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... Aww.. I love that! I quite liked it. I learned a lot from it...

Now that you've got it worked out have you tried plugging what you had initially into ChatGPT or something just to see what it would have looked like?

Or a tiny bit of reading/listening to fiction/poetry/Bach, playing a game, or deeply relaxing/dozing for a few seconds, or make up a nonsense story or silly poem for half a minute?

Three cheers for cognitive onloading.

100% the way the best ideas come to light and LLMs will likely never be able to do that with any sort of consistency. Probably not at all except through accident or theft of obscure but already existing work.

Isn't "just" measuring stuff in the lab. Without our grad students and postdocs generating data and experimentally testing hypotheses (ours and theirs), our desk jockey jobs would be rather unfulfilling.

I LOVE that aspect of science.

There's an attitude that if you use an LLM to do a bit of grunt writing, it's OK as long as you honestly review it. "Yup! That's exactly the itinerary I would've written" or whatever. But people are missing (and I think maybe don't even know) that sometimes writing IS thinking. You have to do it.

Writing is thinking. Always was, and will be. The string of words coming out at the end is just a reminder of the process.

(As perhaps I am wasting yours now, but you know what you're getting into when you open a microblogging platform. You're lucky I'm not posting pictures of my dogs.)

I think the most interesting part of writing is figuring out what you’re trying to write. You sit down with an idea of what you want to write…and it’s broken and clunky and flawed and every attempt to make it flow is awful and slowly you pare it back and re analyse what you’re ACTUALLY trying to say

If itd been flabby and incomplete then the LLM hadnt fulfilled the purpose no? Meaning, the task wouldnt be done either way

Love this in particular, Carl.

"author"

Yes! The writing is a key part of science and other complex thinking endeavours. It changes the brain and helps us test, clarify and refine information and ideas. The pain is the point: that's the creativity in action!

Thank you for this post. I have been a research scientist since 1977 and I've written some very complicated papers over the years. Sometimes it takes me ages to figure out what the data are telling me. It's not only painstaking, but it can get very uncomfortable while in the wilderness searching.

The process leads you in directions which grow your understanding of the topic, but also of those places where you get stuck. That’s where growth happens. Handing off to an LLM anywhere in the process limits, or eliminates, growth of thought.

the struggle matters! (and good luck with it!)

When I'm struggling to start, I begin with just writing keywords, grouping those, and getting some topical sentences from that. And I go for a walk or take a shower and let my spatial-navigation mind surface some ideas. Maybe have a protein snack.

Sounds painful.

You see how much more efficient and productive you’d be if you just threw some vague prompts into ChatGPT?? 🤣🤣

Writing science for a broad public--- writing it really well---is so much harder than it might on the surface seem! Plus, we write to think more clearly, no?

Writing isn't thinking but it does make you think. Telling someone else has a similar effect. As a computer programmer, I have often solved a difficult problem by describing it to a co-worker. The co-worker rarely contributes but putting the problem into words forces a certain kind of thinking.