But the real issue is people that are not already engaged and knowledgeable about what one another are doing, the key moment when a non-tech needs to discuss a tech need with someone from the tech developer sphere: can they even communicate, and I'm not talking through a salesperson, but actually discuss what one needs and what one provides without resorting to empty jargon? Real communications needs no jargon and does not use jargon, it modifies itself to be understood by the audience, using the audience's terms.
This is critical in the coming decades: learn to communicate, professionally communicate, and I'm not talking about being a media talking head, I'm talking about learning how to speak to anyone anywhere from any stature. It's a critical skill and it is damn well needed now as well as tenfold in our fast approaching future.
I am for example very good at math and reasoning etc. But when I write something I tend to construct long complicated sentences (probably because I think that way^^) and the result whould often be considered badly written.
Now of course you can feel superiour, for your better writing style. If it makes you happy ;)
All of those are related to language, because our thinking (and also math and logic) is based on language.
But just because we think in language, does not imply that writing is the only form of reasoning. It is ok when it is your preference and certainly has a value - like other thinks.
The biggest obstacle to my job is when I need to convince other people of a course of action. People do not do what I ask of them, because people need a nice narrative. Indeed the reaction of others to my writing is so negative I can get into disciplinary proceedings just for writing facts. Yet, when the shit hits the fan, and people need a leader and a plan, suddenly people do what I ask and are successful, presumably looking past my communication issues because of the imminent and larger threat.
I am Autistic. I look forward to the day when my email and slack client, my JIRA client, automatically take my statements of fact and turn them into something neurotypical people won’t have a social signaling reaction to and respond to as a threat.
Also, thinking can also be doing.
And while I’m here, there’s plenty of people who can write and not think. And more who cannot think critically. Electrolytes: it’s got what plants crave.
Writing and clear thinking are are related in at least two ways:
1. Both good writing and good thinking require structured thought, which is the ability to organize and categorize ideas in relation to eachother.
2. Both good writing and good thinking require meeting other minds: expressing your ideas in such a way that they are also comprehensible to someone who doesn't share our own brain. This is important because it's entirely possible to _think_ you have a good thought without actually having a good thought. The ability to articulate a thought is an effective discriminator between the two scenarios.
It's probably possible to think clearly without writing, if these two elements are still present. But writing well is an effective forcing function, which is why they're so closely related.
The "people are mostly fine" is true. People were mostly fine at the time when only the elites could write, but the society will not be the same. We are moving towards those old times.
Maybe you deal with intellectual elite from the best schools and haven't noticed[1], but adult literacy even among college educated has been on a downward trend for some time and we can see some results. Normal interactions in the corporate world are more difficult. People in middle-level management can't explain and articulate things as well as they used to. There is more communication, but it's not as efficient. One well-written report in every two weeks used to be enough. You need to be on a Zoom call 2-3 hours weekly for the same thing.
Mediocre or low quality writing is mentally taxing to read. If what you read is grammatically correct AI-slob it really kills all interest in reading and communicating in writing.
[1] Only about 10% of adults have PIAAC adult literacy level 4 or 5.
With language however we are attempting to refer to some kind of underlying meaning or reality, and an LLM will not give you the understanding of the things being referred to - only the outward representations themselves. If you are indeed interested in meaningless exchange of symbols a la Searle's Chinese Room then perhaps there is some utility in this; otherwise it's the act of digesting and comprehending meaning, and the internal cognitive processes that go into the production of the written artifact that matter, not just the written artifact itself.
Writing is different. It is more akin to the left leg, when the right leg is your thinking. I am a weird combination of an author and a mathematician-turned-programmer, and both these skills are very useful in either activity; I wouldn't be able to program half as well if I didn't dump my messy ideas to a doc first, especially when the model is far from straightforward.
Writing things down is a huge feedback loop for thinking. Plenty of edge cases stick their head out of the doc once you write everything down.
I wonder if some people would argue that it _was_ disastrous though?
We seem to struggle with things like putting people on the moon and not making airplanes fail compared to 50 years ago.
Maybe there was some critical mass of mental maths skills that engineers had in the 60s that we've lost now? Are we still inventing things at the same rate as before?
Not that, say, doing long division in your head isn't a valuable skill, mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
As a person who frequently uses writing to focus my thoughts, I don’t see why one would see writing as the only way to focus their thoughts.
I'd disagree with "half" here because I can't imagine it being anywhere close to 50/50. I expect a power law distribution: most won't be able to write well. The ones who do will have a massive advantage, in the same way that those who can concentrate in our age of distractions have a significant advantage over those who can't.
We're already in a poverty of quality communicators. All that nonsense with Bitcoin was fast talking nonsense that sounded plausible. This is what happens when real communications breaks down: fraudulent technical products surrounded by a word salad of abused language and people afraid of looking stupid so they never ask for clarifications of the gobbledygook.
I recently published a [major philosophical work][1] that is the result of decades of thinking and three months of writing. I’m not a native English speaker, and although I know what I want to say, I often don’t know how to write it. I may not know or can’t find the right terms or phrasing, or I might make grammar mistakes. Sometimes, I can describe my ideas in a clumsy way, and I need help refining my sentences.
So, I use AI. I think, write my thoughts in my own way, and then work with AI to bring them closer to what I want. It’s hard work. Although AI can be an amazingly good writing partner, it often alters my text in ways that change the meaning completely. Even replacing a single word word with a synonym or adding a comma can turn a sentence into something totally unintended. It can be a lot of back-and-forth work to find the right paragraphs. Still, AI is a tremendous help, and my work would have been more immature and unpolished without it, even if it sometimes feels a little artificial.
Of course, it’s much more ideal to master English fully and to practice writing until it feels natural. But AI helps with that, too.
the infrastructure of the internet has matured enough now that we don't have to talk to each other in ASCII characters any longer. being online increasingly will mean using your voice and face (or suitable synthetic alternatives) to talk to the rest of humanity. not like TikTok though with its algorithmically driven mental corruption. and not like YouTube with its copyright oriented business model. More like early days twitter. Just everyday people talking to each other. But video. And realtime.
Does video add not a dimension of friction over sending text? For one, you can't scan a video the same way you can scan text.