I noticed that the quality of email text has gone up around my work these days. everyone is sounding like a master of drafting emails. Ofcourse Ai has a role in it. But real cool thing about this is, this is pulling up people's thinking to have a structure, minimalism and sequencing of expression. Same as how textile industry has enabled people to have an style and expression in clothing.
I'd tend to agree with what you said, except this part. Mass produced clothing is fantastic for many reasons, but not for style and expression. Look at the traditional clothing from almost any part of the world and it was gorgeous and colorful. Now it's all just a t-shirts.
People had cultivated an art in how the rectangular cloths are wrapped around them and they clothes are secured at their waist, or around their head. Talk to a Sikh or Afghan about turban.
Was it?
There's a lot of survivorship bias in old things; we don't see the things which weren't recorded. Old things had their style, that much is unavoidable, but before mass production normal people inherited their clothes because it was just that hard to create.
Also, a lot of the pigments we take for granted today didn't exist at any price in the pre-industrial era, and some which did involved trekking to a mine in Afghanistan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine
This also means (in general, not specifically clothing) a lot of "traditional" things are post-industrial recreations or re-imaginings of the past.
She said she’d only choose the modern era because of the washing machine.
Day-to-day clothing is definitely not "all just tshirts" nowadays, even in the mainstream. Women fashion is very varied, and while men's fashion is a lot poorer there's still a huge spectrum of expressive clothing that's available. I don't think personal style and expression has ever been as available and encouraged as it is today.
So is mass-produced clothing. Go into any store, and you will see the same shit with very few variations. For actual personality you have to search for niche/hand-made/small-productions etc.
That’s a very good analogy!
Case in point, I reached about syllabus to my kid's teacher. Long story short, email ended with their boss, who sent me long winding non-answer that I had to resist to not knock down.
I dunno, generic executive summaries can be canned, but I would like to hope I pay them enough for an person to person exchange.
I’m not reading all that. I want one word answers.
Also noticed huge uptick in “call me” emails.
> this is pulling up people's thinking to have a structure, minimalism and sequencing of expression
I see the same for the former but the opposite on the latter. Everyone sounds like expert drafters because the AI is doing all of that.
True to the "use it or lose it" principle, the people's thinking skills about the emails have weakened. They rely on giving the AI some bits of info, a document they never read, some vague instructions, and the AI molds the message with structure and sequence. Then I get to experience live the joy of discussing with these people face to face and they still just spit out disparate bits of information with no fluid structure and sequence for the ideas because the only time they thought about the topic was when the AI wrote an email about it.
One man said, that enlightement (as in Zen) cannot be faked. Whoever had it, will be able to tell if someone else had it or not. There is no way to merely sound like it. Socratic method is like enlightement.
Very few teachers get to do this or are good enough, but it's just as much a question of relationships than anything else- how do you pose the exact right problem so that the learner can discover something for themselves.
I think about this, whenever I have questions which are related to morality and how people act.
I think this same phenomenon — faking competence, or good intentions — extends beyond spirituality as well.
> When the user is wrong, do not give the answer. Ask a narrower question that exposes the contradiction in their reasoning
For those new (beginners), install pi from pi.dev and then your favorite AI model (ask your model how to set up pi and it). Then ask your pi-based AI how to set up the tutor (just give it this link, it will set it up for you).
Then start pi by typing pi in the terminal; and to launch the tutor preface your question with: /skill:socratic-tutor. Like so:
/skill:socratic-tutor teach me Python.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning
Make your own custom skinner boxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
Not sure what to do about it because I don't care enough to learn everything about this topic in order to fix it.
Using LLMs this way was really refreshing, I could really feel how I started to think on my own again.
Especially nice when you are not so sure how something should look like, so it makes you stop and spend a few hours answering questions and thinking about what you want to do. Combine that with the RFC skill and you get a good basis for your feature and then a skill to split the RFC to issues on Linear.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_questioning [1]: https://github.com/search?q=socratic+tutor+skill&type=reposi...