On 2/11/25 8:20 AM, glen wrote:
That's a fraught question. First, editors need not have been writers before they became editors. But barring that, my answer would be "No". But they prolly *do* lose facility for writing, the ease with which they write. It's simple reinforcement. Use it or lose it.E.g. I can still code in Ada. But I'm way worse at it now than I was when I did it multiple days per week. A better question might be: Do editors lose their ability to read? And that question bears an even deeper problem ... something akin to Gell-Mann amnesia ... and I blame it for me losing my taste for reading for *fun*. Up until ~1998 or so, I did a lot of reading for fun. It was fun to read. Now reading is merely a means to some other end. Make something your job and it ceases to be a hobby. So even if editors retain their ability to read, the *quality* of their reading must change in deep ways.
I think this is the more salient aspect of the general question... and it may even be "generational" in the sense not that readers/writers lose their skills through atrophy but if they lose their "taste" or "facility" for it and a new generation simply *never acquires it*. I never acquired a significant ability or facility for writing longhand/cursive, and I do think it limits me and how I think/feel/perceive the world.
"kids these days" who have never read anything longer than a short paragraph on the back of a cereal box (Boomers/X) or a Tweet (millenial/Z) probably do perceive the world somewhat differently than those of us who may still read novels, entire non-fiction books, and long-form journalism. I myself have atrophied in this regard... I tend to look to YouTube and Audiobooks (and Podcasts) to consume what I once looked to full-length printed books.
But to your (glen's) point, there are qualitative thresholds which are perhaps more salient than the quantitative ones...
On 2/11/25 6:57 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:Do editors lose the ability to write?On Feb 11, 2025, at 6:43 AM, glen <[email protected]> wrote:The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdfIt really doesn't seem that different to me from numerical analysis. It shifts the work from doing the computing to declaring what the computing should do.
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