Comment by lamasery

6 hours ago

> The number of times I see my words interpreted as though my choice in words had been imprecise is a near constant source of pain, particularly in the workspace. I might be on the spectrum, I am undiagnosed.

Could be some of this, but also the median person is barely literate.

Reading historical correspondence of highly-literate people makes this clear. There's none of the shit you describe. It's not because they're all autistic, it's because they can in-fact read and write and think.

Pick any very-good author you're familiar and you'll easily discover a flood of writing about their works, online, by people who misunderstood even very-clear passages. You're not alone in being so-misunderstood. Reading well is a somewhat rare skill, even among the allegedly college-educated.

One major situation in which this problem is practically unavoidable—where you're not getting to choose who you read, and who you write for, and where reading and writing is extensive and necessary—is work. In fact, I suspect an under-appreciated source of resistance to things like remote work is that a majority of people find closely reading even simple texts draining and unpleasant, and aren't capable of writing clearly at all. "I'm barely literate despite somehow holding a bachelor's degree or even some variety of graduate degree" isn't a thing any of them are going to admit (consider how easily people admit to, or even volunteer, being terrible at math) but it's still part of why they take the positions they do on things like remote work.

The AI-related behaviors you point out are why I remain skeptical LLMs are going to increase productivity at all, across the whole economy. They're powerful enablers for many of the worst behaviors of the typical office-dweller, and in ways that I think will defy bureaucracies' ability to quash. Giving an LLM to the average office worker is like giving meth to someone with known addiction problems: sure it might make them more active, but I'm not sure the extra activity's going to be useful, and it might even be harmful.