[modriano]

This reminds me of a talk I attended many years ago given by the director of UChicago's writing program (and found a recording of the talk [0]), and his thesis was that writing IS the process of thinking. That talk changed the way I write and made writing a primary tool I reach for when I want to learn something new.

Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those ideas in the written word enables us to evaluate, edit, and compose those smaller ideas into bigger ideas. Kind of like how teachers would ask for an explanation in my own words, writing down my understanding of something I'd heard or read forced me to really evaluate the idea, focus on the parts I cared about, and record that understanding. Without the writing step, ideas would easily just float through my mind like a phantasm, shapeless and out of focus and useless when I had a tangible need for the idea.

I am glad I learned to write (both code and text) long before Claude came online. It would have been very hard to struggle through translating ideas from my head into words and words (back) into ideas in my head if I knew there was an "Easy button" I could hit to get something cogent-sounding. I hope a large enough proportion of kids today will still put in the work and won't just end up with a stunted ability to write/think.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

[observationist]

I'm not sure - being able to take something like a casual response to a post, and then changing it to iambic pentameter with the easy button could be a great way of learning how to do that off the cuff.

Though I’m unsure, this notion comes to mind:

to take a casual reply to a post

and turn it, with an easy button’s press,

to flawless iambic pentameter

might be the finest way to learn the art

of speaking thus extempore, off the cuff.

It's not perfect, but I envy the wealth of tools this generation has. They'll find uses for AI that leave us in awe.

[Planktonne]

It's worth emphasizing here that you haven't changed it to iambic pentameter with an easy button. Your A lines are, but the Bs butcher it.

[TheOtherHobbes]

You can do that interactively with LLMs. Instead of aiming for a finished product you ask a question, then refine your understanding with more questions.

"So if that is true then this next statement is also true..." and the LLM will either agree or disagree.

There are lines between writing as a persuasive medium, writing as a didactic medium for teaching, writing as a creative/poetic medium, writing as the process of creation of marketable products, writing as a shared summary of specialist niche knowledge, and writing as an aid to personal comprehension.

Those are fundamentally different activities, They happen to use the same medium and there are some overlapping areas. But they're essentially different activities with different requirements and different processes.

There's also the point that LLMs can give you explicit control over features like reading age, social register, metaphor frames/ themes/imagery, sentence structure, grammatical uniqueness, rhythmic variation, and other linguistic markers.

The generic templated slop styles - rule of three, it's not this it's that, bullet points, "that's rare", strained weird or cringey similes, and the other tics - that appear all over social media are the low-skill default for AI writing. It doesn't have to be that crude or obvious, and learning how to push it beyond that is a skill in itself.

As is creating knowledge engineering systems that use agents to manage knowledge in useful ways, with writing as one possible output.

[Planktonne]

> There's also the point that LLMs can give you explicit control over features like reading age, social register, metaphor frames/ themes/imagery, sentence structure, grammatical uniqueness, rhythmic variation, and other linguistic markers.

You already have this. Control over your writing is the default position.

[modriano]

> You can do that interactively with LLMs. Instead of aiming for a finished product you ask a question, then refine your understanding with more questions.

Yeah, I regularly spend a lot of time with Claude fleshing out ideas and scoping out features. I'm behind the times and just use the chat interface rather than Claude Code, so perhaps there are controls I'm not aware of, but there can't be any that make it correctly understand an under-specified idea, or even correctly understand an adequately specified idea.

For example, I've been playing around building a side-project that involves building out a safety-weighted graph to support generating safer bike routes. I was recently working on integrating traffic control devices (represented on OpenStreetMaps nodes) into the model where I calculate weights for my graph (I essentially join the penalty for the traffic control device onto the destination end of an edge) and Claude kept wanting to average that penalty by the length of the edge (as that makes sense for some other factors in my model like crashes, surface material, max speed, etc), but doesn't make sense for traffic control signals at intersections (as the length of an edge shouldn't change the risk a cyclist experiences going through an intersection). If I didn't have a well-developed ability to closely parse words to ideas, I could have very easily just taken the working model Claude generated and built more on top of it, setting up a dangerous situation where the routing algo would promote routes running a user through more intersections (which are the most dangerous place for cyclists).

I hope a comparable proportion of kids coming up today will spend the time and energy to understand the ideas behind the text and the code, but I really doubt 18-year old me would have had that wisdom. I would have been underspecifying what I wanted out of a lack of prerequisite knowledge, receiving slop, and either promptly getting lost in debugging hell or more likely the worse case of erroneously believing the slop satisfied the brief.

> There are lines between writing as a persuasive medium, writing as a didactic medium for teaching, writing as a creative/poetic medium, writing as the process of creation of marketable products, writing as a shared summary of specialist niche knowledge, and writing as an aid to personal comprehension. > Those are fundamentally different activities, They happen to use the same medium and there are some overlapping areas. But they're essentially different activities with different requirements and different processes.

In all of those areas, if you take away the human who can develop value-creating ideas into an accurate and high-fidelity written representation, you will just get slop. Developing ideas and representing them in words is the skill. There is no substitute.