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▲Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone (self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__=self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__||[];self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__.push("2:I[\"aadde9aaef29\",[],\"default\",1]\n3:I[\"6e873226e03b\",[],\"Children\",1]\n5:I[\"bc2946a341c8\",[],\"LayoutSegmentProvider\",1]\n6:I[\"6e873226e03b\",[],\"Slot\",1]\n7:I[\"3506b3d116f7\",[],\"ErrorBoundary\",1]\n8:I[\"a9bbde40cf2d\",[],\"default\",1]\n9:I[\"3506b3d116f7\",[],\"NotFoundBoundary\",1]\na:\"$Sreact.suspense\"\n:HL[\"/assets/index-BLEkI_5r.css\",\"style\"]\n")get="_blank">thesignalist.io)
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> 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).
If they can't be arsed to write it, why TF should I be arsed to read it.
This isn't just a comment. It's a an experience. A shared cognition between parties -- To collaborate & exchange ideas. It's not procrastination, it's culture. Culture is what builds civilization.
There's no concept of what truly is important with the writing itself since there's no actual thinking going on. The opinion of the supposed writer, which colors how they structure the writing and the language they use, is often all over the place since an LLM has no real opinions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
I too noticed a shallowing of the piece somewhere in the middle. It started with an interesting observation but ended with triviality (like you'd expect from a synthetic mind without a body).
I'm asking this genuinely because I've been using stuff like these separators before LLMS - now someone can just say "ahh dismiss the content they used style X it's LLM, it's dogshit".
You could try asking an LLM to write some prose about whatever you fancy. Maybe two or three different pieces, and ask it to be extra profound. You will probably see that exact sentence structure above a number of times:
> It’s not [X], it’s [Y]. A bit of [A], the [random adjective] of [B], all weaving together to form [C]. A short sentence. Maybe two. A final, culminating closer, gradually transcending into space.
The words are quite interchangeable, but the you will know it when you see it.
>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.
- genuine dialog between 2 peers with overlapping knowledge on the topic, both being kind, patient, open-minded yet critical, able to point flaws in reasoning or provenance without being hurtful
- genuine dialog between 2 peers with overlapping knowledge on the topic
- genuine dialog between 2 peers
- genuine dialog between 2 persons
- thinking out loud in front of someone listening
- thinking out loud alone thinking of someone listening
- thinking out loud alone
The "trick" here, and that's why I wanted to write it down, is that having an actual person, real or imaginary, does force one to actually explain. A typical fallacy is the "proof left out to the student" which actually happens to be terribly complex or even infeasible.
I believe trying to explain to someone forces you to identify the gap into their knowledge and your point. It's precisely mapping where knowledge does NOT overlap. So instead of making a lot of assumptions they have to be laid out, at the very least made in part explicit. Doing so forces you to stop skimming parts that are challenging for you. The part that you might not feel so sure.
Obviously the whole problem is that this peer, who is both knowledgeable and kind is good in their field and popular, thus busy. Consequently their time is very VERY precious. Hopefully you yourself are that peer. That means that often we have to go down the list and find the next best person.
So... I do think duck debugging is better if you genuinely trust in the kindness of the duck, not see it as a piece of plastic ;)
As an aside, I end up having to organize certain types of thoughts through speaking, which requires some adaptations and limiting functions :-)
Thus, writing things down is a necessity for me: it's not for a need for structure but rather that my "context window" gets filled too quickly. I can counter my own arguments but it's more fun, and often quicker, to do with someone else. Besides, there is such a diversity of thinking out there it would be foolish to not take advantage!
Could probably have gone for a walk around the block instead, but the formulation of the problem to be able to explain it to someone else seems to be key.
I sometimes put out the question anyway and added an answer. Never quite figured out if this was considered bad style.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/
I've only ever heard that associated with schizophrenia, but I don't even know if that's true or not.
Personally, I find it very difficult to understand how people could not think in words, like you were speaking to another person. Obviously you also have mental imagery and sound etc, so not everything is just words. Internal speech is one channel of thought, but for anything complex I would have thought it was mandatory.
I personally don't since I suffer from aphantasia. Perhaps I also suffer from not having an internal monologue?! I do think in words but not in complete sentences, it kind of happens much faster.
See also papers from Hurlburt and others on "unsymbolized thinking" and surrounding topics
Which of you? :)
It's hard to talk in groups, because you have to have a sentence mentally critiqued by 3/4 people in turn, so the topic has usually changed before you can say your piece.
Your comment made me pause in the "wait, other people don't do that?" way.
Not so much imagining a conversation in your head, but playing through a conversation with "the other side" of the coin (be it an idea, plan, problem, solution etc) which are both yourself if that makes sense.
Is this not what the inner monologue to yourself is? Your inner is conversing with your outer monologue. Hard to explain.
Would consider myself to be both physically and mentally stable, no conditions etc.
I think it's okay, unless you converse online with your throwaways.
1. Sometimes you have a vague sense of the shape of the solution, and ime it can be helpful to sit with it for a while before trying to shape it into words.
