgotten" a language, they're quicker to pick up it again later on compared to someone without that prior experience; how quickly being time dependent, but more quickly nonetheless.

OTOH, IME the quickest way to truly forget something is to overwrite it. Photographs being a notorious example, where looking at photographs can overwrite your own personal episodic memory of an event. I don't know how much research exists exploring this phenomenon, though, but AFAIU there are studies at least showing that the mere act of recalling can reshape memories. So, ironically, perhaps the best way not to forget is to not remember.

Left unstated in the above is that we can categorize different types of memory--episodic, semantic, implicit, etc--based on how they seem to operate. Generalizations (like the above ;) can be misleading.

I think a better way to say it is that the brain doesn't commit to long term memory things that it doesn't need.

I remember hearing about some research they'd done on "binge watching" -- basically, if you have two groups:

1. One group watches the entire series over the course of a week

2. A second group watches a series one episode per week

Then some time later (maybe 6 months), ask them questions about the show, and the people in group 2 will remember significantly more.

Anecdotally, I've found the same thing with Scottish Country Dancing. In SCD, you typically walk through a dance that has 16 or so "figures", then for the next 10 minutes you need to remember the figures over and over again from different perspectives (as 1st couple, 2nd couple, 3rd couple etc). Fairly quickly, my brain realized that it only needed to remember the figures for 10 minutes; and even the next morning if you'd asked me what the figures were for a dance the night before I couldn't have told you.

I can totally believe it's the same thing with writing with an LLM (or having an assistant write a speech / report for you) -- if you're just skimming over things to make sure it looks right, your brain quickly figures out that it doesn't need to retain this information.

Contrast this to riding a bike, where you almost certainly used the skill repeatedly over the course of at least a year.

> Sounds very plausible, though how does that square with the common experience that certain skills, famously 'riding a bike', never go away once learned?

I worked with some researchers who specifically examined this when developing training content for soldiers. They found that 'muscle memory' skills such as riding a bike could persist for a very long time. At the other end of the spectrum were tasks that involved performing lots of technical steps in a particular order, but where the tasks themselves were only performed infrequently. The classic example was fault finding and diagnosis on military equipment. The researchers were in effect quantifying the 'forgetting curve' for specific tasks. For some key tasks, you could overtrain to improve the competence retention, but it was often easier to accept that training would wear off very quickly and give people a checklist instead.

Such a good question - I hope someone answers with more than an anecdote (which is all I can provide) - I've found the skills that don't leave you like riding a bike, swimming, cooking are all physical skills. Tangible.

The skills that leave: arguments, analysis, language, creativity often seem abstract and primarily if not exclusively sourced in our minds

Riding a bike is a skill rather than what we would call a “memory” per se. It’s a skill that develops a new neural pathway throughout your extended nervous system bringing together the lesser senses of proprioception and balance. Once you bring these things together you then go on to use them for other things. You “know” (grok), rather than “understand” how a bike stays upright on a very deep physical level.

I am not an expert in the subject but I believe that motor neurons retain memory, even those not located inside the brain. They may be subject to different constraints than other neurons.