Post

I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.

It's a struggle, but it's gratifying once things start coming together. What I have on paper tonight is a clean expression of idea I didn't have well-formed when I began this morning. Some people think we should hand off this painstaking form of labor to LLMs and get back to doing science.

In my case, this painstaking labor in the process through which the science gets done. Science isn't measuring stuff in a lab. It's thinking deeply, extracting the heart of idea from the soup of thoughts running through my mind, molding it, and finding a way to communicate that idea to others.

There's an attitude that if you use an LLM to do a bit of grunt writing, it's OK as long as you honestly review it. "Yup! That's exactly the itinerary I would've written" or whatever. But people are missing (and I think maybe don't even know) that sometimes writing IS thinking. You have to do it.

The process of figuring out how to express one’s thoughts improves one’s ability to express future ideas in addition to forcing evaluation that may lead to further insights. George Saunders said something like: in the act of writing you discover things missing from the original idea.

That's like a Plato quote: doesn't matter if he actually said it, it's true! I'd love a citation if you've got one though, I can use it in class.

Sometime this year i started to do this with my blogging. Instead of just writing out my post long form and asking the LLM to copyedit & also critique and suggest rewrites based on that, I started writing in points & asking it to expand. Only this year it started to mostly work (1)

Often it would be short x/bluesky ranks expanded into full blog post. I would use llms to iterate, highlighting parts I want changed or i would add <url> and prompt something like use argument from there in this section & llms these days I find pretty much get what I mean (2)

(As perhaps I am wasting yours now, but you know what you're getting into when you open a microblogging platform. You're lucky I'm not posting pictures of my dogs.)

here to fulfill the promise

That took me numerous seconds to orient what I was looking at. That's a very amorphous dog!

I think the most interesting part of writing is figuring out what you’re trying to write. You sit down with an idea of what you want to write…and it’s broken and clunky and flawed and every attempt to make it flow is awful and slowly you pare it back and re analyse what you’re ACTUALLY trying to say