[callc]

Recently I’ve been thinking about the text form of communication, and how it plays with our psychology. In no particular order here’s what I think:

1. Text is a very compressed / low information method of communication.

2. Text inherently has some “authority” and “validity”, because:

3. We’ve grown up to internalize that text is written by a human. Someone spend the effort to think and write down their thoughts, and probably put some effort into making sure what they said is not obviously incorrect.

Intimately this ties into LLMs on text being an easier problem to trick us into thinking that they are intelligent than an AI system in a physical robot that needs to speak and articulate physically. We give it the benefit of the doubt.

I’ve already had some odd phone calls recently where I have a really hard time distinguishing if I’m talking to a robot or a human…

[GMoromisato]

This is absolutely why LLMs are so disruptive. It used to be that a long, written paper was like a proof-of-work that the author thought about the problem. Now that connection is broken.

One consequence, IMHO, is that we won't value long papers anymore. Instead, we will want very dense, high-bandwidth writing that the author stakes consequences (monetary, reputational, etc.) on its validity.

[Avicebron]

The Methyl 4-methylpyrrole-2-carboxylate vs ∂²ψ/∂t² = c²∇²ψ distinction. My bet is on Methyl 4-methylpyrrole-2-carboxylate being more actionable. For better or worse.