The value didn't come from what was said at that moment. It came from what had been built across many such moments: a pattern of mutual recognition, a shared context, a baseline of trust that made the later exchange possible. The relationship was the infrastructure. The conversation was where it had been built, one cup of coffee at a time.

And that made me immediately question the worth of the entire piece. I get it, LLMS can rewrite an entire blog post in a minute, which can be quite tempting for people that don't enjoy writing itself, but it just takes so much variety away. I think people should stick to grammatical corrections only, and not rephrase entire paragraphs (never mind letting an LLM write everything in the first place).

The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure.

It's not unlike what people like PG say about writing improving thinking...it's the being forced to go from fuzzy directional notions to something you can put on paper in that will stand up to critique.

Same with rubber duck debugging. The verbal part means you need to articulate it clearly but it's not the speaking that helps. Same with writing a detailed spec/prompt for an LLM - I know if its too fuzzy ("set an appropriate timeout") the LLM will spin it's wheels so it forces clarity.

Also suspect that a big part of who we consider intelligent is linked to this. Maybe their internal monologue is just more crisp - closer to what they'd tell a rubber duck.

Trying to train an LLM on two 1080ti's on the StackOverflow corpus in my living room was a vibe though. Good times.

Programming is serializing ideas into the computer language. Communicating them with someone else first serializes them into human language, which is already much less abstract compared to the thought cloud in your head.

In the case of an effective pair programming collaboration, you also get to debate approaches, discuss details, alternate between coding and watching.

It also helps that the presence of someone else helps avoid many common distractions. Reading non-urgent private messages and checking out HN (I'm no longer so addicted to any other platform to check it out at work).

I have my younger kid explain each math problem to me before she submits it on Khan Academy. My older kid thinks in her head how she would explain a problem before turning in a test. It's a good habit to form.

Somewhere in that process it would lead to a solution that I would bring to work the next day!

Half the time on the walk over, trying to frame the question in my mind I’d figure out the answer or at least next step. It got to the point where Dan would see me heading towards him and suddenly turn around and he’d as “Figure it out?” And I’d throw him a thumbs up on the way back to my desk.

Thinking silently fits Asian Americans better than Euro Americans*.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-murder-and-the-m...

Pierces Firstness is exactly what drives this.

The move from thinking to semantic conversion is important for investigation/introspection.

Arguing with yourself also seems to engage your brains "theory of mind" centers, so different pathways get activated to examine the problem space.

The problem with Ai is the fact that it hallucinates and if you're doing anything truly novel in an integration or framing sense it bottoms out very quickly and can't engage. A human operator can decompose the problem and get accuracy checks for known areas in the training data of course.

Now to be I'm not saying Ai can't produce novel work on the edge but in my experience it is antagonistic towards those goals.

Case in point, CRDTs, many don't use tombstones but they are the minority, and if you try iterate a new CRDT off of one that doesn't use tombstones, let's say diamond-types, it will keep pulling you back to tombstones.

The problem is that the number of humans who understand dynamic investigation and the push pull of exploring an idea you don't hold with someone has always been very small, and now with reflexive internet argument culture driving how we view "debate" and "discussion".

I don't know if we've reduced the leisure to think or what but things are not great for finding speculative thinking partners.

And not necessarily just based on their feedback, but just hearing the words come out of my mount and predicting their reactions would have helped a ton.

is a classic german text from 1805 on this subject that I have always valued deeply

https://franxfiction.com/on-the-gradual-fabrication-of-thoug...

1. Talking or writing requires thoughts to be sequenced so they come out in a way someone can follow

Thinking in your head won’t organize your thought.

2. Talking or writing to someone invites feedback and forces you to make sense, fit in socially etc.

Chatting with an AI or writing in your diary won’t refine or improve your thoughts.

So you can just doodle in a notebook and tell yourself you've written it down. If you look at it regularly im sure recall will be even more perfect.

If you dont write anything down you wont be alle to access an orderly array of thoughs.

My reactions to thoughts that I myself have had are stereotyped and repetitive (every reaction is typical of me.) Reactions to me that come from another person are going to be different than those, and in turn stimulate me differently. Thinking tends to be an enumeration (then elimination) of possibilities, and that random input helps with the enumeration part by keeping me out of local minima.

I'd wait a bit and get a kitten but having lost both cats inside a year frankly it hurts too much and they don't live long enough.

Maybe they studied the same subject but at a different school, or maybe they specialize in something else entirely.

Maybe their first language is different from yours, since language idioms can affect the way we frame problems.

Maybe they want to get into the field you're working on, and your thinking can also be teaching.

For me, this is a big part of the value of a hackerspace/makerspace. The tools are nice, but the intellectual environment is amazing.

https://chatoctopus.com/share/94ed2beb-3878-4fbe-aeee-1f86a1...

The Enigma of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017): their argumentative theory holds that reasoning evolved for social rather than individual epistemic purposes, to produce and evaluate arguments in group contexts.

Yes! I love that someone wrote this down!

This seems so obvious to me now. I often ask LLMs to cite their sources (they do hallucinate from time to time), and they often give me sources that don't say what is claimed. "How would the LLM know not to give this to me?" I wonder. They're trained to explain but not to convince, so they don't know what's convincing, and they should.

I think humans hallucinate at least as much as LLMs—arguments of any complexity are impossible to formulate without leaping at least a bit—but other humans ground us. That's why when people become socially isolated, they join cults or adopt conspiracy theories or the like.

Conversely, "this is convincing to an expert" converges on “this is true" as our collective expertise grows over time. This is the foundation of the scientific method, of progress in all engineering disciplines, etc.

The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure. They have a subject and a predicate.

I already think in sentences so idk what this guy is on about, sounds like a skill issue.

I feel like trying to explain it to yourself as if you were ignorant of the problem may give similar insights.

wish I had discovered that trick sooner.

By talking to someone else, you're simply mobilizing a different set of circuitry and thinking approaches.

It's like you switched llm models

I don't think this is particularly a complicated phenomenon