Music Video maker and self professed “Fashion Victim” who is hoping to apply Rationality to problems and decisions in my life and career probably by reevaluating and likely building a new set of beliefs that underpins them.
CstineSublime
Did someone advise you to do what you are doing with LLMs? I am not sure that optimising for legibility to LLM summarisers will do anything for the appeal of your writing to humans.
Good question, no, no one advised me to use this technique but I use it as a last resort. I frequently feel that I am misunderstood in communication. Often I feel like people’s replies to me sound like replies from totally different conversations or statement/questions to the one I just made.
If an LLM seems to imply the focus is different or overemphasizes something I didn’t see as significant, then I see no reason to believe that isn’t indicative that humans will be dragged away by that too.
I’ve read your article before and found it to be good advice. I have tried to take the first warning about ambiguous use of “this” to heart for a while now.
I might have to get the courage to engage the feedback service.
I mean… I described it. It works by… discussing a post. In the comments. This is… really straightforward and ordinary. I’m really not suggesting anything weird here.
Ah, you’re just suggesting is that people ask more questions like “what does this important word mean?” “Can you give more examples of that”—the onus is falling on the commenters not on some kind of micro-peer-review panel before an author publishes a post?
That the overall process doesn’t need to change, just people ask more of these kinds of questions and to do right after the post is published. Am I oversimplifying it?
At risk of sounding like a broken record: All you’re imploring people to do is to ask more of these types of questions in the comments immediately?
My writing is sloppy. Can anyone please suggest any resources where I can get feedback on my writing, or personalized instructions that will improve my processes to make me a better writer?
In the meantime I’ll try to adopt this “one simple trick”: each time I write a piece, I will read it out aloud to myself. If it is “tough on the ear” or I stumble while sight reading it, I will edit the offending section until it is neither.
Also, I’ll continue to get LLMs to summarize the points in a given piece. If there’s something I feel is missing in it’s summary or appears to misinterpret an argument, then I shall edit accordingly.
Also, Also, two bad habits I will try to stop are ‘disunity of pronoun’, and using the ‘royal we’. Disunity of Pronoun is this habit I have of switching between “you will find… you ever notice” to “we have this tendency” “we still don’t know” and even “they cannot fathom” “I for one”. And the Royal We is when I generalize human traits as immutable or universal, “we all need love” “we long for purpose”, which is just kinda cringe.
Three! Three bad habits. [1]The third bad habit I intend to stop, INCLUDES writing too many “buts”.[2] Here is an example:
”I really enjoy Direct Cinema documentaries because you’re watching people just going about their tasks—they aren’t performing to you. In Jacques Tati’s Playtime there are many scenes of people watching other people going about their tasks but that is a scripted comedy not a Documentary. But I think the appeal works with both”
Uh… no. “Peer review” is something that happens to a work after it’s been published.
Incorrect, a peer review is reviewing a draft before the work is published.
But you’re saying Formative Evaluations must happen before an idea is absorbed into the local culture. Isn’t when it’s posted too late for that? Since you’re impressing the importance of instantaneous evaluation. I’m just getting very confused how this process looks like in a Forum.
it might also help clarify things if you clicked the links I include and read about
There are a lot of links, which one would you prioritize?
, so I’m not sure why I would have any examples of this. Please clarify what you’re asking here?
Which specific ideas in the past have you seen been absorbed in to the local culture and become the formation of a dozen or more posts prematurely or that needed more Formative evaluation? Those examples.
Sorry I got confused, will fix, I meant “Summarative”—the one that comes after the school year is over or near the end.
How does this work in practice when someone has an idea they want to present in a post? Are you suggesting that they go towards some kind of immediate peer review as a Formative Evaluation?
before an idea is absorbed into the local culture, before it becomes the foundation of a dozen more posts that build on it as an assumption
How many examples are there of this where the consensus was once treating it as an assumption, and now it isn’t? (I’m more asking within the Rationalist community, not historical paradigms like Heliocentrism or Miasma Theory or even the unfortunate wrongful accusation of Sunil Tripathi.)
That makes a lot more sense, since the Summartive Evaluation can inform changes in the way next year’s cohort of students is to be taught (or next round, or whenever it is to be taught to a new group) - so even if you can’t do anything about the last cohort, you can fix it for the next. Whereas the way it’s been presented in this post for Product Design and “ideas”—the cast has been set already forever.
I suspect the soap on the wall (I assume you’re talking about liquid soap?) it’s a fixture vs. furniture thing. You can use suction cups to attach a soap dispenser to the walls, but then again, would you trust it not to go splat? It needs a commitment to drill into the tile or wall to attach it.
I can’t help myself but I am compelled to link this comic because of the superficial similarity
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/precise
This sounds like it assumes you’ll never have to pull into a space less than a few cars lengths long. In other words, it assumes a context where the skill doesn’t actually matter, and you don’t need to be better at it than the bare minimum.
That would be my implication not his. He wasn’t saying no one ever needs to parallel park, only that he was nominating that space as a opportunity for me to practice reversing in even though I’d likely go head first in.
Honestly I don’t know.There’s no selection pressure there to converge on an optimal teaching method even if there is one.
I mean it’s still universal in tests, which even if it’s a pointless exercise, means there is SOME selection pressure.
