IMO I think a partial root of why AI writing is so bad is because it's written like code. Like if you really dive into how it constructs things after iterations and ask it to analyze it , without it saying it's like code or without you saying anything about code, you'll notice coding like iterations.
How many models have you tried? They write very differently. I found Gemini Argon 4 to be really good at writing like a human. Simpler models like Haiku seem better than more powerful ones like Opus, though even Opus has improved considerably with 5.5.
DeepSeek is much more roundabout which can mirror certain people’s styles and some people prefer that. So in summary don’t just say LLMs are bad at writing, you need to be more specific: which model, which style, which context, what instructions were given? Claiming they are bad under all combinations is just ignorant.
Oh, absolutely. The often voiced statements about "terrible Ai writing", "LLMs cannot joke" they all seem to be fashionably regurgitated by people who had last time used an LLM for said purpose in 2024 if ever.
It's autistic / adhd hyperverbosity. Rationalists are a social group of neurodiverse people and attract neurodiverse people as a result.
> adding layers of detail and nuance rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start
This is a fundamentally neurotypical assumption. NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience, so they splay out all the detail to compensate. Earlier in their lives they tried 'just interrogating the one or two assumptions' but because they are not able to infer context nobody understands them because they are off the mark. They also enjoy diving into a huge amount of detail and exploring every nook and cranny to potentially find something new.
Which I find is the lesswrong-style to a T: here are all the details, literally all of them, and then we'll find our way to the point together, eventually.
> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience
Or they understand that this “shared context” is a myth that doesn’t exist in reality. Plenty of situations where everybody just nods “yea, right” and then walks away with a different idea because they’ve been looking at it from a different perspective/set of assumptions.
The issue is that you've got to build shared context before people can follow an unstructured dump of everything in your brain. You have to tell a story that makes sense. Also, ideally you figure out how to filter out the stuff that other people simply don't need to know. It is not easy, but it is a skill you can learn.
How ND of you! There is a difference because the when the ND person misses the mark they get reactions of confusion. What you're talking about has a huge amount of instinctual social detail behind it and knowing what kind of 'yeah right' and seeing how your audience received it is part of the game.
What game with a huge amount of detail are you talking about?
For my experience, kinds of “yeah right” are just nonverbal signals. People who primarily communicate by text may miss those (it’s literally a different language), and so may folks who tend to get hyper focused on their thoughts so they lose track of their peer (so they stop seeing those details). What confuses me here is that it’s not something with a ton of detail - just a bunch of signals and their meanings that people are expected to know and recognize. There sure are groups with insanely deliberate rules and complex signaling, but that’s for extra geeky folks, not any norm.
Even if I’m just missing the complexity… I don’t see: why not being able to do so would tend to steer someone into hyper-verbosity? Especially when plain old conformance is more than enough to explain it all no less plausibly?
To be honest, I dunno about neurodivergent experience, I’m just a plain old ret^Wdumbass. I think that ND people know there’s - generally speaking - no secret and unspoken NT context game they’re not privy to. There could be something I’m not seeing or even knowing. And that’s exactly why - I think - nuances and details are sometimes important, not because brains can be wired different ways. My impression is that if someone writes any long (for the type of communication) form on some stuff they care about, they’re supposed to get into details and nuances, irrespective of author’s tendency for cognitive or processing quirks.
So, sorry
- not to invalidate if this is a personal experience, but… while I won’t dispute ND correlation, how do you know that explanation?
... are you going to accuse his 2 sentence post of being hyperverbose?
> huge amount of instinctual social detail behind it and knowing what kind of 'yeah right' and seeing how your audience received it is part of the game.
Most people's instincts on the matter lead them astray. They seem to spend their life hallucinating that other people said or thought things that they didn't. Functional assumptions, but wrong. With a predictable consequence that sociopaths have an easy time ending up in charge if they feel like it, because people relying on their instincts just make too many social mistakes.
