Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• In the nineties I was a junior copywriter at BMP DDB in London. The creative department was made up of loads of small offices, each with a two-person creative team working out loud all day. The best ideas rarely came from one person thinking alone. Someone would say something half-formed about a brief and their partner would catch it, often bouncing ideas back and forth. Reckon the whole building ran on that. Well, apart from the late and brilliant John Webster, who had his own office at the top of the corridor. We were lucky enough to have ours opposite his.
  by Etymon
• This proves nothing but, in my earlier days, I'd come home with something on my mind from work and tell my wife about how I couldn't get something to work the way I wanted. She had no clue what I was talking about but she'd offer up clues and suggestions to which I would try to explain to her how things actually worked.

  Somewhere in that process it would lead to a solution that I would bring to work the next day!

  by assimpleaspossi
• It's simpler than this. Explaining a question/issue to someone involves going back to basics and covering all the foundational info that a third party would not have. When thinking alone, you gloss over this, and may not realize that a foundational assumption is incorrect. When you are forced to explain every step explicitly, these errors or gaps can become apparent without any intervention by the listener.

  I have my younger kid explain each math problem to me before she submits it on Khan Academy. My older kid thinks in her head how she would explain a problem before turning in a test. It's a good habit to form.

  by apparent
• Tangentially, Regarding pair programming (as a special case of thinking together):

  Programming is serializing ideas into the computer language. Communicating them with someone else first serializes them into human language, which is already much less abstract compared to the thought cloud in your head.

  In the case of an effective pair programming collaboration, you also get to debate approaches, discuss details, alternate between coding and watching.

  It also helps that the presence of someone else helps avoid many common distractions. Reading non-urgent private messages and checking out HN (I'm no longer so addicted to any other platform to check it out at work).

  by aljgz
• OMG - strong vibes to Einstein crediting Michele Besso, his colleague at the Swiss Patent Office, with helping him discussing some concepts in the special relativity paper: see at the end of the paper https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf
  by dh2022
• In 2017 LLMs weren't powerful enough to generate working code on their own, but my goal was to at least create a chatbot that could help you rubber-duck-debug your way to a solution. Unfortunately the tech wasn't quite strong enough for that, and not enough engineers even knew what rubber-duck-debugging was. RIP Duckly.

  Trying to train an LLM on two 1080ti's on the StackOverflow corpus in my living room was a vibe though. Good times.

  by jboggan
• It started out as an interesting read, until I got to this paragraph:

  > The value didn't come from what was said at that moment. It came from what had been built across many such moments: a pattern of mutual recognition, a shared context, a baseline of trust that made the later exchange possible. The relationship was the infrastructure. The conversation was where it had been built, one cup of coffee at a time.

  And that made me immediately question the worth of the entire piece. I get it, LLMS can rewrite an entire blog post in a minute, which can be quite tempting for people that don't enjoy writing itself, but it just takes so much variety away. I think people should stick to grammatical corrections only, and not rephrase entire paragraphs (never mind letting an LLM write everything in the first place).

  by lowdude
• I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this:

  >The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure.

  It's not unlike what people like PG say about writing improving thinking...it's the being forced to go from fuzzy directional notions to something you can put on paper in that will stand up to critique.

  Same with rubber duck debugging. The verbal part means you need to articulate it clearly but it's not the speaking that helps. Same with writing a detailed spec/prompt for an LLM - I know if its too fuzzy ("set an appropriate timeout") the LLM will spin it's wheels so it forces clarity.

  Also suspect that a big part of who we consider intelligent is linked to this. Maybe their internal monologue is just more crisp - closer to what they'd tell a rubber duck.

  by Havoc