I have only glanced at that paper, but it is an interesting read and the notion that it chiefly is about the space required kind of makes me reconsider my expectations of how easily this tactic could be compressed to a convergent one: maybe it just is that damn complex and comprised of so many sub-skills based on the different environments, lengths of car, and even traffic conditions.
They also explained that no one actually expects you to do it that way in real life,
My driving instructor, pointing to a space I was going to practice on stated that after I pass—I’d simply go in head-first, but that this was something that had to be mastered for the test.
Thank you for linking learned blankness—that’s a very interesting post just generally.
The better way (reversing) isn’t the maximally intuitive or direct way.
I’m keen to see other instances where the transmission or difficulty teaching something is preventing the proliferation of a valuable and demonstrably better approach to something
The two ways I was taught was inverted steering wheel and full lock.
I can’t remember which is which, but I would assume with Full Lock, you line your car about a third of the way with the car in front, stop, turn your steering wheel as far as it will go (full lock) and then begin backing in.
The other way was you line further up, like side-mirror to side-mirror, stop, and you turn the steering wheel until it’s inverted. Not full lock. And then you begin backing in.
Parallel Parking and possibly Instrumental Convergence
I often feel misunderstood, so what if I A/B tested this...
I write a blog post about something which is very niche or personal and thus bound to get misinterpreted. I try, to the best of my ability, to make it as clear as possible and post it here.
Then, I take that exact post as posted, put it into an LLM and ask it to rewrite it and keep asking it to rewrite it until I feel it expressed what I intended to express. Maybe a couple of LLMs and duke them out.
Finally, I post it on here.
I’m not sure how I would test which one is more successful? Enthusiasm (positive or negative emotions) of replies? Positively scoring the post with more replies I feel are most “on the mark” and by extension, negatively scoring the post which has more irrelevant or tangential replies?
I would have some disclaimer that, yes, they are the same exact post even if they are written differently—or would that foul up the experiment? Not sure if I will identify which one is the LLM one and which one is my original.
{How meta is this—I asked Claude to rewrite the above}When I speak, people misunderstand—they appear to construct an entirely different narrative, responding passionately to a statement I never made.
My goal is simple: find a way to transmit my exact meaning with precision. Can another voice render my thoughts in a way that ensures the core intention is correctly understood by the audience on the blogging platform?
The critical question becomes: How would I determine which version—my original or the translated piece—more effectively communicates my intended meaning? Would I measure success through the enthusiasm of responses, score the replies based on their relevance, or track the proportion of comments that genuinely reflect the original message? Perhaps I’d assign positive weight to responses that demonstrate true understanding and negative weight to those that drift into tangential or misaligned interpretations.
The meta-question becomes: Can a different articulation—whether by AI or human—create a pathway to being truly heard, or are misinterpretations inevitable regardless of how carefully the message is constructed?
{Then I asked it to do it like a pithy Hemmingway… because… why not...?}People twist my words, inventing stories I never told.
I want precision. Can another voice make my meaning clear to readers?
How to measure success? Count relevant replies. Score understanding. Punish misinterpretation.
Can a different voice break through, or is misunderstanding inevitable?
If you’re thinking economically, I’m quite confident that children born from surrogates on average will have higher incomes and therefore pay much more tax per capita than children who have spent time in foster care.
I’m not sure if Foster Care costs are a good model for how to create people who “thrive”—most importantly on an existential level—are they emotionally satisfied? But from an economic argument, I assume that whatever foster kids are getting is not the optimal to make them productive in terms of future income, and therefore the taxes they can pay.
In this webinar Douglas Hubbard talks about inconsistency even with Calibrated Experts that I feel is very close to the problems you’re grappling with. He says that the simplest solution is to average expert’s answers together.
But I have a feeling elsewhere he’s also said you can account for personal inconsistency by getting the same person to answer the same question on two separate occasions and average their answers. That might be my faulty memory.
But what about understanding things which are unclear?
I think this is part of a broader problem about asking questions and is not limited to LLM. The broader topic I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is “How to ask for help?”. The better way to ask for help often involves being specific and targeted about who you ask for help.
In this example Adam is casting a wide net, he’s not asking a domain expert on X how to do X. Casting a wide net is always going to get a lot of attempts at helpful answers form people who know nothing about X. The helpful-but-clueless to expert ratio will often increase drastically the more esoteric X is.
It’s probably pretty easy to find someone credible who knows how to cook a half-decent Spaghetti Bolognese, but, what about a Mousaka which is slightly more esoteric is going to be a bit harder. I am one of only two people in my very broad face-to-face friendship group that has ever written code in GLSL, and I’m not very good at it, so if a third friend wanted to learn about GLSL I probably won’t be a good person to ask.
I believe people like Bella are genuine in their desire and intention to help.
I also sympathize with Adam’s plight, but I think he is the problem. I sympathize because, for example, I don’t know anything about the legal structures for startup financing in my company. I wouldn’t even know if this is something that I should talk to an account or a lawyer about. So I understand Adam’s plight: not even knowing where to begin asking how to do X necessitates casting a wide net: going to general online communities, posting to social media, asking friends if they “know someone know who knows someone who knows how to X”. And then you’re bound to catch a lot of Bellas in that net: people genuinely trying to help, but maybe also too enthusiastic to rush in for their participation trophy by asking ChatGPT.
And the less said about people who when you ask for recommendations online give you a title of a book without any explanation about why it is relevant, why it is good, or how they expect it to help, the better. haha.