My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read.
I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1].
> Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
> > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Orwell's version goes:
> > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
> First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.
> The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it was supposed to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the wise who earned the bread. Not the men of understanding who gained the riches. Not the men of skill who gained the favor. And here is what I found: to any story of success, there is an element of unpredictability and chance.
(There are really just two possible outcomes: either the article is right or in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this, as in humans learning from mediamatically reinforced human feedback.)
I already notice LLM speech patterns in people that use them a whole lot. If you speak more than one language I recommend talking to LLMs in a language that you don't use when speaking to people.
I have a tendency to switch between different languages when interacting with LLM depending on the language of the most likely sources the LLM will pull. It's interesting because the llm speech patterns vary from language to language. And I am much faster at noticing LLM generated text in English (which I use 70% of the time) than in French or Spanish.
In Greek they are still atrociously bad, still feels like they translate an English thought. Nevertheless, the etymological insights they can give on words or Ancient Greek passages is making reading the ancients really fun.
The most frustrating one is when it does the papering over analysis and adding pushback to seem helpful. No, there shouldn't be a spot "where you pushback" unless it makes sense and responds to someone's concern!
Like with an LLM I would rewind the conversation. What do I do, shame them?
I am a bit of a luddite in this domain and have so far managed to resist the lure of using the generator to expand my thoughts, and I still catch myself writing "it's not just an X it's a Y" and other generator type tells. If it infecting my patterns it is totally entering the wider subconscious as "How to write" (Sighs)
That's the flaw in RLHF: constructs tagged as effective or sophisticated speech become templates, are increasingly used out of context (e.g., "not just A, not just B, but C" is usually meant to provide some synthesis and further the progress of the text) and suffer from significant overexposure. (And gone is the em-dash…)
It's bad in and of itself the way LLMs use it. They separate it into a weird declaration when it's usually something you'd say at the beginning and/or end of a paragraph or passage where you're making a case for that statement.
It's part of how LLMs often seem to repeat the same thing over and over again. Most arguments are X is Y (and the others are X is not Y, or X is likely Y), and LLMs lean on "X is Y" because it is the most distilled form of that argument - a thesis minus the meat. Also "This is not a Y, this is a Z."
They're just thesis sentences inserted in inappropriate locations. The reason it makes them overdramatic is because separated from the argument, they seem like they should be premises. Conclusions without premises have the feeling of demands.
The question is: how did your test reader respond to the version without the "It's not just an X, it's a Y." ? Perhaps the discussion went:
Test Reader: I got confused when you started talking about X as though it were a Y.
Author: But it is a Y. I should flag that up, where I introduce it.
Alternatively, the test reader comments
The villains monologue wasn't unhinged enough. He says that making himself universal dictator is democratic because he gives people what they secretly desire. I feel he would express himself with more empty rhetoric.
Author: Agreed. I'll add "It's not just democratic, it's not just super-democratic, it's ultra-democratic!!!"
Test Reader: Scary!
The error lies in using "It's not just an X it's a Y." for emphasis rather than to ward off a likely misreading.
That one starts with a glaring hallucination "he didn't understand, nobody understood, not then or now...". But the second part is IMO better than the Ecclasiast, which has outdated phrasing ("nor yet riches to men of understanding").
> When I look under the sun, it's not the swift who win races, nor the strong who win battles, nor the wise who earn bread, nor the smart who gain riches, nor the skilled who gain favor. Ultimately, it's the lucky; every contest has a degree of unpredictability and chance.
The construction of meaning is totally distorted, though. In the original, the first part is entirely motivated by the conclusion, and puts emphasis to this by a crescendo of counterintuitive observations. This is what made this memorable phrasing. In the version suggested here, there's just an incompetence attributed to the original author, underlined by repetitive phrasing, so that the supposed speaker may claim all the glory by uttering an observation, which is in and by itself rather banal. You wont think about this twice. Thus, the entire construct ends in a whimper (so it may fit the template) and there isn't really any reason to put it that way, or to say this, in the first place. Its perceived purpose may be rather to occupy space and time (at the cost of the recipient.)
Of course. As we're told to prepare for the new times… :-)
On a more serious note, I think, if we're going to criticise the kind of distortions LLMs do to language and the construction of meaning, we should be able to come up with similar productions, just to demonstrate where and how this goes wrong.