2. Talking out loud forces structure but it also rate-limits how quickly you can iterate through ideas to find one that plausibly solves the problem at hand
- The House at Pooh Corner
Taking anything from up in the mind out into the real world, be it a physical action, a speech, an artwork, requires you to make decisions about what’s load bearing and what’s not.
So the more practice you get translating your thoughts into words (or another medium), the better you get at executing.
It's illogical to use one word when another is more concise and succinct like talking and speaking in this case.
Some words are self-explanatory like thinking.
Trying to train an LLM on two 1080ti's on the StackOverflow corpus in my living room was a vibe though. Good times.
And thanks for saying it should have worked, I agree. My chagrin has increased over the years as I have realized the magnitude of my ill-timing.
Agentic uses adversarial expert, steel-man opponent, risk-mitigation and failure-mode analysis. But what about almost brainstorming, but with thought-provoking nudge questions? Or on the other hand, arm-waving fight-club style discussion? Or... It's a big design space. I used to go to lots of research talks at MIT, in assorted departments. The post-talk Q&A question cultures varied a lot. Like encompassing both "leaves the speaker in tears", and "nudge so subtle, you won't quickly get it if you've not already spotted the fatal flaw in the work".
So aside from dialing down the "transformative insight!" silliness, there seems a rich multi-agent multi-persona space to explore.
I'm also already busy building Forgetmenaut and enabling data deletion at scale: forgetmenaut.com
I was wondering about the question of whether people who made very deep discoveries (Einstein and Godel come to mind) had others to talk things through with beforehand.
I know Andrew Wiles kept all of his work on Fermat's Last Theorem secret and by that I assume he never talked it through with anyone.
I saw a Facebook copypasta piece that claimed that Einstein's first wife came up with many or most of his ideas, and never got credit because of sexism. No proof whatsoever, other than she was a mathematician and physicist.
But "it could have happened!" is more important than even a microshred of evidence for highly emotional, online topics.
This anecdote nicely pokes a hole in that conspiracy theory: he was thoughtful enough to share credit with a layman work associate, but (supposedly) not the most important woman in his life - that seems even less likely.
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.
But it is for sure good that there are multiple ways to do various operations, and there are plenty of youtube videos that students can turn to if what they have been taught does not resonate for them.
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...
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.
I just counted, 11 notebooks (b5, 60 pages) in two years, so just about a new notebook every 2 months.
Funny thing is, coworkers will now ask to use my pen and paper to flesh-out something together, as I'm certain it's the only paper and writing utensil in the building.
And yeah, draw.io or even an ipad with a whiteboard app aren't good replacements for me.
You remind me of a joke that with good employees you need only one pen and they can all write.
Curious. My first thought would have been "... because the line is physically displaced from the pen, of course"; but that doesn't apply there.
You are compressing thoughts/ideas to symbols. Via a visual feedback loop your mind can operate on more complex ideas as your working memory doesn't need to hold everything at once. The term "second brain" really applies here. While you're "doodling forth" you become proficient in your on-the-fly invented symbol language.
Key is also the slowdown effect of being careful to draw properly. It's like a harness for your thought process. Fixating your thoughts on paper is a way to be safe not to go astray; like a climber who puts hooks in the wall.
It's really more complex than it seems from the outside. A picture of a group of people drawing lines in the sand comes to mind. And one wonders - once again - how language came into the world.
Assuming you can type well.
Take a sentence, put your hands on the keyboard with the intend to type it but dont do it.
Some time later dont try to remember the sentence but just put the hands on the keys and let them type. Its really funny seeing the text come out of your keyboard buffer muscle memory.
Some japanese guy said he played with the concept and reported that he could fit a whole paragraph or a list of things big enough that he couldnt recall it without using his hands. He could do an invisible abacus to recall it.
> the act of writing out a problem to a model still forces the same sentence-level precision described earlier
(model referring to LLM here)
but not as writing for writing's sake
For technical problems, I find the act of writing out a request for help, even just into a text editor, is often sufficient for me to solve the problem at hand. Writing things out is a way of organizing and structuring your thinking, and is itself a powerful troubleshooting tool. Things will become obvious that, unwritten, you might not even notice. I think this is very similar to thinking out loud; when you listen to what you say, or read what you have written, your mind is somehow keyed to react in a useful way.
That response might not be what you want or need for problems that need to be wrestled with, chewed, and pondered on deeply, though.
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...
Putting two regular programmers together in front of a computer will typically annoy both and not accomplish much.
I was fortunate to learn from experienced people, and I've had very good experiences with it.
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.
Ah yes, the newfound pastime of arguing online – sure miss those pre-COVID days of online's universal consensus…
I feel like trying to explain it to yourself as if you were ignorant of the problem may give similar insights.
I already think in sentences so idk what this guy is on about, sounds like a skill issue.
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
wish I had discovered that trick sooner.
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.
I loved it so much, because I was learning programming completely by myself usually after midnight while taking care of a new-born. I had nobody to pair-program with, no lead dev nor teacher to speak with.
It was years ago, but such an amazing implementation of an LLM for education.
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.