Maybe many rationalists interact with chatbots more as a letter correspondent, but if so this is highly unusual (and not true for me).
I do! Not full ‘letters’, but definitely a paragraph at a time is normal for me. (I also naturally do it in other conversational media, sometimes unfortunately; this is a habit I’ve tried to break among genpop, with partial success. In another life I have sometimes been known for accidentally smothering people’s Twitch chat…) I would guess that my entire communicative and thinking style was heavily influenced by written culture first and oral culture a distant second, so I talk like a book unless I’m trying not to.
Spot check on a recent conversation I had with ChatGPT-5 in which I was trying to solidify my understanding of a few points in mathematics: my message lengths from that conversation, rounded to multiples of 10 and sorted, were (70 310 340 370 400 480 770 820). The lowest one corresponds to my initial question, and you can see the others all fall into a sort of paragraph-y range, with no really short ones at all.
I can easily believe that this would be unusual overall, though I don’t know if it would have occurred to me to think of that if you hadn’t pointed it out. I don’t know how unusual it is among people selected for being active LW users.
I do! Not full ‘letters’, but definitely a paragraph at a time is normal for me. (I also naturally do it in other conversational media, sometimes unfortunately; this is a habit I’ve tried to break among genpop, with partial success. In another life I have sometimes been known for accidentally smothering people’s Twitch chat…) I would guess that my entire communicative and thinking style was heavily influenced by written culture first and oral culture a distant second, so I talk like a book unless I’m trying not to.
Spot check on a recent conversation I had with ChatGPT-5 in which I was trying to solidify my understanding of a few points in mathematics: my message lengths from that conversation, rounded to multiples of 10 and sorted, were (70 310 340 370 400 480 770 820). The lowest one corresponds to my initial question, and you can see the others all fall into a sort of paragraph-y range, with no really short ones at all.
I can easily believe that this would be unusual overall, though I don’t know if it would have occurred to me to think of that if you hadn’t pointed it out. I don’t know how unusual it is among people selected for being active LW users.