(Much like the early Wittgenstein pointed out some constructs and declared, this is not a meaningful sentence, in fact, it's not a sentence, at all. And went on to define the limits for what a meaningful proposition may convey and what it can not, what we may expect and hope for in an expression and what we may not. In other words, is there even enough in the toolset of LLMs to construct meaning? Is traversing a semantic field in an apparently well-formed sentence already meaning or is it not?)
> two years, we will be all writing and talking like this
I have seen kids talking like youtubers: the top 10 things I like, or what I need to do before I die (the kids is 9 years old), ... not great (like repeating ad tunes or slogans) but not as bad as AI bullshit-talk.
My only hope is that AI bullshit-talk is so boring and predictable that it has low impact in our speech. And looking at what other commenters say boring and insufferable seems to be the case.
>iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Orwell himself routinely ignores it, even in the first sentence of the essay:
>Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
The second clause could be rewritten in active voice by changing it to "but people generally assume". But this would make the writing worse, and Orwell, as a good writer, probably didn't even consider the option of making it worse, and therefore didn't notice the passive voice.
Passive voice is an essential tool for all good writers of English. I always give the example of the opening of Pride and Prejudice [0]:
>It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
The joke doesn't work in active voice. If you attribute this acknowledgement to some specific group of people then it's simply false, not a comedic exaggeration.
Technically, I think, that first sentence, by Austen, uses a passive participle but does not use a passive voice for any finite verb. I don't think that advice to avoid "the passive" is intended to apply to that situation.
For example, nobody would seriously suggest avoiding the passive participle in a sentence like "Put the broken plate in the bin". ("Put the plate that someone broke into the bin"?)
There's a rather simple reason this is so: A thought is typically most powerfully expressed in a sentence that puts the most surprising or notable word last, immediately before the period. Ideally, without any qualifying adjective/adverb.
And "... a wife." really turns on the ears, no?
So advice to prefer active voice is not wrong -- but the skilled writer adds other values into the balance.
> It's a bit of a pet peeve when people include quotes on a blog post without linking or otherwise references their source.
You’re peeved with good reason. It’s the blog equivalent of posting a screenshot of an article to social media. People, please post your sources! In the age of misinformation, that’s more important than ever.
> "My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text."
I saw a comment on HN that that was roughly "re: ChatGPT, when I write one sentence and I get back three screens of lecture, I don't consider that a 'chat'".
I consider that comment often when prompting Claude and hoping for a two line response and getting an "it's important to note that <blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah>".
> I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Ultra-concise: Talent and effort don't guarantee success; luck and timing happen to everyone.
> Punchy: The best don't always win—chance rules us all.
> Modernized: Skill, speed, and wisdom don't decide the outcome; everyone is at the mercy of time and circumstance.
I feel like it did pretty well, and made the point more clearly than either the original or Orwell's rework (Gemini 3.8 Flash).
Or, as the version I've used for 30 years goes: "It's better to be lucky than good." I do like Reagan's addition, though: "But I find the harder I work, the luckier I get."
Concise helps clarity, but notice what still is lost. The original version used multiple perspectives to illustrate the point. It invites consideration, putting yourself in the shoes of each person before the "twist" is applied to each. It makes the point more visceral and memorable because it is (slightly) lived instead of told.
This is the difference between writing to convince a broad audience and writing to explain a point. AI can summarize well but until we can contextualize a richer framework for human comprehension, LLMs will struggle to resonate.
I find the original poorly written, and it did not, for me, invite any consideration, because it didn't make much sense. "Bread to the wise"? "Riches to men of understanding?" Why would someone wise get bread, or someone with understanding be rich? What's the difference between "wise" and "men of understanding", anyway?
LLMs didn't write "It's better to be lucky than good.", but I find it both easier to understand and easier to remember than the biblical version.
Here on HN, I've noticed that I pro-actively defend myself against things I think will be said in counter to my comments. I concluded it's being trained into me.
Alternatively, I've been banging on against the same things that I see as insane so long that I know all the objections.
Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. It does make me get a clear mental image from the very first word. It leaves little room for roaming and guessing, as it firmly nails elements one by one, and, by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I get the full meaning almost immediately.
This sentence is not randomly written; this is crafted with intention. TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand. I seriously like it.
Perhaps, this is more about context -- which style to use in which situation. I'm only guessing here, but, since Orwell is offering an interpretation, he probably chose to be more clinical. He probably had a point to make and didn't want to risk vagueness up-front.
