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122 sats \ 19 replies \ @Scoresby 10h \ on: Stacker Saloon
If everyone is using AI to summarize long documents so they can understand what was written in them, why aren't people just writing what they mean to say in less words?
From #846510:
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I think it's perception of value. Same reason book publishers want book >200 pages. The average person measures legitimacy in the laziest way.
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Meaning you think most writing could be shortened?
Clearly, if I ask chat for a summary of Sofia Petrovna, and treat it as having read the book, I'm missing out. I'm sure nobody does that.
I'm sure much writing can be shortened, but I'm curious if writers will start to feel pressure to write more concisely. Will human writing trend towards the un-summarizable? Maximally condensed writing that doesn't require a summary.
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related paragraph from Good Writing by Paul Graham:
How could trying to make sentences sound good help you do that? The clue to the answer is something I noticed 30 years ago when I was doing the layout for my first book. Sometimes when you're laying out text you have bad luck. For example, you get a section that runs one line longer than the page. I don't know what ordinary typesetters do in this situation, but what I did was rewrite the section to make it a line shorter. You'd expect such an arbitrary constraint to make the writing worse. But I found, to my surprise, that it never did. I always ended up with something I liked better.I don't think this was because my writing was especially careless. I think if you pointed to a random paragraph in anything written by anyone and told them to make it slightly shorter (or longer), they'd probably be able to come up with something better.
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I think if you pointed to a random paragraph in anything written by anyone and told them to make it slightly shorter (or longer), they'd probably be able to come up with something better.
I don't agree with this. For me, at least, there's this thing where, after I have written a thing and revised it a good deal, sometimes I can't change it.
Not that I don't want to, but further revision becomes circular and gets me exactly back to where I was. I've changed a passage and changed it and changed it and sat on it for a few weeks and then tried again and ended up with word for word what I started with.
Arbitrary constraints are good and helpful, though.
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Free of waste is so fuzzy though. I went through a time where I tried to make my writing as concise and condensed as possible. Some of it was good, but I think when I've been given myself more freedom with extra words, I've ended up with better. Were they unnecessary words? I don't know.
But with ai's presence, I think we will see pressure on writers (at least those who want to write to be read) to shorten their work.
Hmmm. Saying that, I realize that it may only apply to internet writing (posts, articles, comments and such), novelists and other long form writing may be exempt because conveying info is not the primary goal. Something like this.
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Related to this, I've found that with most non-fiction books you can get 90% of the value out of it just by reading the blurb, the introduction, the chapter headings, and a few reviews.
Deeper dive is only really necessary if you want to engage with the book at an academic level (pulling out quotes, making citations, etc)
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At least for serious non-fiction books, I think academic engagement is a big part of it.
If you want to be taken seriously, you need to fill in all the details and cover all the gaps. Otherwise you open yourself up to attacks. So a lot of the "filler", so to speak, is covering all your bases and making sure you address issues from multiple angles to minimize your attack surface.
But in terms of just getting your big picture idea out to a layperson, yeah usually the introductory chapter is enough to make your point.
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Filling the papers with useless words or padding the papers out is a trick in academia. Nobody else uses it. Try doing it in a business communication and see what happens.
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Having built AI summary interfaces for clients, I can say this stuff is not as simplistic as people think. And only the most simplistic analysis could conclude that a summary is equivalent to a full treatment.
A document might serve many audiences, some of whom want more or less detail. Sometimes the summary is enough but you want the detail there in case you want to dive in on some aspect or another.
Maybe you want the summary to know if it's worth reading in full.
And summaries are not one-size-fits-all. When I ask AI to summarize something, I ask it to pull out specific things I care about. You might summarize it differently because you care about other things.
A summary is a lens. It distorts. It also magnifies. Lensed views are useful, but they are not the original.
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