There's a Nurse Anesthetist I sometimes drink with who is dyslexic. He once
described how difficult it was for him to get through his schooling and how it
seems to compare to his wife's experience getting through her Nurse
Practitioner schooling. I waffle between wondering if this guy's actually 100x
smarter than the people around him, which is what allowed him to grit his way
through that; versus the perspective that we *all* have persnickety little
details about how our bodies work that somehow evens out the struggle. Maybe
we're all equivalently sized tensors, but the weights are differently
distributed?
If the latter is the case (which I tend to believe - maybe confirmation of my
rejection of the Great Man theory and meritocracy), then the appreciation for a
well-timed meme or a pithy/profound tweet (neither of which I have) is on par
with an appreciation for, say, Paradise Lost or whatever book allows one to
virtue signal to one's MENSA buddies.
But even if the latter is the case, my perspective on it still seems
individualistic. The appreciation for snark and sick memes still resides deep
in one's psyche. It's centralized. The compute isn't on the leaves as it is
with something like mob mentality or that exhilaration you feel at a rave or a
protest.
On 2/11/25 8:21 AM, steve smith wrote:
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.pdf
It 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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