To be gentle, that some here are impressed by Orwell's intentionally bad sentence indicates that they need to improve their reading and writing skills. Using complex words where they don't introduce additional precision or meaning to fake intellectualism is something basic that writing classes warn against.
Orwell's bad sentence uses harder words than it needs to, but it reworks the bible verse into direct claims.
Needing better reading skills to understand the bible verse just shows that it's not a good way to communicate. If an HNer wrote like the bible verse, you'd find them insufferably ostentatious. Just like you wouldn't want Claude to use literary flair when you're asking why your production database stopped working.
If you dumb down Orwell's sentence back to simpler terms, it's a point much better communicated than the bible verse.
Frankly the bickering in this thread is due to the original HN comment choosing a bad comparison because both sentences are poorly communicated for different reasons in this context: you wouldn't want Claude to write either.
I'll point out that the bible verse was a translation for the common folk of their central religious document in an age where Christianity was dominant. Being able to read it smoothly is a very low bar to clear for the educated.
When I read the Orwell's version, I immediately had the same feeling I had when reading mathematical proofs. I hate so much to hunt the preceding text for anaphora resolution... It's just such a bad and pretentious way of writing. It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
It's like having to sit through a party with acclaimed academics: every single one is so full of themselves, they will constantly one-up each other by belittling everyone in their workplace s.a. to make you feel how great of an intellect they possess and how much more they would accomplish, had they not been surrounded by all these bumbling idiots.
I agree that it's not great style for just conveying information clearly and plainly (e.g I'd hate to read documentation written like this) but I'd argue that here, the medium is part of the message.
It's supposed to sound dry and depressing and somewhat sterile.
> It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
I think if someone deliberately obfuscates meaning to sound fancier when the point is to communicate information directly, sure, I'd agree. But writing is often art, and I think demanding effort from the reader is fair in that case. I wouldn't make a blanket generalization like that.
I agree in that I don't know in what context Orwell wrote the quote above. Maybe it made more sense the way it fitted in that context.
Whenever this kind of discussion happens, I recall Andrey Platonov (a Russian writer, who was so weird in his rejection of the "decadent" parts of speech and sentence clauses that he'd never use passive voice or adverbs, would never put two adjectives side by side etc. that even Soviet censorship decided to ban him.) His works were added to the mandatory high-school reading list back around the collapse of the Soviet Union. I studied book publishing in college right around that time and had taken an elective in editing (the process of preparing a manuscript for publication, especially for the more technical fields, like encyclopedias or handbooks). My professor was a huge fan of Platonov, and, probably, forever spoiled for me whatever people enjoy when they read flamboyant or contorted prose like the one quoted above.
One thing that would send my professor into a fit of rage about that quote is that the real subject is people: it's talking about how people incorrectly rationalize the connection between effort and outcome. But, it's written in a way that, formally, the subject is... "the consideration", making it necessary for the reader to work back from the formal towards intended before they can figure out what the author was really trying to say.
I disagree. There is plenty of writing that operates at the same level of abstraction (philosophy, mathematics) without being needlessly convoluted.
Orwell is a master precisely because he understood language deeply enough to be able to produce a monstrosity on both the level of content (undue abstraction) and structure (winding, breathless syntax).
Ah, I just read through it. That’s was a fun read.
> This is a parody, but not a very gross one. …
So, Orwell wrote the second sentence as a parody of the first sentence, using the modern English that he was criticizing in the essay.
> … in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. …
> … The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. …
> … The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first.
He tried to argue that the second one is worse, but, unfortunately, he successfully simulated one possible interpretation of the original. Sure, the parody has narrower meaning, but it is a valid subset of the original meaning, which is still very significant tbh. This justifies the reduction of “race, battle, bread” into “success or failure”, invalidating one of his points.
Also, the parody is not necessarily less concrete. It replaced poetic expressions in the original with words that are bloated, for sure, yet more concrete. It does have awkward expressions, but every word plays a role in the sentence. This basically conflicts with one of his criticisms in the essay — meaningless words.
Funnily enough, his another example — “some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism” — also fails to capture the nature of the modern English. He points out the “euphemism” towards the violence as an issue of style, but, no, that’s the whole purpose of it, and his example really just excel at it. Style-wise, again, the writing is very solid.
