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> humans are needlessly verbose What a depressing belief. Human communication is about a whole lot more than just getting your point across as quickly and effi
by tharne 1y ago
> humans are needlessly verbose
What a depressing belief. Human communication is about a whole lot more than just getting your point across as quickly and efficiently as possible.
- thimabi 1y agoOh, no, I do understand the value of long-form and deep human communication. I’m an avid book reader, for instance, and I actually prefer longer narratives. What I don’t agree with is being needlessly verbose in circumstances in which the opposite is more valuable. Unfortunately, humans have a tendency to use flowery language even when that comes at the expense of message clarity. Think, for example, of the countless self-help books that can be converted to short blog posts. Or think about legal or academic writing, which often stands in the way of readers actually understanding what is being said. There’s so much writing like this out there that even LLMs were notorious for taking this over-elaborate language to a whole new level. And in my opinion that’s the kind of thing that we can (and should) avoid.
- wood_spirit 1y agoYou mean that language is a form or bureaucracy and gate keeping?
- mapmeld 1y agoPeople are not reading and absorbing the longer pieces of writing. I worked at a company which would create information-dense, wordy PowerPoint slides for client updates, and at some point you see it has no point besides trying to impress. If we actually needed something in an email, they told us to put it in the first sentence. I've also noticed it when people post LLM writing on Reddit. Something may give me pause, and then re-reading the content any given paragraph was way off. I had even glossed over the bolded conclusion "it’s a coaching-wheels moment" (?) because as you read it your brain thinks of a way it could make sense.
- nathan_compton 1y agoThere are many, many, contexts where humans just pile text up for no real reason than to fill space.
- procaryote 1y agoPretty often it should be about getting your point across as efficiently as possibly though, but people add fluff out of tradition or cultural norms.