This is interesting, and I’d like to see more/similar. I think this problem is incredibly important, because Five Words Are Not Enough.
My go-to head-canon example is “You should wear a mask.” Starting in 2020, even if we just look at the group that heard and believed this statement, the individual and institutional interpretations developed in some very weird ways, with bizarre whirls and eddies, and yet I still have no better short phrase to express what’s intended and no idea how to do better in the future.
One-on-one conversations are easy mode—I can just reply, “I can answer that in a tweet or a library, which are you looking for?” The idea that an LLM can approximate the typical response, or guess at the range and distribution of common responses, seems potentially very valuable.
One of the things we can do with five words is pick them precisely.
Let’s use “you get about five words” as an example. Ray could have phrased this as something like “people only remember short phrases”, but this is less precise. It leaves you wondering, how long is “short”? Also, maybe I don’t think of myself as lumped in with “people”, so I can ignore this. And “phrase” is a bit of a fancy word for some folks. “Five” is really specific, even with the “about” to soften it, and gives “you get about five words” a lot of inferential power.
Similarly, “wear a mask” was too vague. I think this was done on purpose at first because mask supplies were not ramped up, but it had the unfortunate effect of many people wearing ineffective masks that had poor ROI. We probably would have been better off with a message like “wear an N95 near people”, but at first there was a short supply of N95, and so people might have not worn a mask at all if they didn’t have an N95 rather than a worse mask.
On the other side, “wear a mask” demanded too much. Adding nuance like “when near people inside” would have been really helpful and avoided a lot of annoying masking policies that had little marginal impact on transmission but caused a lot of inconvenience and likely reduced how often people wore masks in situations where they really needed to because they were tired of wearing masks. For example, I saw plenty of people wear masks outside, but then take them off in their homes when with people not in their bubble because they treated masks like a rain coat: no need to keep it on when you’re “safe” in your home, regardless of who’s there.
This is interesting, and I’d like to see more/similar. I think this problem is incredibly important, because Five Words Are Not Enough.
My go-to head-canon example is “You should wear a mask.” Starting in 2020, even if we just look at the group that heard and believed this statement, the individual and institutional interpretations developed in some very weird ways, with bizarre whirls and eddies, and yet I still have no better short phrase to express what’s intended and no idea how to do better in the future.
One-on-one conversations are easy mode—I can just reply, “I can answer that in a tweet or a library, which are you looking for?” The idea that an LLM can approximate the typical response, or guess at the range and distribution of common responses, seems potentially very valuable.
One of the things we can do with five words is pick them precisely.
Let’s use “you get about five words” as an example. Ray could have phrased this as something like “people only remember short phrases”, but this is less precise. It leaves you wondering, how long is “short”? Also, maybe I don’t think of myself as lumped in with “people”, so I can ignore this. And “phrase” is a bit of a fancy word for some folks. “Five” is really specific, even with the “about” to soften it, and gives “you get about five words” a lot of inferential power.
Similarly, “wear a mask” was too vague. I think this was done on purpose at first because mask supplies were not ramped up, but it had the unfortunate effect of many people wearing ineffective masks that had poor ROI. We probably would have been better off with a message like “wear an N95 near people”, but at first there was a short supply of N95, and so people might have not worn a mask at all if they didn’t have an N95 rather than a worse mask.
On the other side, “wear a mask” demanded too much. Adding nuance like “when near people inside” would have been really helpful and avoided a lot of annoying masking policies that had little marginal impact on transmission but caused a lot of inconvenience and likely reduced how often people wore masks in situations where they really needed to because they were tired of wearing masks. For example, I saw plenty of people wear masks outside, but then take them off in their homes when with people not in their bubble because they treated masks like a rain coat: no need to keep it on when you’re “safe” in your home, regardless of who’s there.