All in all, Orwell simply failed to properly simulate what he was trying to criticize. Good examples of “modern English” can be found in the earlier part of the essay, basically written by other people. Those examples do fit into Orwell’s criticisms.
He tried to argue that the second one is worse, but, unfortunately, he successfully simulated one possible interpretation of the original
All in all, Orwell simply failed to properly simulate what he was trying to criticize
If I was going to read "Orwell was wrong about English" anywhere, I guess it was always going to be HN.
The sheer pomposity of your remarks here is the biggest clue that you are not writing them yourself.
No, my view is more like that he was too good at English to write bad English that he was criticizing. The examples he wrote are simply too sharp to fit well into his own criticisms. They are formulated so well that you can just “welp, my intention was different”.
EDIT: This kinda reminds me of the musical theory of harmony. There are strict rules to follow in music composition, but when you go against every single rule in major scale, and keep your work sound nice, you eventually get a minor scale piece that keeps every rule that you tried to break through.
Same here. He probably wrote a disgusting piece in his standards, but kept the writing sane, and eventually it became a proper prose — simply with disgusting intention in his standard.
> we are all way worse at reading compared to the average mid-20th centry reader?
I would say English has changed. Modern English speakers, especially those in academia and technology, prefers explicit styles over poetic and nuanced ones. There are a lot of factors at play (e.g. i18n, the internet, education, literature) but I’m too lazy to cover them here.
> you - and no one else in the hundred years since - found his fatal mistake?
First, the essay is from 1946 — 80 years ago. Second, why not? Often-times, a different perspective is all that takes to discovers something new in the old.
I think you’re trying to make an appeal to authority here — a logical fallacy. You’re basically saying I cannot criticize his essay because Orwell is a great writer.
Also, my point is neither fatal nor about mistake. Orwell’s examples still demonstrate his claims in a relative sense, all within the context of the essay. However, when you pull them out of the context and put them out in the wild, it’s going to be very difficult to say those are bad writings right away, because, compared to other bad writings, those examples are very solid and straightforward.
> This is not even a sentence.
It is informal, sure, but I intentionally made it colloquial with something called bare quotation, a style commonly used in informal conversation. I wanted to avoid being “an overeducated dolt” and send a friendly gesture too, oh, but you chose to put that on a pitchfork. Bravo, clap clap.
> Also, my point is neither fatal nor about mistake[sic]. Orwell’s examples still demonstrate his claims in a relative sense, all within the context of the essay. However, when you pull them out of the context and put them out in the wild, it’s going to be very difficult to say those are bad writings[sic] right away, because, compared to other bad writings[sic], those examples are very solid and straightforward.
You should take this as an opportunity to improve your English and widen your reading, rather than trying to win a silly argument on a forum with 'logical fallacies' and other such humdrum wikiphilosophy. I'm not even sure what you meant to say in this paragraph, it's not at all clear I'm afraid.
Your perspective on this is entirely wrong, starting with a mistake about the intentions of Orwell and the quality of the text (which is deliberately obtuse and plain awful in so many ways). If you can't easily interpret the biblical text, that's fine, it is quite old, but there is really no excuse for saying that Orwell is a bad writer or .
But Orwell's example here is an example of bad writing, not good, and was produced deliberately as an anti-pattern. It has no redeeming features, and deliberately so. If you read 1984, you'll see further what he was getting at and rebelling against - a tendency to use words to obscure and twist meaning rather than transmit it.
> widen your reading, rather than trying to win a silly argument on a forum with 'logical fallacies' and other such humdrum wikiphilosophy.
Yeah, sure, the paragraph there is pretty bad, I admit. I was having an technical issue w/ my phone. But, look, did you really read my comment, the whole set of it? It's not even about philosophy. I'm just talking about a little /finding/ that Orwell's examples of bad-English is much better than what you usually find in your daily lives.
I'm not even arguing here, because you people avoid engaging w/ my point itself. It's more like I'm only repeating myself again and again and again. I'm not raising anything new.
> Your perspective on this is entirely wrong, starting with a mistake about the intentions of Orwell and the quality of the text (which is deliberately obtuse and plain awful in so many ways). If you can't easily interpret the biblical text, that's fine, it is quite old, but there is really no excuse for saying that Orwell is a bad writer
First, if you were talking about my first comment, I did mention that "I'm only guessing". I did clarify that I didn't read at that point. Someone replied with a link to the essay, so I read it, and only then I said "I [had] read it".
