jimrandomh comments on The Design Space of Minds-In-General - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 June 2008 06:37AM

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Comment author: TheOtherDave 21 January 2011 03:19:57PM 1 point [-]

That might be true, but I'd want to see evidence of it. If you're just appealing to intuition, well, my intuition points strongly in the other direction: I frequently find that the act of saying things out loud, or writing them down, changes the way I think about them. I often discover things I hadn't previously thought about when I write down a chain of thought, for example.

I suspect that's pretty common among at least a subset of humans.

Not to mention that the act of convincing others demonstrably affects our own thoughts, so the distinction you want to draw between "inducing thoughts in other people" and "thinking" is not as crisp as you want it to be.

Comment author: jimrandomh 21 January 2011 03:25:24PM *  0 points [-]

Does talking about or writing a thought down cause you to notice more things than if you had spent a similar amount of time thinking about it without writing anything? That's the proper baseline for comparison.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 21 January 2011 03:36:17PM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure it is the proper baseline, actually: if I am systematically spending more time thinking about a thought when writing than when not-writing, then that's a predictable fact about the process of writing that I can make use of.

Leaving that aside, though: yes, for even moderately complex thoughts, writing it down causes me to notice more things than thinking about them for the same period of time. I am far more likely to get into loops, far less likely to notice gaps, and far more likely to rely on cached thoughts if I'm just thinking in my head.

What counts as "moderately complex" has a lot to do with what my buffer-capacity is; when I was recovering from my stroke I noticed this effect with even simple logic-puzzles of the sort that I now just solve intuitively. But the real world is full of things that are worth thinking about that my buffers aren't large enough to examine in detail.