I'm here at Harvard in the office of Stephen Pinker.
And he's written nine books and devoted his life to studying language and cognition and writing.
And so what we did in this interview is we started off with a really practical stuff.
We started off with his rules for writing.
And what makes him unique is that he's been thinking about AI since the 1980s.
So if you're interested in doing great non-fiction writing in the age of LLMs, well, this interview is for you.
I want to talk about the Curse of Knowledge, and I want to talk about this cartoon from your book, which says, good start needs more gibberish.
Yes. Would I pose the question, why is there so much bad writing?
Why is there so much academia, and bureaucraties, and corporaties?
People's favorite answer is captured by that cartoon, namely that bad writing is a deliberate choice. that it's in various versions.
It's academics with nothing to say, dress up, banal ideas with gobbledygook to show how sophisticated they are or pasty faced nerds get revenge on the girls and turn them down for dates in high school.
People want to erect a kind of cult that no one else outsiders can't penetrate because they haven't learned the jargon.
I don't think that's the best explanation for bad writing.
Partly it's personal. I just know enough people who have plenty to say that brilliant people, they have no desire to obfuscate.
They just incompetent. They just don't know how to express themselves clearly.
There's something called Henlan's Razor.
Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.
These are not stupid people I'm talking about, but it's a kind of stupidity in not knowing where your audience is coming from.
I illustrate it with an anecdote of a conference and technology, entertainment, and design, better known by its acronym, TED, where a brilliant molecular biologist had been invited to present his latest findings.
He launched into what was obvious to me is the exact kind of talk that he would give to his peers in molecular biology, and that within about Four seconds he had lost everyone because he just spoke in jargon without even introducing what problem he was solving, why it was significant, it was launched right into the experiments.
There was a room of several hundred people from many walks of life, from entertainment from design, and is obvious to everyone in the room that no one was understanding a word.
Obvious to everyone except the distinguished biologist. who was just clueless.
This is not a stupid man, but he was very stupid when it came to communication.
Namely, not everyone knows what you know.
The curse of knowledge, in terms of economics, is the difficulty that we all have in knowing what it's like not to know something that we know.
That is to subtract something from your brain.
Put yourself in the shoes of your audience, whether it be in public speaking or in writing, where they're coming from, what do they know, what don't they know?
I think that's the main cause of bad writing.
You get abbreviations and acronyms that no one has any way of knowing.
You have jargon that is known only to a tiny little clique.
You have abstractions. The level of the stimulus was proportional to the intensity of the reaction and what it really means is that People, kids look longer at a bunny than a truck.
So it's so familiar to you that you don't think it's worth explaining to people concretely what they're supposed to be seeing.
So all of these are manifestations of the curse of knowledge.
It goes by other names, egocentricism, absence of a theory of mind.
That is a theory of what's going on in other people's minds.
And if I had to identify The single biggest flaw in writing and communication would be that.
That's it. So when you're writing your books, I know you go up to Cape Cod and you write for like, you know, as long as you possibly can.
Now, I would assume that one way to get around the curse of knowledge is just to talk to the kinds of people who would be reading your book.
Yeah, you show it to people. So what do you do?
What do you do? Because you do? You write really intensely.
So when you're writing, how do you get around that?
Well, I do something that is, I know is not good enough, but I do it as best I can, which is, I try to imagine what it's like for someone not to know what I know.
That is, I try to cultivate my sense of empathy.
But the problem with the curse of knowledge is, you don't know when you're subject to the curse of knowledge, because something that seems so obvious to you that you don't even question whether other people know, it turns out not to be obvious.
So anyway, I try. But today, I show it to people.
When my mother was alive, I would always show her a draft of my book.
Not for the reason that most academics cite, namely referring to my mother as the epitome of a unsophisticated, not very well read, not very bright person.
My mother was extremely intelligent, extremely well read, and very sophisticated, but she wasn't a cognitive psychologist.
She wasn't a psycholinguist. She didn't know what I knew.
And when I write, I don't write for just a random sample of the population.
They don't buy my books. I write for people who are intellectually curious, who have some degree of education.
However, not for peers in my field. And so my mother being an example, but also, of course, when you publish for a commercial publisher, you have an editor, and the editor is typically very smart, again, not in your field.
And I showed to people in different fields who are academics, but it's surprising how insular even academics are when it comes to other academics.
Sometimes there'll be people here in this building in my own department, sometimes my own subdivision within my own department, like students, and they'll give me their thesis proposal.
And I just don't know what they're talking about.
Sometimes in my own field, because they've been immersed in like five or six people in their lab, their supervisor and the other grad students and a couple of postdocs and a research assistant, and they've all been consuming the same jargon that as soon as they step outside that tiny little circle, they're unintelligible.
So even showing it to, if I'm sure to friend who's an economist or historian or a political scientist or an evolutionary biologist, not being a cognitive psychologist, they'll say, I'm sorry about an artist, I don't know what you're talking about.
Yeah. In terms of your writing, you've done so much work looking at vision and how the brain works.
And it seems like a lot of your writing advice is informed by that.
Like, I guess if I were to try to summarize that it's like, a lot of our brain and basically the way that we move through the world is indexed heavily on vision.
And so writing well means being concrete and helping people see what it is they're trying to write.
Is that a good way of describing it? Yes, and that would be probably the second bit of a separate ice on the list.
Of course, would be find some way of getting into your reader's heads, but don't just depend on your ability to get their heads, actually get a flesh and blood person to actually weed it and see if it makes any sense to them.
That'd be number one. Number two is I study language and as a writer, I live in language But language is kind of overrated in the sense that what understanding consists of is not a bunch of words.
It's not blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But language is a mean to an end of getting people to appreciate what the ideas you're trying to convey, which are not just a string of verbiage.
And those ideas very often are visual. And, and, and, motoric, that is, you know, bodily, emotional, auditory, but their sensory.
Or they're even conceptual, but they aren't just a bunch of vowels and consonants.
Right. And so constantly allowing your reader to be able to form a mental image based on what you're writing is the next key to good writing.
That is, don't talk about a stimulus if you mean a bunny rabbit.
Don't talk about a level or a perspective or a framework or a paradigm or a concept, all of which mean a lot to you and your day-to-day work, but no one can form an image of a paradigm in their mind's eye.
So how do you do that? One thing you've said is use, for example, all the time.
What else can we do? So often visual metaphors are helpful.
One of the reasons that often the prose of other eras strikes us as so much more vivid is... It's gonna say lush.
Lush, yes. Partly because They had the advantage of writing before there were several hundred years of academia and intellectuals inventing terms and abstractions, and they had to appeal to images that were part of people's common knowledge.
So instead of saying something like aggression, or anti-social behavior.
They might say the spirit of the hawk needed into our flesh.
Yes. We wouldn't write like that because we can say aggression or anti-social behavior.
But that's jargon that a lot of people are familiar with, but they weren't always with us.
And before that there had to be some way of referring to it in terms of an image that everyone shared.
And I think that's why often the writing of previous centuries just strikes us as so much more gripping, so much more evocative and powerful that they had to appeal to visual metaphors.
Yeah, I've never thought about that before because a lot of the Bibles like that, I think of like, I don't know why the owl of Minerva came to mind.
Like there's just all of this symbolism in animals that always is striking.
And so what you're saying is like a lot of the concepts that academics and people brought in, obviously they're kind of a more efficient way to communicate, but they do lack that kind of visual quality that makes writing vivid.
That's right. So they do make it, in fact, they're essential for doing the work within the profession.
You have to be able, if you're a biologist, you have to be able to talk about things like ecosystems and species and systems and reagents and potentiation, all these concepts that you don't want to have to go back to basics and talk about, well, there's a certain amount of chemicals, and we call that a concentration, and when it increases over time, we call it, you know, you'd be on that after you're a freshman.
And so you have more and more abstract terms that you could refer to enormous bodies of knowledge just with like two syllables.
That's very good. The problem is that then now when it's time to convey them to someone who isn't at the pinnacle of specialization in your field, Because of the curse of knowledge, you're apt to forget that these abstractions, which are kind of basic to you, are just don't even need to be defined, aren't basic to anyone else.
What do we need to know about writers about how hard writing is?
And I mean it in this way. speaking comes so naturally to us.
But then writing is something that we sort of have to learn, right?
You watch a kid and you talk to a parent who has a 20 month old.
They're like, yeah, you know, they're speaking now.
They're like, oh, you know, you wouldn't believe it.
You know, they're talking so much. They're crawling around.
And it's always like, yeah, it's like that.
And then you talk to them. who have a parents who have a eight-year-old kids like how's the writing going?
It's like, well, you know, it's a little slow.
There's not that same excitement. And so it's as if, like, why is it that writing is so unnatural in a way that speaking is so natural?
Like, what is going on there scientifically and then practically?
A number of things. One of them is that in conversation, You never have two people that are parachuted on the stage and immediately have to begin a conversation.
They have some common ground to begin with.
They know why they're there. They're talking about something that is in the air that they're both familiar with.
It was the reason for them having the conversation in the first place.
They can get away with using terms that in context are perfectly clear like this and that and the thing and what I was talking about. she, whereas if you are not privy to that little social circle, you may not know who they're referring to.
In writing, you're wrenched from the context.
Someone's picking a book up off the shelf, and they'd never met you.
And they may be living in a different country, you might be dead.
They've got to pick up all of this detail from what's there on the page, not what's in not the common ground that the two people bring to the conversation.
Right. Also, you know, when you're speaking, you know that you're speaking to someone.
You know their idiosyncrasies. You're a little bit better at avoiding the Chris of knowledge, partly because you get feedback.
Right. The furrowed brow, the quizzical expression, the white, the request for clarification.
I'm sorry, I just don't know what you're talking about. in real time.
And in the body language, the engagement, even in a live audience, any speaker knows when people are trying to fidget and drift off, as opposed to continuing to be riveted.
None of that is available in writing. Absolutely.
How about this one? I think generalizations without examples and examples without generalizations are both useless.
Yes. Well, useless might be a bit strong, but generalizes the examples I find Even in my field, not at a ten times, I don't know what they're talking about.
It's like, what do you, like, like a neat example.
Uh, just, it's too, just because generalization erases detail.
Um, it, it, uh, sweeps over particulars.
You often just can't really know what it's referring to.
And, and the abstract words in a language just aren't precise enough, they often have, we have probably a hundred concepts for every word in the English language.
And so a particular word, especially if it's abstract, won't call to mind a particular reference.
The example pins it down to what's the general ballpark that you're talking about?
What is the generalization of generalization about?
Now, examples like generalizations, it's, well, why did you just tell me that?
Like, you know, and your point is, and how, how, how, apropos of what?
One of my favorite ways to think about this is that there's always a trade-off between context and compression.
So if I could wax poetic for the next five hours about my train ride to Boston today, but that's way too long.
Or I could tell you, yeah, it was an easy train ride.
But then you didn't actually get anything from that, because there's no context there.
And that maybe we're always kind of balancing the examples, kind of give us that context.
And then the generalizations are the compression.
And it's actually like the swing in the dance of the two of those that good writing and good communication happens.
Yeah. So for example, if I were to say that familiar words don't have to refer to the literal meaning of their, their parts.
You can understand that and you kind of say, yeah, yeah, okay.
And then I say, well, for example, a bathroom isn't necessarily a room with a bath and going to the bathroom doesn't necessarily mean going to a room that has a bath.
A breakfast isn't necessarily breaking a fast and Christmas isn't necessarily doesn't necessarily refer to Christ's mass.
Now, having said that, I think you now understand what I mean when I said, say that the meaning of a familiar phrase doesn't necessarily correspond to the meanings of its parts.
Hopefully, that now makes some sense to you.
Now, if I'd give you the examples, without the examples, you know, you could nod and say, oh, that sounds plausible, but you really wouldn't have understood it.
Let's roll with that. If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry?
If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what is a humanitarian consume?
A writer is someone who writes, and a stinger is something that stings.
But fingers don't fang, grocers don't gross, hammers don't ham, humdingers don't humdang, ushers don't ush, and habitatshers don't have her dash.
What's going on there? Why'd you pull this out?
So this is a quote from Richard Lederer, I deserve no credit for that criticism.
I love this. I think it's very good. Lederer has written a number of delightful books like Crazy English and English English.
He's a marvelous year and a fabulous collector of quirks and errors and oddities and blunders in English language.
So that whimsical list is quite profound because it indicates a lot of truths about language, such as that over time compositions of words, compounds or words with prefix and suffix can sometimes drift away from the original meaning, the case of adultery.
For example, it is related to adulterate.
Namely, to commit adultery is to introduce a foreign substance, namely, semen into a woman where it doesn't belong.
But that whole connection has been completely lost.
Also, in many kinds of compounds, there are a number of different semantic relationships. that can hold.
So for example, olive oil is oil made out of olives, baby oil is oil for babies.
So there isn't a logical, a single logical relationship between the different parts of the compound.
Language is so ancient. English itself is And depending on how you count, maybe, you know, 1500 years old or more.
But it came from Germanic, which came from Indo-European, and who knows where that came from, that a lot of words can completely obscure their origin.
You have to go to a dictionary to find them out.
But they're kind of like fossils of processes in the language that are long dead, you know, where How the ER got into finger?
I would have to look up the etymology to tell you, but it's not the same as a sing singer, which comes from the rule that ER turns a verb into a noun for the kind of person that typically engages in that activity.
That's a rule that's still alive and well in the English language, whereas we have the fossil record of lots of rules that died long ago.
When you're writing, like, if I were to basically map out almost like a gradient of our conversation, I'd say like, cursive knowledge, I would almost, I'm being very haphazard here.
I'd say like equal parts left brain, right brain.
And then we sort of moved into kind of a left brain side of the conversation.
And then I think of what you've said about language should be a source of pleasure.
Like I think of that in beauty, right? You talk a lot about beauty also in your photography.
You're very interested in that. That to me is more right brain.
So like when you're writing, when you're actually sitting down at the keyboard, what are some of the more right brain, maybe less verbal concepts that drive your right in?
Well, certainly a visual imagery that is, uh, can I form an image?
Can I read or form an image? Uh, you for me that is sound that that is, uh, Is there some poetry in the prose? read aloud, or at least mumble, or at least mumble to myself, and propose something that's, again, highly recommended writing that I didn't invent it.
Often when you read a draft or hit on a prose, and if you can't articulate it smoothly, that probably your reader won't be mentally sounding it out smoothly either.
The aesthetics sometimes come from even things like, paying attention to the medical structure of language, that is the rhythm.
Oh, tell me about that. There is a regular rhythm to language and that it's not. perfectly, you know, tick-tock, tick-tock, like a metronome.
But there are beets, and if you disrupt it too much, then it does interfere with speech, but it also interferes with reading, even though it's just characters on a page.
Even the aesthetics of a sibilant sounds, generally too many chosen, says, make pros a little unpleasant, and I will often pick a synonym that avoids the sibilate, at least too many sibilants in a row.
I'll often go with alliteration, just because, again, there's a little spark of pleasure, sense of style, sense of style.
Even when you don't want to make it too conspicuous, otherwise it starts to feel forced.
But often, a bit of alliteration can just make the sentence roll past more easily.
Why do you think that you as much as anybody have been the person to kind of stomp your feet kicking scream about the how bad academic writing has been over the years?
Like when I think of who has been like, God, what are we doing?
You sort of been in one of the front runners.
What about it? I mean, besides the obvious, what about it?
It's just bothered you so, so vividly. Yeah, part of it is just the sheer waste that is there's an awful lot of really brilliant work, a lot of really smart people in academia and why are they doing it?
Just to entertain each other and close little circle, I mean, taxpayers pay for it.
It should be accessible. They should give it away.
I should state it informed that it's accessible.
There's also, when even within the profession, there's just an enormous amount of wasted effort and potential for misunderstanding in bad prose.
It's like, if I'm reading, if I have to read something, It's a student paper, it's a paper in my own field, or I'm reviewing a grant proposal, or a peer reviewing a manuscript, or evaluating for someone for tenure.
And if I have to read the same paragraph like five or six times in order to know what they're talking about, for one thing I might get it wrong, then what's the point?
Another is, why should I have to read it five or six times?
They're either doing something else in them.
So there's waste, there's confusion, there's also foregone opportunity for pleasure and beauty.
It's enjoyable to read something that's well crafted and it's annoying to read something that's stilted and tortured and bloated.
The many reasons it does get under my skin when academics devote so much brain power into the scholarship and then just blow off the essential task of letting the world know what you've done.
Yeah, it's a true virus in the modern world.
Yeah, I think a particular interest in it, not just because I do try very hard, even in my academic writing to be clear.
But since I'm someone who actually not just study stuff as an academic, but studies language.
Yeah. I get particularly annoyed at people in the field of linguistics and cycle linguistics because so many of them are such bad writers.
It's like you study language. If what you're studying is what makes a sentence difficult to understand, why don't you pay attention to your own research and make your sentences less hard to understand?
Yeah. What is it that you love so much about children's explanations?
Things like clouds or water vapor, smoke is fire vapor.
Oh, yes. Uh, you do see things. Uh, yeah, that was from my, um, my, uh, grandson.
I mean, it is poetry. It's a new juxtaposition.
There's such a freshness to children's explanations.
Yeah, yeah, because they aren't writing in cliches.
And partly because they haven't accumulated this massive abstractions, like the writers of a few centuries ago who had to grasp for some common image, children Without the decades of acquired jargon from academia, have to appeal to something that they can see and that other people can see.
Yeah. There's a guy who I follow on Twitter who I've really come to like, and in his bio, it says, listen to children.
They haven't forgotten how to see. And I know you, Tuber, and one of the ways that she comes up with her ideas is she has conversations with her friends, kids who just ask these crazy questions, like how deep is the ocean, how how high would a tower need to be in order for us to get to heaven.
And then like I have another friend who when he was a kid he thought that clouds were produced by those little smoke things sort of like chimney.
So he thought that those were like cloud creators.
And there's such a freshness to just how children see and how they talked about things.
And like you said, they're they can't possibly think inside the box because they don't even know the box exists.
Yes, right. And there have been in history various features to remind people of the originality and the freshness of kids.
There was a regular feature. from my childhood called kids say the darndest things from a television host named art link letter, long part of him.
In fact, what has survived him and the feature of the program is the say the darndest things are even the verb the darkness nouns, which you'll often see in adopted in headlines and it's become itself a kind of formula, but he originated it.
Johnny Carson, the long time host of the tonight show, with sometimes have features where he'd read answers, kids answers to questions, to much hilarity.
How does humor factor into all this? Into writing?
Yeah, exactly. and even maybe even the science of humor, like words that are funnier, because you have that great talk from like 10 years ago where you, I'm gonna recommend it.
Yeah, well there's, I guess like everything has an art to it because you don't want to, when it's strained, you get groans instead of laughter.
Yeah. So it has to be appropriate. It can't just be something that has been repeated so often that people have heard it 37 times before.
Right. And humor specifically depends on freshness.
Yeah, it does. And it also depends. Humor does have much in common with good writing.
There's a line from Hamlet, which brevity is the soul of which.
Now, it's a great saying for a number of reasons.
One of them is, even the term soul, as opposed to, is essential for wit, or is important for wit, or even the essence of wit.
Those are ways that we would say it now, but the soul of wit.
You have to think for a minute, the soul being the deepest essence, but it's a mono-syllable, and it has so much resonance that, because that shakes me.
It was a good writer, wasn't he? Yeah, for that guy.
But it's also, it is true, and it's a good example of itself because it is so brief.
It was reiterated centuries later in the famous style manual, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, where Professor Strunk, in lectures at Cornell, the E.B.
White, recalled an interdental book. would say that the first rule of writing is omit needless words.
Now, again, it's a beautiful example of itself because there are no needless words in it.
And he said that sometimes Professor Strunk would be so adamant and so insistent that this was the It's almost the only thing you need to know about writing that he would just not know what to do except repeat it and you'd say, I'll make needless words, I'll make needless words.
And as with brevity is the soul of wit, aside from being an example of itself, it is so true that sometimes When I have to compress an article to fit into some fixed space, especially if I'm writing for a newspaper or magazine, it's a unlike academia where you can blather on with no one telling you to shut up.
When you have to write for a paper, they'll say, sorry, 800 words.
And if it's, you know, 800, 800 and three words, the editor will chop off three words and you don't get to say what they are and it can often mangle the meaning.
So you have to actually learn how to say something in 800 words or however many words it is.
But what I find is, often just the exercise of squeezing it into that that maximum limit just improves the pros as if by magic.
It's like, oh, you know, damn, I have to make this shorter, and I thought I had to sit it perfectly.
And often when you do it, you find, you know, it really has improved in quality having gotten rid of those needless words.
Partly it's because of mental effort. namely, every syllable, every word is more cognitive processing by your reader.
You can get the same message in quicker.
That's often less work. But it also makes it aesthetically more pleasing.
You have to work within the constraints of the English language, the the the melody, the rhythm, the music of the language.
It forces you into often into concrete language instead of wooly idioms and and cliches.
Brevity of the soul of wood is good. It kind of just hit me how good of a line that is.
It's such a good line. I've heard that a thousand times, but it never it never punched me in the chest like it just did.
I got to ask. Sorry, the ways in abroad it up is in humor.
It's a soul of which. I mean, wit used to mean a lot more than just, you know, haha.
It meant trenchness and appropriateness.
But wit in the sense of just raw humor. That's something that comedians know.
You pair down the jokes, you pair down the lines.
When you're using humor, the shorter, the prettier, the funnier.
If you drag it out, then you're paying money.
You're paying money. You can step on your own punchline.
You can telegraph the punchline. So I went to Rockefeller Center the other day, and there's this, like a big thing, a stone.
And John D. Rockefeller is talking about his theory of society and the good life.
It was just remarkably well written, remarkably well written.
And then it's the same thing with the Declaration of Independence.
There's just some beautiful lines in that, right?
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
It's just beautiful writing. And what do you make of how old they're writing?
It seems like when people think about it, it's like harder to read.
Thank God that writing's gotten so much clearer and easier to read.
But at the same time, it does feel like a kind of beauty and poetry, a kind of reverence that I have for the language itself has been stripped away from the English language at times.
Do you sometimes feel that? Even again, Rockefeller is a good example because he did not go down in history as a pro stylist.
Yes, no exactly. Thank you. Thank you. That was a very important part of that point.
This was the CEO. He was a oil magnet. Yeah, right.
And likewise, I have a quote from Thomas Edison in the Enlightenment now on how the electricity will liberate women.
Right. And it's just beautifully written.
Beautifully written. And this is a guy who spent hours with, you know, filaments and life light bulbs.
And he could, but he could write like an angel, Herbert Spencer, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
That's a great example. You know, Dark Charles Darwin.
Yep. All these people who are not themselves professional writers, they had something else, but they were very good at it.
So it's an interesting question. I think one reason is they were trained themselves on the classics, on great works of literature, probably because for many of them there wasn't the telephone radio level-owned texting social media, the way that you presented yourself was through your prose.
And so you cultivated it the same way you kind of arranged yourself in a mirror.
Other people, how other people viewed you.
But you had this stop because also that they were educated on the classics.
They had many good examples to draw on. But then the third reason is one that came up earlier in our conversation.
Namely, since they didn't have the benefit of decades and decades of abstractions and cliches and they were kind of exploring virgin territory. conveying new ideas, and they couldn't easily reach for a canned cliche.
They had to put new ideas into forms that their readers and listeners could understand, and that forced them to draw on visual images and metaphors and vivid expressions and locations.
And that is that There's been a process that's been going on for longer than a century called informalization, where you can see it in dress, where men no longer wear hats and women don't wear gloves.
And sometimes you look at a picture of someone on a hike from a century ago.
And the men are wearing ties and the women are wearing long dresses.
And they're going hiking. It's inconceivable to us.
The fact that people used to address each other with, you know, Mr. And Mrs. And we're all on our first name basis.
I got in trouble in the third grade for calling my teacher.
I went to detention for calling my teacher by our first name.
And that would not happen now. That was certainly familiar to me from my childhood.
I would be unthinkable. I wouldn't have gotten that detention.
It's been like 20 years and I still feel the shame that I felt that moment.
It's crazy. It just wouldn't have occurred to us.
You couldn't have done that in a million years.
The fact that taboo language profanities are commonly woven into speech, which again would have been unthinkable a century ago.
But there is a process of greater familiarity of less hierarchy, partly as a byproduct of democratization, the erosion of traditional hierarchies of class and education.
There's a kind of romantic ethos where authenticity, spontaneity are valued as opposed to putting on heirs thinking carefully before you do anything.
All of these have led to fancy language being seen as more pompous stilted distancing, whereas the cultural value has changed towards spontaneity, intimacy, naturalness, authenticity.
So I think many of us in having, if we had to put The effort into crafting prose the way they may have a century or two centuries ago would fill, oh, people are thinking I'm being too fancy.
And you might even perceive you as being too fancy.
And as a result, the conversational vernacular as opposed to the elevated, the well-crafted, has come to characterize modern prose.
So I've got to ask, you were talking about being able to pull a cliche or an abstraction.
AI takes that completely to the next level.
And do you feel like AI then enhances our almost inability to think originally for lack or better word, like does it keep the trend that we're seeing or are LLMs like a new form and then maybe actually create some new way of communicating altogether?
Yeah, the output of LLMs is peculiar in one sense.
It's well written in the sense that it tends not to be in academics, in jargon, in the sentence structure tends to be pretty sound.
Pretty sound. Plain and sound. Even the progression of ideas tends to be orderly.
They tend to be introductory sentence and concluding sentence.
So in that sense, it's good writing. It's bad in the sense that it is so generic and prosaic.
And you could almost recognize the output of a large language model.
It's so banal. Now, perhaps it'd be trained, and perhaps if you've prompted it, don't be prosaic, don't be plain.
It'd be interesting to see whether it would come up with any kind of style or freshness.
But it's not the way it's designed. It's designed as a mashup, as a pastiche, of literally billions of examples out there.
And it's an interesting question why it should be so At least why its pro style should be sound.
I think that's the best you can say about it.
Whereas the pro style of most academics, most lawyers, most bureaucrats, is not sound.
Why is it better? One possibility has just been hammered into shape through the fine tuning and the feedback that is instead of just regurgitating an amalgam of the reinforcement learning.
The reinforcement learning and the stuff they don't really talk about much but that might be essential that is they're real human beings who force it into a five paragraph essay.
The other is that And this is completely speculative.
But we know in visual beauty, often a composite is more attractive than the elements that went into the composite.
So that if you take a bunch of faces and you morph them together, the non-existent human being that comes out of the morphing is more handsome or prettier than all of the men's faces and women's faces that went into it.
Really? Take a high school yearbook and you mashed together the several hundred faces and the result is pretty attractive.
Is that right? Yeah. Now, whether that can be true of prose style, that is that if you were to Eliminate all of the God-awful convoluted constructions and just came up with a generic sentence structure.
It wouldn't be beautiful, but it would be clear.
That's a hypothesis. You've written nine books, you're working on your 10th now.
With LLMs and the way they're going, if you were to almost rewrite those books starting now, how would you have written those books differently? me knowing what we know about uh... you know what we know about our lands and also your sense of where the world is going and how it's changing how the world of writing is changing would you have written the same books uh... probably not i think that i think i'd have to give greater uh... wait to the power of abstracting uh... patterns from massive amounts of uh... input which in the uh...
The approach that I was kind of trained in and that I then developed a computational cognitive science, chompskin linguistics, classic AI.
It was much more organized around rules, algorithms, logic, kind of logical programming.
It was hard to imagine how with enough just sheer input and training, a neural and associative neural network could extract sensible ideas and pros out of this huge unstructured massive input.
Now, I don't think that shows that the human Mind is a large language model because it would be the equivalent of a child listening to language for 30,000 years before they could put it for a sentence.
And also kids don't just need to have massive amounts of text pour into them.
They also are in a situated in a world where they can figure out what the people talking to them are trying to say.
And they're interacting with a world and that's a very different style of learning.
They're just processing massive amounts of text.
But still, I certainly would have had to reconcile the intelligence of large language models with human intelligence, with more attention to the power of pattern extraction from large input corpora than I did.
Well, thanks very much for doing this. Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