Second, I never said the original is bad. I only said the parody is pretty good, perhaps because of its brutal explicitness, which the first one lacks comparably.
Also, I've been saying that Orwell is a bad /bad-English/ writer, not a bad writer. His proficiency in English doesn't imply any proficiency in reproducing the bad-English he was criticizing. This part is childish, sure, but it was supposed to be /fun/.
> But Orwell's example here is an example of bad writing, not good, and was produced deliberately as an anti-pattern.
I totally agree here, but ...
> It has no redeeming features
... this is the part I disagree with.
Sure, on the surface, they are chokingly bad. I definitely agree that he removed certain qualities from those examples, and, for demonstration purposes, they serve the purpose.
However, if you offer those examples completely out-of-context, it's going to be difficult to dismiss them simply as bad writings. Their logical flow is very natural, and his word choices are very precise. It is much better /formulated/ than a lot of real-world bad English writings. I definitely sense /professional touches/ from those examples. That's why I said that it would take me hours, if not days, to write such sentences by myself.
Both versions are great: the former is poetic and grand and would fit right in in a fantasy text; the latter is dry and informative and requires much less mental effort to translate and extract meaning from (though still more than "normal" text.
I could imagine a third version that's clearer than the second and still nearly as poetic as the first.
Well, I can tell what sort of angle you most enjoy. Anyways -- I think there is GOOD writing and BAD writing, but only subjectively. So if you enjoy it, power to you. It's certainly not random, but it is the sort of verbosity that turns off 99 percent of the people that would read it given a comparison. I find the former rather eloquent.
My take is that the generated stuff is terrible for communications.
It feels great to use, direct your machine minion to fill out your thoughts for you, but holy hell does it suck to be on the receiving end. Least of all is the disrespect, they don't care enough to even talk to you but worse is having to try and reason through that big incoherent blob.
Probably to only reasonable thing to do is to try and get your own mechanical agents to produce summaries. Inventing the lossy expansion algorithm(like compression but things get bigger on the wire), And we wept.
Now I am all depressed because it is probably inevitable, apparently thinking is hard and in general people are all to happy to outsource it to the machines.
Let's say I'm making an HN comment. I have a one-sentence idea, I get an LLM to expand it into an impressive-looking (or oppressive-looking) wall of text, and then I post that. Well, let's say 10 people see it. And each one of them has to either plow through it on their own, or paste it into LLM to get the summary.
But even with one-to-one communication, it's still terrible, as you say. You can't be bothered to clarify your idea, but you're trying to use an LLM to make up for your lack of thought? So you're going to make me plow through that huge blob of text to try to understand what your thought was, the thought that you couldn't bother to actually really think through. That's far less efficient than you, the sender, actually doing the thinking.
But it lets the sender be lazy. And the sender is the one in control.
I used to sympathize with those on the "receiving end" but I'm becoming extremely desensitized to their plight.
The sheer amount of hatred they level towards anyone who's using AI or is even just positive towards it is something to behold. They've got racism-tier slurs for us now.
The negativity and stigma are so strong I've stopped caring. I don't feel like putting in human effort for the benefit of these hateful people anymore.
The problem is not the LLM prose appearing everywhere, it's the legions of AI-boosters appearing in every thread attacking anyone who complains.
Apparently, even though they want to spew AI prose everywhere, they want it read by humans, not by other bots, so when a few holdout places are insisting that prose be human authored they fight very hard against the rule.
I don't think I've ever seen someone on HN say that. Many people would say that AI makes them more productive at coding, not that the output is nice to read.
This thread, in particular, stands out - reader makes the claim that Pangram found that the US constitution was 100% AI generated, when others tried they found 0% (or close to it) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378191
Those are not that. The first two are people complaining about other people incontinently identifying text as AI, because it's annoying to listen to unreliable hunches and aspersions. The second two are complaining about AI detectors not being very reliable. The claim made in the last one is a casual anecdote about "an AI detector", presumably told because it's amusing. It isn't a vehement statement about how you must accept slop into your life.
Yeah, intentionally or unintentionally there is often at motte-and-bailey fallacy flavor to their arguments. The motte is that it can sometimes be hard to identify AI writing, the baily is that we should accept AI wholesale and stop worrying about AI writing.
