Comment by OhNotAPaper
7 months ago
> I can’t believe riding a horse and carriage wouldn’t make you better at riding a horse.
Surely you mean "would"? Because riding a horse and carriage doesn't imply any ability at riding a horse, but the reverse relation would actually make sense, as you already have historical, experiential, intimate knowledge of a horse despite no contemporaneous, immediate physical contact.
Similarly, already knowing what you want to write would make you more proficient at operating a chatbot to produce what you want to write faster—but telling a chatbot a vague sense of the meaning you want to communicate wouldn't make you better at communicating. How would you communicate with the chatbot what you want if you never developed the ability to articulate what you want by learning to write?
EDIT: I sort of understand what you might be getting at—you can learn to write by using a chatbot if you mimic the chatbot like the chatbot mimics humans—but I'd still prefer humans learn directly from humans rather than rephrased by some corporate middle-man with unknown quality and zero liability.
From the thread: yes, it's sarcasm. Here's some clarification as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44291314
Yes, I'm acknowledging a lack of skill transfer, but that there are new ways of working and so I sarcastically imply the article can't see the forest for the trees, missing the big picture. A horse and carriage is very useful for lots of things. A horse is more specialised. I'm getting at the analogy of a technological generalisation and expansion, while logistics is not part of my argument. If you want to write a very good essay and if you're good at that then do it manually. If you want to create scalable workflows and have 5 layers of agents interacting with each other collaboratively and adversarially scouring the internet and newssites and forums to then send investment suggestions to your mail every lunch then that's a scale that's not possible with a pen and paper and so prompting has an expanded cause and effect cone
> A horse and carriage is very useful for lots of things. A horse is more specialised.
You have that backwards. A horse and carriage is good for traveling on a road. If you have just the horse, however, you can travel on a road, travel offroad, pull a plow, ride into battle and trample evildoers, etc.
No it's only half backwards because of the infrastructure there is scalability in amount of work you're right in the phrasing however but the intention/idea matters more. So the horse and carriage is a generalization of the core value of the horse and increases the core value and generalization -> general, horse more specialised or at least reduced to niches today like competitions and hobbies
The first sentence in the comment you are responding to is sarcasm. Just replace "I can't believe" with "Of course".
> The first sentence in the comment you are responding to is sarcasm. Just replace "I can't believe" with "Of course".
Do you have any evidence of this?
No, because of Poe's law only the author of the comment can confirm. But the analogy makes sense then:
"[Of course] writing an essay with chatgpt wouldn’t make you better at writing essays unassisted. Sure, a student wouldn’t want to practice the wrong way, but anyone else just wants to produce a good essay."
It’s fairly obvious from the context.
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