Comment by vishnugupta

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/

> 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.