I would say that AI prose is often still a bit iffy, but I would disagree with anyone who would want to argue that this is any indication that AI prose will always be bad in the future.
i am a big fan of llms and the possibilities they enable. but i also find this type of behavior extremely rude! ai;dr for life. :is-your-human-around: is my preferred emoji for reacting to such behavior
Well what does time mean in this context? Patience? Foresight?
I've actually spent the morning journaling on the value of having a long time perspective. So initially I thought the author was saying something to that effect.
But the other translation leaves out time altogether! So honestly I don't know what he was trying to say. I guess it's just some archaic idiom for luck?
It may be perfectly clear to you. For me (a non-native speaker) reading the first verse required a significant focus and I still didn't get what the author meant (only the general vibes).
LLMs get a lot of finetuning, but I suspect there are two things that can cause this kind of writing:
Firstly, some parts of the RLHF involve human graders on the LLM's performance. I suspect their general bias towards a punchy, persuasive writing style could come from what biases the graders towards preferring that response, especially in shorter segments and when the grader is not focused on writing style
Secondly, later parts of the finetuning involve reinforcement learning on achieving certain tasks which are automatically graded: stuff like coding tasks. I think this can create a kind of feedback loop where the style drifts further, and you get the kind of LLM tics which are even more extreme (it might be that they incidentally help somehow with the actual tasks, or it might be a drift that comes from the grader also now being an LLM or some of this finetuning happening on output from other models). The more recent claude models seem to suffer from this a lot, moreso than earlier ones.
I'm not an expert, but... might this indicate the need for "sub-models", meant to be invoked by the general model to write good prose for it? Those sub-models would not be RLed on code (or any algorithmic-feedback tasks that might reinforce bad writing), and could specifically be tuned for prose, even at the cost of general intelligence (which would be provided by the worse-at-writing more general model).
A bigger question I'm interested in is why do LLMs speak like that in the first place? Is that really what you get if you took the average of the English language? It would be difficult for me to believe that.
Is there something about tuning for desirable qualities that forces LLMs to have this voice?
It wouldn't surprise me if it takes more effort to be succinct. There's some famous quote from I think Mark Twain "this letter would have been shorter but I ran out of time". Just my guess
And The New Yorker - writing that is written to sound impressive, and takes forever to get to the point. I hated that kind of writing in The New Yorker long before LLMs made it cool to hate that.
Personally, I think Orwell's version is a lot easier to read. I read the Ecclesiastes verse several times and can't really get it: "time and chance happens to everyone"? Okay?
While phrases like "contemporary phenomena" and "tendency to be commensurate" are a bit over-the-top, summarily the picture is conveyed much more clearly imo: Luck plays a factor, no matter how good you are.
I don't see how "nor yet favor to men of skill" is more natural or clearer, at least to the modern reader.
It appears LLMs are much better at writing during a debate than when explicitly asked to write. The moment LLMs are tasked with composing a blog article or intro for a book they introduce all the nuances that identify the output as AI slop.
The first is of course from the King James Bible which for centuries was essentially a standard that all English speaking peoples aspired to. If you find that version difficult I would expect much literary writing before the 1940s also seems difficult. This is just to say I recommend reading the King James even if you are an atheist, as I am.
I also have to say that the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am, the second as being written by someone significantly less intelligent than I, yet somehow placed by society in a position of authority over me.
In the context of newly written work in the modern era, I would argue it's best to use grammatical constructions that are used in modern 20th/21st century English, at least most of the time. Those who wrote the KJV were trying to be expressive but the whole point was to do so in language that ordinary people would be familiar with.
> the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am
This is why Joseph Smith tried to imitate the language of the King James Bible in the Book of Mormon, albeit not very successfully.
My guess is that if you were betting on a race, you would put your money on the swift to win, and "sometimes fast runners trip over" wouldn't seem as smart.
The rewrite stinks of a consultant's report where humor is frowned upon, business is serious, and there's no way we could write in plain words that the CEO got there by chance. Objective consideration distances the author compared to the subjective original I have returned and [I saw]. The original gives examples, the rewrite's contemporary phenomena is vague enough to avoid calling out the board of directors. A compelled conclusion is one the author is - reluctantly, you understand - forced into. Innate capacity leaves an escape hatch for a education from a good school and life experience to excuse the board again. It's not an honest rewrite of the same sentiment - a subjective take that life isn't fair and it's not just here, and us.
