[isolatedsystem]

This article is visibly, annoyingly, distractingly in threes.

> It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.

> but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked.

> A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions...

> A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it...

> There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts

> The belief that by naming a goal, you are closer to achieving it. That by storing a thought, you have understood it. That by filing a fact, you have earned the right to deploy it.

> ...the fear of losing track, of forgetting, of not being caught up.

> Nietzsche burned early drafts. Michelangelo destroyed sketches. Leonardo left thousands of pages unfinished.

[tolerance]

I'm starting to notice this style a lot. Apparently there's a formal term for it, but I didn't begin to notice it until I started using ChatGPT regularly.

Granted, there are people who didn't notice the utility of the em dash until it became apparent in ChatGPT's responses, but aside from either device there is a certain vibe I'm starting to pick up from a lot of writing online that mirrors AI writing although you can't just call it that, especially if people enjoy it.

A kind of abstract solipsism that only resonates unless you consent to a platonic relationship with the author through their writing. About as close as you can get to reading something written with the aid of AI, I'd imagine.

[alwa]

I choose to think optimistically, in the same way as I did when smartphones put a camera in everyone’s pocket: suddenly, “bokeh” is a term with purchase in the mainstream! “Portrait mode” for every adorable baby pic! A ring light in every makeshift bedroom-dresser studio!

Everybody’s participating now, and taking pride in using more of the visual language of photography for themselves. That makes us all richer!

Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-constructed triplet, the drama of a “—“, and the muscular power of a strong active voice (…that’s three, right?)—aren’t we all richer for it?

[gjm11]

On the other hand:

> Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. (4, though I suppose you could argue it's 1 + 3)

> But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. (2, albeit with a 3 inside)

> Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories. (2)

> The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. (2 with a 3 inside again)

> It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders. We do not retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational. They forget on purpose. (4, 2, 2)

I think the author (either in person, or via some LLM that did much of the actual writing) is just fond of this sort of rhetorical repetition, and it happens that if you're doing that then 3 is often the best number. (Because 2 may not be enough to establish the rhythm, and 4 may be enough to feel overdone.)

I do think there's too much of it here, and specifically too many threes, but I think the underlying fault is "too much parallelism" and the too-many-threes are a symptom.

[jtwoodhouse]

It’s called the Rule of Three. It’s a good writing practice, but it can be overdone.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)

[warpspin]

If she tended to have that rhythm in her notes, too, no wonder it was two-thirds hoarded junk.

SCNR

[StefanBatory]

I don't understand why people are saying it's LLM.

To me it's more of a stream of consciousness style of writing.

[gwern]

I'm fascinated by all these comments I see on HN and elsewhere where people will deny that a blatantly LLM-written article was not LLM-written, including cases where people praise it for not being LLM-written (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44384138 ). Like, leave aside the issue of whether it's a good or bad thing (I've been doing generative text NNs since 2015, so I'm mostly for it, when done well), I'm just interested in the inability to notice.

Skimming your comments, you, for example, do not seem to be illiterate or a bad writer at all despite being ESL (although you overuse the double-sentence structure in your comments), but you describe this as being 'stream of consciousness' (it is not even close to that, look at an actual example like Joyce) and seem to think it is fine.

So I'm puzzled how. Why isn't it obvious to you that the style is so mode-collapsed ( https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/preference-lear... )? Do you also not notice how all the ChatGPT images are cat-urine yellow? (I've been asking people in person whether they have noticed this in the Bay Area and I'd say <20% of enthusiastic generative AI users have noticed.) What are you thinking when you read OP? Does it all just round off to 'content', and you don't notice the repetition because you treat it all as a single author? Are you just skimming and not reading it?

[XiphiasX]

That’s because it’s LLM.

[crtified]

Verbose, literate writers wrote like LLMs long before LLMs existed.

We taught them.

One irony now being that that form of skilled writing is inevitably and sometimes falsely accused of being machine-written.

[Veen]

The rule of threes is a widely known rhetorical guideline. Some people do take it a bit far, though.