9 ms·
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 Zinsse
by kierangill 11d ago
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.
[1] https://blog.kierangill.xyz/clotted-claude https://blog.kierangill.xyz/clotted-claude
- tdeck 11d agoAm I the only one that finds the second one much easier to parse?
- pavinjoseph 11d agoI had to reread the first one but I wanted to read it! The second one was understood on the first scan but was a chore to read. Does that make sense?
- buttercraft 11d agoThat was exactly my experience, and I found it to be a little bit depressing.
- jimmaswell 11d agoThe 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.
- lljk_kennedy 11d agoThe first communicated a feeling. A brief flutter in the soul of a picture of recognition, painted for your mind's eye with care by the author. The second transcribed considerable information bandwidth through intentionally structured word choice for maximal density.
- AnimalMuppet 11d agoYeah. The first one was like a minimalist painting, the second like a software specification. I'm pretty sure that the general public does not want to read software specifications.
- jimmaswell 11d agoI 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.
- overtone1000 11d agoSeconded
- jfengel 11d agoThe grammar is more straightforward. It has some extraneous words, and makes conspicuously bad choices of vocabulary, but it's still a more direct statement.
- kamma4434 11d agoI found it an improvement too
- Barbing 11d agoSecond helped explain the first, appreciated having both (but I’m no genius or nothin’).
- Kerrick 11d agoOther 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.
- Barbing 11d agoEasiest! Loses some color, gains much clarity.
- AnimalMuppet 11d agoColor. Perfect word; thank you. That's what LLM writing doesn't have, and the second version didn't have it either.
- jimmaswell 11d agoThis 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.
- tudelo 11d agoWriting is fluff. What do you want, a list of bullet points? There would be no books. Maybe you have a career in writing 2 page books?
- jimmaswell 11d ago
- macleginn 11d agoThis is why almost 100% of hard and social scientific discourse reads almost exactly like this these days.
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- shsjshhsh 11d ago[dead]
- bryanrasmussen 11d agoThe 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.
- tdeck 11d agoIn 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.
- bryanrasmussen 11d agoyes, I am very schooled in Smith's attempts.
- jodrellblank 11d agoMy 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).
- dragonfax 11d agoYeah, 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.
- ahepp 11d agoI 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
- layer8 11d agoYou’re not. The first is vague and requires significant interpretation, the second is very clear and to the point in what it’s saying.
- sltkr 11d agoOrwell's entire essay (Politics and the English Language) is well worth reading if you haven't before: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... (I'm guessing Zinsser's comments are from "On Writing Well", which you can also find online even though it is still under copyright.) It's a bit of a pet peeve when people include quotes on a blog post without linking or otherwise references their source.
- mrob 11d agoBut Orwell's rule 4 should be ignored: >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. [0]: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42671 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42671
- bloak 11d agoTechnically, 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"?)
- squidbeak 11d ago
- marsven_422 11d ago[dead]
- masswerk 11d agoIn contemporary YouTube-script wording: > 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.)
- vogelke 11d ago> in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this Shoot me now.
- somat 11d agoVery depressing, and I believe it. 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)
- jbeninger 11d agoThat's not a generator tell when used judiciously. It's a genuinely useful construction that's been poisoned by overgeneration.
- bryanrasmussen 11d agoI came to this post and saw that Orwell had forgotten to mention money as the prerequisite of success, which was very unlike him.
- squidbeak 11d agoRemember he's transcribing a scripture into bad modern prose, instead of riffing on it.
- lelanthran 11d agoThe 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.
- quietbritishjim 11d agoI 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.
- eru 11d agoI 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.
- lelanthran 11d ago> I don't think I've ever seen someone on HN say that. A 5m search got me the following: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49410941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49410941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49059571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49059571 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378191
- card_zero 11d agoThose 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.
- bananaflag 11d agoWhy dont they train LLMs not to speak like that? Is it some tragedy of the commons here?
- schubidubiduba 11d agoThey are certainly trying to
- tudelo 11d agoYou ever wonder why recent claude models speak in riddles? I dunno, maybe all those "rare" books? They may have been rare for a reason.
- knollimar 11d agoRare like a steak not like a treasure.
- rcxdude 11d agoLLMs 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.
- valleyer 11d agoI'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).
- esjeon 11d agoI think Orwell did a great job there actually. 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.
- tudelo 11d agoWell, 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.
- crabbone 11d agoWhen 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.
- yummybrainz 11d agoI 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.
- tedggh 11d agoIt 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.
- somat 11d agoMy 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.
- AnimalMuppet 11d agoBut even that is grossly inefficient. 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.
- tomjen3 11d agoThe problem is that people use llm to expand with. They should use them to condense with.
- matheusmoreira 10d agoI 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.
- kome 11d agoenglish is my second, third language, and i understood the second immediately, but not the first. go figure.
- andai 11d agoI actually found the second one easier to understand. What the hell does "time happeneth" mean? Despite our best efforts, events continue to occur!
- bigstrat2003 11d ago> What the hell does "time happeneth" mean? It's perfectly clear from context. Time and chance are the governing factors in success, not intrinsic merit.
- andai 11d agoWell 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?
- msm_ 11d agoIt 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). The second verse was immediately clear.
- huurtehoog 8d agoI offer an alternative translation directly from the original hebrew: "Surely the testimony of misfortune will be imposed at any season"
- cainxinth 11d ago“It’s better to be lucky than good.” - Lefty Gomez
- jodrellblank 11d ago> "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>". At some point it may as well be the teacher in a Charlie Brown cartoon: https://annotatedgilmoregirls.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/grnkoia.gif https://annotatedgilmoregirls.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11... audio version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss2hULhXf04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss2hULhXf04
- rpdillon 11d agoTelling LLMs to be concise works. > Reword this concisely: > 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."
- lubujackson 11d agoConcise 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.
- amemi 11d agoPersonally, 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.