Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Learning to articulate your thoughts is pretty vital in learning to think though.

An LLM could make something sound articulate even if your input is useless rambling containing the keywords you want to think about. Having someone validate a lack of thought as something useful doesn't seem good for you in the long term



Yeah, so the problem I’m solving is not that I don’t think enough about something, or even that I don’t think about it in the right way. “Murky” was maybe the wrong word. It’s more that I often find my audience does not have the longest attention span or forgiveness for sloppy writing; thus, the onus is on me to make my thoughts as easy to digest as possible.


As someone in a similar position, I have found I benefit from practicing - but also, LLMs are a really useful tool for that practice!

Learning how to condense what I say focuses me to think about what is and isn't important - and it also forces me to think in terms of "style" and "audience".

(My natural writing style is much more verbose - I want to address all sorts of branching objections and tangential concepts. I find parenthesis really useful, because I can dump a bunch of stuff there and it's a clear marker that you can safely skip it all)

LLMs are also useful, because I can ramble, work out my own summary, and then compare to the LLM. Or, when I was just starting out, ramble, get an LLM to summarize, and then try to work out my own summary that captures what it missed.

Aside from practice being inherently beneficial, I also find that being able to form my own summaries helps me catch when the LLM has misunderstood, hallucinated, or just subtly changed the emphasis - for instance, your original example was indeed much cleaner, but I wouldn't have felt like you were really truly a fellow rambler just from reading that.

Hopefully you don't mind a rambling post. If you want a TL;DR an LLM can probably do a decent job ;)

(ChatGPT Summary: Practicing summarization improves clarity, audience awareness, and writing focus—especially for naturally verbose thinkers. LLMs are helpful tools for this, both as a comparison point and a learning aid. Writing your own summaries sharpens understanding and helps catch LLM misinterpretations or emphasis shifts.)

(Yeah, that seems pretty accurate)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: