Tag: understanding

Thoughts on Letting AI Write For You [en]

I was planning to write another blog post. I may still write it – or not. But as I opened my computer, I had a pile of open tabs. I’d clicked on a bunch of articles of Daniel Miessler’s blog for possible further reading. Daniel is the guy behind LifeOS (previously PAI), a personal AI framework (infrastructure) I have written about and spent many (many!) hours battling with since April.

It had been a pleasant surprise to discover Daniel’s blog was active, and even more that it was readable, as most of what I’ve seen “from him” these last months is in the GitHub repo or PAI/LifeOS documentation and rather AI-sloppy, sometimes even to the extent that it sounds like his DA (Digital Assistant) posting on his behalf. (I say this with all due respect, the thinking behind PAI/LifeOS is genius.)

Not so with the blog, clearly well-written by a human (see, by the way, his AI Influence Level system, something in the same vein as AI Labels).

So I fell in the trap of looking at the topmost open tab before closing it, and I started reading, and I was even more pleasantly (ephorically?) surprised to read this:

I value text because I see it as one step away from thought.

I believe thinking is the one thing we should be careful not to outsource, and I worry what this idea smuggles in is a major step toward making our creations opaque to humans. Not just AI’s creations, but ours as well.

The reason I value Paul Graham so much is because of the idea compression work that goes into writing super clean prose. It’s difficult to write clearly because it requires thinking clearly.

Daniel Miessler, “Text is Thought, and Thought is Holy“

I worry that if we vibe-think to AI and have it spit out amazing HTML, we’re instantly disconnected from the idea. Like where did the idea go? It started as vibes and got put through a woodchipper and turned into someone else’s HTML.

I see this happen so much. A lot of writing is a way of thinking, it’s not “path to an output”. And I think that when thinking is missing in the process, we feel it, which is why AI Slop and even many “decently AI-generated texts” are so distasteful to read.

Because the “thought” they contain is not coherent, not organic, and we cannot access it comfortably through the text we’re reading. We need to do extra work to try to get at it – and sometimes it’s not even there. Just like “over-optimised” administrative processes end up outsourcing a large part of the work they’re supposed to do to the people they should be serving, “over-optimised” text production outsources part of its work to the reader.

We could maybe apply this analysis to badly constructed, hastily-written reports whose sections have been copy-pasted to death and which lack overall integrity and structure.

Jens-Christian wrote about this too in “Keep Your Voice“.

Daniel again:

I just feel like if you didn’t put the hard thinking and writing work into the original idea, and then maintain it in a format that’s easy for humans to read and edit, then you have somehow surrendered something Holy to the machines. I say this as a total AI maximalist.

This reminds me of two things that came upon my radar recently.

The first is this post by Alex Hillman about how generative AI has broken the social contract by upending the balance of effort from producing to consuming content. What used to be expensive (writing, creating a song, shooting a video, etc.) is now super cheap, in terms of effort (if not tokens). Sure, we used to have content farms and the like, but it was still a lot of manual labour. Now I can feed a one-line prompt to an AI model, leave the computer running and come back to a whole book of content. Sloppy, but a lot of words.

Over time, the world we live in has shifted more and more in the direction of “too much content, not enough brain time to absorb it”. It’s something humans have been complaining of since before the internet. But like everything, it’s speeding up like a hockey stick. The democratisation of online publishing, and social media on its heels, has brought in another height of cognitive overload and collective anguish about there being “too much stuff out there”. And now that more and more of this stuff is produced by machines that never need to sleep or eat (except a prompt or two), the overall quality of what is out there is going down as fast as its quantity is going up.

This reminds me somewhat of my thoughts about audio and video versus text, back in the day. If you record a 30-minute video and post it online, it took you 30 minutes, but it will also take each person who watches it 30 minutes. If you spend 30 minutes writing up your message, it will take the people reading it much less time.

Because what has not changed is the finitude of human existence. Not only is our time limited, but also our energy and ability to read, watch, learn, concentrate. This is, now more than ever, our bottleneck. Producing something today is pretty much worthless. Producing more is senseless. What has value is: does it enter somebody’s mind in a meaningful way?

There is a link between this and the AI brain fry explanation that I referenced some time back. AI has no limits on the concurrent projects it can work on, and no limits on how much content it can produce. But we have limits on how much delegation we can supervise, how many open loops we can stand, and how much content we can absorb.

And this brings me to the second thing: understanding cannot be outsourced. Andrej Karpathy now famously said you can outsource thinking, but not understanding. A lot of what AI produces does not help us understand anything. It gives the illusion of opening the door to that, but it’s more often than not just word froth. Reading is about understanding. It’s about meaning. There is no shortcut to that. Only you can learn and understand so that you later know.

When Karpathy says you can outsource thinking: well, some of it. But what we writers-as-thinkers know very well is that the thinking that we do when we write is the kind of thinking that leads to understanding. Saying that thinking can be outsourced is a slippery slope because it drags down a chunk of understanding with it.

Writing is thinking is understanding.

Well, that was the first open tap. 27 more to go. (Just kidding. I’m going to close them. I might write my Paléo Festival blog post tomorrow.)

Thinking Too Much [en]

[fr] J'ai un peu tendance à penser trop, et à ne pas vivre assez. Aujourd'hui, avec le côté un peu compulsif de la consommation d'infos en ligne (hello, Facebook!) je crois que je suis retombée dans ce piège.

At some point during my young life, in my mid twenties, it dawned on me that I was thinking too much for the amount of life I had racked up until then. Barely post-adolescent brains will go a bit overboard, of course, but this has happened to me a couple of times since. In my mid-thirties, for example: I had spent a lot of energy trying to figure out the world, people, relationships, myself, life, death and the like. I did study philosophy and history of religions, after all.

Green

Today, I’m wondering if I’m not thinking too much — again. But it’s taking a different shape. Although I’ve long been skeptical about all the alarm bells ringing about information overload, I have come to believe that there is something to say about our access to, and relationship with, all the information now at the tip of our fingers. And it’s clear to me that there is something compulsive in the way I go after information.

This was the case for me before the internet. I’ve always been an avid reader. I’ve always loved understanding things. I collected stamps. Then fonts, and even AD&D spells (don’t laugh). At university, I loved immersing myself in a topic, surrounded with piles of books and articles, going through them for hours and seeing a big muddled mess of ideas start to make sense. So, imagine when the internet came along. As far as my academic life goes, that was largely when I was working on my dissertation.

My compulsive search for information has served my life well when I have managed to harness it for concrete projects (write a dissertation; publish a blog post; gain expertise). I even wondered if there was a way to use it to earn money some way. But today, I feel it is leading me around in circles on Facebook, mainly. There is so much interesting stuff to read out there. I still want to understand the world, people, life, love, politics, beliefs, education, relationships, society… And I will never be done. But the internet allows me to not stop.

My tendency to “think too much, live not enough” has found an ally in the  compulsive consumption of online media.

Time to think less, and accept I can’t figure everything out.

Just because something is easy to measure doesn't mean it's important (Seth Godin) [en]

[fr] Citation du jour de Seth Godin, dont je suis en train de devenir fan: "Ce n'est pas parce qu'une chose est facile à mesurer qu'elle est importante." (Contexte: nombre de visiteurs d'un blog/site.)

After having abandoned Google Reader during the crunch weeks preceeding Going Solo Lausanne, I heard about Feedly, installed it, and started to love it. (I’ll blog about it in more detail in a few weeks, but it’s a Firefox extension which piggybacks upon Google Reader.)

With Feedly, I’ve started reading blogs again — and also blogs that I didn’t read regularly. More and more, I end up reading posts by Seth Godin, and I’m becoming a fan. A few weeks ago, How to Organize the Room but in clear writing something I’d noticed before (atmosphere and interaction are better if people are a bit cramped). Saying thanks in a conference presentation gave me inspiration for how to do things properly next time around. And today, in Who vs. how many, he picks up on Robert Scoble’s post against the rush to audience and provides us with this “quote of the day” gem:

Just because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s important.

Seth Godin

This reminds me of what I was trying to say in Twitter Metrics: Let’s Remain Scientific, Please!, when I got annoyed by numbers thrown about under the assumption that they meant anything. (The post is mainly a video because I couldn’t type at the time, but I’ve been told it was well worth watching.)

Diving Into Something New [en]

[fr] Pour se familiariser avec un sujet nouveau, il faut lire, et même si on ne comprend pas tout, continuer à lire. Au bout d'un moment, les choses commencent à tomber en place, et on peut reprendre avec plus de succès les premiers textes que l'on avait compris que partiellement.

I remember very clearly when I understood this: I was working on my coursework about gnosticism. I didn’t know anything about the subject and had a pile of about 10 books to go through.

I started reading, and felt completely lost: I couldn’t really understand much. But by the time I reached the middle of the pile of books, things started to make sense. I went back to the first books, and they were making sense too.

To learn about something new, one method is to dive in, and just read on even if you don’t understand. At some point, it will sink in, come together, and you’ll start to get it.

Something about Agile popped up this morning when I clicked my Google Reader “Next” bookmarklet this morning. This isn’t the first time I hear about Agile, and I have a rough idea what it is, but I thought that I should probably read up a bit on it. So I’m reading this case study, even though not everything makes sense. At some point, it will. I’m just starting.

Note: don’t misunderstand. I’m not heading for a career change into software development. I just want to understand more.

Most People Are Multilingual [en]

[fr] Une clarification de ce que j'entends par "la plupart des gens sont multilingues". Multilingues au sens large.

In a comment to my last post, Marie-Aude says I’m being a bit optimistic by stating that “most people are multilingual”. I’d like to clarify what I mean by that.

The “most people are multilingual” thing is not from me. I’ve seen it mentioned in varied settings, though I still need to find systematic studies to back it up (let me know if you have any handy).

It all depends how you define “multilingual”. If you define it in a broad sense (ie, school-level passive understanding of a language counts), then a little thinking shows it’s not that “optimistic”. Here is what would make somebody multilingual:

  • immigration, of course
  • learning a foreign language at school
  • living in a country with different linguistic groups.

Some examples:

  • in India, many people are fluent in their mother tongue, and to some extent in one of the countries official languages: Hindi or English
  • in the US, think about the huge immigrant population; the whole country was built upon immigration, come to think of it; in the bus in San Francisco, I often heard more foreign languages than English
  • again in the US (because the English-speaking world is seen as a big “monolingual” block), think of the increasingly important hispanic/latino population (people who will often have knowledge of both English and Spanish)
  • in most European countries, people learn at least one foreign language in school — even if it’s not used, most people retain at least some passive knowledge of it; I’m not sure about Asia, Africa, Southern America, Australia: does anybody know?

So, I don’t think it’s that optimistic to say most people are multilingual. To say that most people are “perfectly multilingual”, of course, is way off the mark. But most people understand more than one language, at least to some extent.