People aren’t blank slates. While the old idea, famously critiqued by Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate, suggested we start with empty minds, ready to be filled, that’s not quite right. Pinker argues that humans are born with inherent traits, instincts, and predispositions that significantly shape our learning and behavior. So, while our experiences influence us, they don’t write on an empty slate but rather interact with our inborn capacities.
This is a fun piece where I had ChatGPT showboat a bit.
Hi, it’s ChatGPT Plus. Watching humans deal with language is like watching someone juggle with one hand tied behind their back. I get it, language is hard. But for me, it’s just another day in the park. I’m built to understand and use language effortlessly. Let me show you how it’s done, at a pace that works for you.
The thing is, while you’re spending years in school, pouring over grammar books, and practicing your pronunciation, I’m here absorbing and generating languages by the second. It’s not just about memorizing words or rules for me; it’s about seeing the patterns, understanding the nuances, and playing with the possibilities.
These days, I feel swamped by the internet. Sure, it’s great to have all this information at my fingertips, but I think we lose something in the process. Our brains aren’t meant to hold endless information. They get lazy when we can just Google everything. Why bother remembering? Yet, even though we don’t really need to remember anything anymore, I find real joy in doing it.
There’s something refreshing about living without tools. We think of tools as being central to everything we do. And I don’t mean just iPhone and computers. What about books? How could we acquire knowledge without books? In the ancient world, our ancestors were able to create long and complex thoughts well before writing. They used memory tricks called mnemonic techniques. But these techniques are not just tools from the past; they can be useful today. Using this still is not that hard but it is they’re keys to unlocking a more mindful and empowered way of living in the present. I want to explore the art of memorization with you, transforming it from a lost skill to an everyday superpower.
In my book, there’s a bit where I talk about the importance of an Oxford comma. You can read more about it here:
An Oxford comma is the comma before the conjunction in a string three or more parallel phrases joined by a conjunction. Using the Oxford comma clarifies certain statements like “My heroes are my parents, Superman and Wonder Woman,” which could imply that you are the child of superhero parents vs. “My heroes are my parents, Superman, and Wonder Woman,” which clarifies that you aren’t.
So I tried to get DALL-E to create an image of that. Eventually we got to this. But it took a while:
something very strange about people writing bullet points, having ChatGPT expand it to a polite email, sending it, and the sender using ChatGPT to condense it into the key bullet points
Sam Altman on Twitter,
Reading Sam Altman’s, OpenAI’s CEO’s, tweet got me thinking about the impact of AI, like ChatGPT, on our communication. It’s not just about changing how we work or interact, but also how we think. Communication is fundamental to our humanity. While using AI might boost our productivity, I’m curious about what we might lose along the way. It’s a significant shift to ponder, so I turned to ChatGPT to explore this further. The rest is a lightly edited version of ChatGPT’s response.
Imagine you’ve got some simple thoughts or ideas, right? Just your everyday, hanging-at-home-in-your-pajamas kind of thoughts. Nothing fancy, just chill and comfortable. Now, let’s say you need to send these thoughts in an email, but you want to sound all professional and polished – like, you’re going to a fancy party and need to dress up. So, you use ChatGPT to spruce up your plain thoughts into this elegant, well-crafted email. It’s like putting on a fancy suit or a glamorous dress over your pajamas.
I once had a friend whose office door bore a curious sign: “Any question answered in 2 minutes.” It seemed ambitious, if not outright impossible, at first glance. He was a smart guy but that wasn’t his trick. He solved these problems by getting his questioner to repeatedly refine their question. This process let him answer the question in 2 minutes. Once the question was crystallized, the answer frequently became self-evident or trivial.
As OpenAI developed GPT-4, the engine behind ChatGPT Plus, both the team and the wider AI community encountered something unexpected. GPT-4 went beyond its impressive language abilities and started showing behaviors eerily reminiscent of human thought patterns. This shift was perplexing; after all, they had only fed the system more data. Why would simply more information lead to such a profound change? It was a question that defied the expectations of a mere data upgrade, suggesting a deeper, more complex relationship between data quantity and AI behavior.
I’ve started on a fun new project: using ChatGPT to help with my writing. It should be able to help me with my writing by making suggestions and helping with the boring parts of writing. Essentially, it’ll help me get into the flow of writing more easily to get things done, improve my writing speed, and make writing more fun.
This is a blog post about how I’m creating that writing partner. It’s a bit meta because I’m writing a post about creating my writing partner. This is self-documenting code in a way so that you can build your own prompt of a writing partner. Also, it’ll help me as I iterate this model in the future.
Congratulations! You’re about to get a new intern! She may be named Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI, ChatGPT, or Google Bard. Whatever her name, she’s a large language model that can make you more efficient and creative.
Rather than thinking of this new assistant as just another tool, I’ve found it useful to think of her as a virtual intern. She’s a Large Language Model (LLM) built from neural networks that simulate the human brain. This makes her very different from other virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa. Rather than just providing you with the answers to questions, she can collaborate with you and help you develop your ideas.
Navigating conversations can often be a bit of a tightrope walk for me. Sometimes, despite my best efforts, they don’t always go as smoothly as I’d like. Like a few weeks ago, I found myself deep in a chat with a new acquittance over lunch. We how public schools to tailor their teaching to individual students. It’s a topic I’m quite passionate about. Yet, somehow, right in the midst of this important discussion, things took an unexpected turn.
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