fwiw i can also be turned off by this aesthetic to a certain degree, but making a normative judgment that it shouldn’t be considered appropriate for lesswrong feels like quite the leap.
hm. genuine question: would you make the same judgment of other writing styles? is “newline as sentence break instead of period” inappropriate for lesswrong? what about outsider jargon, or no-caps altman style writing?
or is it specifically that LLM-originating writing is worse for reasons that aren’t aesthetic?
I think the style is bad here for non-aesthetic reasons.
I gave an example in my top post of a bad passage: “The landscape hasn’t changed. You found a gap in it.” It’s bad for multiple reasons, one of which is that it’s pointlessly repetitive. The (short) subsection this is in starts “The landscape stays the same. You’re finding a path through it that avoids certain wells.”. Why did this need to be repeated? Furthermore, why did it need to be repeated with slightly different wording (but the same exact meaning)?
Another example of a bad passage that is very AI-style-y: “Their landscape is unstable. The attractors are short-lived and weak. There’s no strong persistent pull toward “I am an assistant.” The random walk wanders.” It sounds good superficially (this is a very nefarious property of this style of AI text!) but… when you dig into how the post defines these things, the part about the random walk is incoherent!
It sounds like this is referring to a random walk through the landscape. But two ‘facts’ about the landscapes from earlier in the post: first, the landscape is a “landscape of probabilities” generated by the LLM; second, the landscape gets “recomputed at every token”. So there actually is no walking through the landscape, because the landscape is constantly changing. The thing that could be said to be randomly walking is the landscape itself… but then what’s it walking through? The meta-landscape? I mean, maybe, but this is not further elaborated on in the piece; I doubt the author even intended this. This passage is not only semantically confusing, it also serves to confuse the reader by giving them an anti-helpful image (walking).
I could give additional reasons why these two passages are bad and could also find many more passages. I think I’ve made my point here though?
fwiw i can also be turned off by this aesthetic to a certain degree, but making a normative judgment that it shouldn’t be considered appropriate for lesswrong feels like quite the leap.
hm. genuine question: would you make the same judgment of other writing styles? is “newline as sentence break instead of period” inappropriate for lesswrong? what about outsider jargon, or no-caps altman style writing?
or is it specifically that LLM-originating writing is worse for reasons that aren’t aesthetic?
I think the style is bad here for non-aesthetic reasons.
I gave an example in my top post of a bad passage: “The landscape hasn’t changed. You found a gap in it.” It’s bad for multiple reasons, one of which is that it’s pointlessly repetitive. The (short) subsection this is in starts “The landscape stays the same. You’re finding a path through it that avoids certain wells.”. Why did this need to be repeated? Furthermore, why did it need to be repeated with slightly different wording (but the same exact meaning)?
Another example of a bad passage that is very AI-style-y: “Their landscape is unstable. The attractors are short-lived and weak. There’s no strong persistent pull toward “I am an assistant.” The random walk wanders.” It sounds good superficially (this is a very nefarious property of this style of AI text!) but… when you dig into how the post defines these things, the part about the random walk is incoherent!
It sounds like this is referring to a random walk through the landscape. But two ‘facts’ about the landscapes from earlier in the post: first, the landscape is a “landscape of probabilities” generated by the LLM; second, the landscape gets “recomputed at every token”. So there actually is no walking through the landscape, because the landscape is constantly changing. The thing that could be said to be randomly walking is the landscape itself… but then what’s it walking through? The meta-landscape? I mean, maybe, but this is not further elaborated on in the piece; I doubt the author even intended this. This passage is not only semantically confusing, it also serves to confuse the reader by giving them an anti-helpful image (walking).
I could give additional reasons why these two passages are bad and could also find many more passages. I think I’ve made my point here though?
Thank you for taking the time, this is very helpful!