You are also missing the point, being ND doesn't mean you are hyper verbose, always. This overall sour grapes about how NTs have social instincts is a typical development of autistic people over the years, which you are also exhibiting.
It's not an accusation, but a mirror to help them potentially realize something, so they don't suffer so much through life so. When you realize what is happening, it helps release a lot of suffering in a person's life. The sour grapes is not helpful, NT social instincts are not going away and it's better to understand and work with the world than to be upset that rain happens sometimes and it just should never exist!
NT social instincts does not mean the person is super effective socially and everything else, but it's a very useful tool if they decide to develop their social skills.
> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience, so they splay out all the detail to compensate
I would say this is fascinatingly true of AI as well, and probably one of the reasons I (and maybe other ND folks?) work with it so well, cringey slop word choice aside.
I was joking a few years ago that if the AI was trained on the internet, the corpus included massive overrepresentation with ND style writing.
I skip over details because my short term memory is bad and I work in extremely abstract abstractions all the time
I have a hard time fleshing out work presentations past like 10 minutes. I figure things get boring. to be honest... maybe that's accurate and nobody's listening past 10 minutes.
You'll notice it follows a population distribution of the world, with higher weighting from less developed countries. Soviet bloc people are not a high %age of world population and also tend to be captured more by europe since it's closer. People from developed countries tend to have less incentive to move on top of that. Indians have a further advantage of already knowing english on top of that and you get our current distribution of mostly people from india, china, canada (proximity, easy TN visa and english), europe with significant slavic representation and then everywhere else in the tech industry.
The relevant metric isn’t population, but educated population. India has 70% of H1bs while most other countries have under 1%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-h-1b-visa-approv.... India doesn’t have 70% of the world’s college graduates in developing countries.
India has 140 million college degree holders, which is less than China and only twice as much as the U.S. China has more graduates but only 12% of H1b. Russia has about 40 million and gets under 1% of H1bs. So India has 3.5x as many degree holders as Russia, but gets over 70 times as many H1bs. Brazil has about 30 million college graduates and again under 1% of H1bs. So India has 5x the college population but over 70x the H1bs. Indonesia has 17 million degree holders but less than 0.1% of H1b. So India has 8x as many graduates as Indonesia but gets 100x+ as many H1bs.
The way you get governments to actually do anything is via politics and hitting the isolated public servants in their careers. Dollar for dollar and hour for hour it is by far the most effective way than vs. the courts unless there is a proven exception in them being effective this way.
In the USA you can get around such administrative batshittery[0] in lower side courts like this one by targeting the competence / career of the judge itself essentially by putting them in catch 22s where the right thing is to do the thing you want. That is usually having cases where an appeal court will cancel their ruling and in that ruling question the competence of the judge to continue being a judge or legal professional, which the battshittery exposes them to that specific risk. This is something you can do more in common law systems vs. the napoleonic courts that France has AFAIK, and the US constitution also helps here too.
This is usually how you get hostile government organizations & staff to do what you want, you need to hit them in the career and figure out how to do so quickly.
[0] batshittery = where they are doing things like ignoring basic logic / reality and other obviously against the law things
This is also, as you know, why france loves it's strikes & protests because the citizenry feel like they have nothing else.
They might make flying into france really, really really annoying for you or cause you to get all sorts of nasty issues for you when landing in the EU.
The AIs are also providing the product suggestions, and it comes from what data they are given from their searches. I think they can put 2 and 2 together on how to make that happen with the right MCP response bodies.
How much to care is reasonable? Do you live in a windowless underground security bunker? Should most businesses be held to that standard?
Lets say these are paper records, behind a locked door, with a security guard that they check id for it. If someone then breaks in at night time, cuts the cameras and knocks out the security guard and steals a filing cabinet, should that university then be fined 10% of revenue, which could mean the entire university shuts down because most businesses cannot survive that? We have to remember who is the original criminal here.
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