Just be careful, because it’s better to make an abacus than to make a calculator. What do I mean by that? Well, an abacus helps you get the answer to your question but it also teaches you how to get that answer: take the abacus away, you can still do math, because now you know how. This is not so with a calculator.
So, make something that teaches proper thinking, not blatantly corrects thinking.
Imagine it this way: you’ve made your Thinkerly and then an evil overlord hacks into it so that ‘good thinking’ is now defined as being a non critical, manipulatable lump of jelly. Do the people who have previously used Thinkerly start questioning the program and use what Thinkerly has previously taught them to be skeptical of the program? Or, do they not notice at all because they just know to click the button to make everything better, or in this case smarter?
I should have made this specific, but I had not considered using such a thing for producing writing for other people’s consumption. What I wanted from Grammarly was this:
1) The latest grammar analysis.
2) The instant feedback.
With this, I envisioned two probable uses:
A) Writing your own thoughts down as notes. Thinkerly catches possible errors. This improves stream-of-consciousness writing as a tool for training better thinking, because the feedback loop is much tighter than with the draft-revision format to which we are usually constrained.
B) Looking critically at something from somewhere else. This seems like it would be more useful on the margins, because it is very easy even for skilled thinkers to accidentally rely on a few suspect thoughts.
I can’t see any way for it to drop in to writing workflow the same way as spellcheckers do now, because I don’t see how it could make good suggestions about replacements the way spellcheckers do. Even if there are signatures of poor thinking, that doesn’t mean there is a corresponding correct thought the way there is with spelling.
Just be careful, because it’s better to make an abacus than to make a calculator. What do I mean by that? Well, an abacus helps you get the answer to your question but it also teaches you how to get that answer: take the abacus away, you can still do math, because now you know how. This is not so with a calculator.
So, make something that teaches proper thinking, not blatantly corrects thinking.
Imagine it this way: you’ve made your Thinkerly and then an evil overlord hacks into it so that ‘good thinking’ is now defined as being a non critical, manipulatable lump of jelly. Do the people who have previously used Thinkerly start questioning the program and use what Thinkerly has previously taught them to be skeptical of the program? Or, do they not notice at all because they just know to click the button to make everything better, or in this case smarter?
I should have made this specific, but I had not considered using such a thing for producing writing for other people’s consumption. What I wanted from Grammarly was this:
1) The latest grammar analysis.
2) The instant feedback.
With this, I envisioned two probable uses:
A) Writing your own thoughts down as notes. Thinkerly catches possible errors. This improves stream-of-consciousness writing as a tool for training better thinking, because the feedback loop is much tighter than with the draft-revision format to which we are usually constrained.
B) Looking critically at something from somewhere else. This seems like it would be more useful on the margins, because it is very easy even for skilled thinkers to accidentally rely on a few suspect thoughts.
I can’t see any way for it to drop in to writing workflow the same way as spellcheckers do now, because I don’t see how it could make good suggestions about replacements the way spellcheckers do. Even if there are signatures of poor thinking, that doesn’t mean there is a corresponding correct thought the way there is with spelling.