A plenitude of observations undertaken in a multitude of geographically and culturally diverse locations has convinced this author of the incompleteness of the following claims: races are won by the swift, battles are won by the strong, bread is earned by wisdom, riches are earned through applied understanding, and favours return to skilled persons. Absent are the effects of time and chance on all situations, of which experience has made abundantly clear. Other phenomena may too have their inputs, e.g. underhanded manipulation.
(Swiftness is still the best available predictor of who will win a race, though, and training cardio, muscles, diet, electrolytes, mental endurance, is the best available way to increase your chances of winning and not dropping out, tripping over from tiredness, or getting cramp, even though you can't change your innate ability or age, and time and chance happeneth to ye regardless).
Yeah, I found Orwell's easier to understand and quite fast to read as well, but I think it's just because of the style of writing of the first one. It's from an earlier style of prose that I'm just not used to.
I also don't have a problem with large words as long as I'm well familiar with the words. The length of a word has nothing to do with the complexity of its meaning. We just have a limit to the number of pronounceable combinations of 5 letters.
The second one was very clear and to the point. Parsing it was rewarded with instant understanding and I enjoyed the word choice. The first one was just annoying; I could tell it was just listing a bunch of pointless analogies to try to make its point sound more grandiose so I immediately started skimming, and didn't come away feeling like it meant much other than "we all die in the end". The second one made an actual point and was the one that made me want to read it. The first one was the chore for me.
I can't see how you could apply "minimalist" to that excerpt. It's maximalist, hammering the same point over and over and over when one or two examples with a little more worldbuilding per example would have done better if they were going for "evocative".
If I had to pin a subjective experience to reading it, it would be that of being stuck in a car as a teenager with a parent who's ranting about whatever set them off that day and won't move on from repeating their grievance in different words when you got the point five minutes ago. In contrast, the second feels like having an enjoyable and productive level-headed conversation with someone who respects you and trusts you to understand the words.
The grammar is more straightforward. It has some extraneous words, and makes conspicuously bad choices of vocabulary, but it's still a more direct statement.
I wonder if this is due to experience with reading technical documentation?
I think the second requires deeper concentration, but is still quite readable compared to the kind of low-content engagement / SEO stuff one read on the internet even before LLMs
Other translations keep Zinsser's preferred lack of fuzz but avoid using "is ... to" for possession.
For example, the Lexham English Bible:
> I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all of them.
This could be shortened to "success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all" with no meaning lost. It's self-indulgent fluff. Meanwhile, Orwell's actually adds more to the statement - much better signal to noise.
You're running into a cultural difference. The book of Ecclesiastes was written in Hebrew, in a poetical style even though large chunks of it are prose. But if you read other parts of the Bible, such as the book of Psalms (which is entirely poetry, specifically songs, though in many cases we do not know the tune that they were set to), you'll see that Hebrew poetry relied on repetition. For example, here's the King James Version's translation of the famous "to every thing there is a season" passage from chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes, which most translations render as poetry:
> To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
That could have been said in less than a quarter of the words the author expended on it. But something of the style would have been entirely lost. He wasn't trying to be succinct, he was trying to repeat the same concept over and over until it sinks in.
Repetition can make a good impact, but it's beyond excessive in this instance. Contrast with this poem:
Non est salvatori salvator,
neque defensori dominus,
nec pater nec mater,
nihil supernum.
Translated:
No rescuer hath the rescuer.
No Lord hath the champion,
no mother and no father,
only nothingness above.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
I find this one profound, and it's given me a lot to think about over the years - in situations ranging from asking what our place in the universe is, to doing the "right thing" (and deciding what "the right thing" even means to yourself), or standing at the helm of some team or project, knowing that judgement call is yours alone and there's no authority or higher power coming to swoop in and give you the answer or authoritatively judge your decision can be simultaneously liberating and terrifying. The use of repetition works incredibly well in my opinion and it still gives me chills to read it.
I never had formal training in Latin, just what I've picked up. But grammatically, I would think the second line would translate to "No champion hath the lord", not "no lord hath the champion". Am I misunderstanding the grammatical suffixes here?
I'm admittedly no Latin expert, so I can't give an authoritative answer, but the translation was actually arrived at on a forum where the author asked for help, and I can see someone asked the same question: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qpp6ZdwHLNKj6PXRp/req-latin-...
I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1].
> Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
> > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Orwell's version goes:
> > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
> First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.
[1] https://blog.kierangill.xyz/clotted-claude