Great post, Hal. Your first two points are exactly my experience, though I will now practice my French as well! At the very least, it won’t make me worse…
Thanks Tim. Let me know how you get on with the French. What I find is that the damn thing is ok for a couple of lines, but then I am too slow to make it work longer.
I like the Wittgenstein reference Hal. What you say about LLM output being untethered reminded me of the Tractatus where Wittgenstein says philosophy is like a ladder that we need to throw away once we've climbed it. The problem is that by doing so we lose the ground of our thinking.
Yes - I wrote my honours thesis on the Tractatus and drew a lot on his later work for my PhD. I still find a lot of the later work compelling in how it picks apart standard representationalist views, and with its emphasis on practice. But where I think you need to start with, and do justice to, practice, Wittgenstein thinks you also need to end there and that theory is a dead end. I'm more into classical pragmatism (Peirce) these days!
Great post, Hal. Your first two points are exactly my experience, though I will now practice my French as well! At the very least, it won’t make me worse…
Thanks Tim. Let me know how you get on with the French. What I find is that the damn thing is ok for a couple of lines, but then I am too slow to make it work longer.
I like the Wittgenstein reference Hal. What you say about LLM output being untethered reminded me of the Tractatus where Wittgenstein says philosophy is like a ladder that we need to throw away once we've climbed it. The problem is that by doing so we lose the ground of our thinking.
Thanks Michael! Good old Wittgenstein ... I used to be totally into him, now I'm not sure what I ever took away that was useful. How about you?
Yes - I wrote my honours thesis on the Tractatus and drew a lot on his later work for my PhD. I still find a lot of the later work compelling in how it picks apart standard representationalist views, and with its emphasis on practice. But where I think you need to start with, and do justice to, practice, Wittgenstein thinks you also need to end there and that theory is a dead end. I'm more into classical pragmatism (Peirce) these days!
And I might dip my toe into Dutch conversation with it...
GIve it a go Margaret, and see what happens. I still find it a bit tense ...