[FRIAM] genai and critical thinking

[steve smith]

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 <gepropella at gmail.com> 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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