Comment by DoctorOetker

Suppose you time-zap a modern physics curriculum on a solarpowered computer tablet to any shortly-pre-Galilean era and observe their reaction to the course notes.

In that era, plenty of fields required mathematics, engineering and architecture.

The church would prescribe and uphold Aristotelean Logic "When objects fall, they fall down" style statements (never mind that if you throw an object up, it doesn't instantly have a downward velocity component).

When the church has new cathedrals, domes, catapults for Crusades etc. built they actually relied on architects and engineers using rule of thumb formulas.

Those educated in Aristotelean Logic were viewed with higher stature than those actually making experience-based calculations using mathematics.

The era often associated with Galileo is when the stature reversal started to surface and be openly talked about. The universe is best described in mathematics, not natural language factoids.

Right before this recognition, those of the higher stature Aristotelean Logic education would look down on the architects and engineers who already used mathematics by pragmatic necessity.

To these people the time-traveled physics curriculum would look like cliche mathematics. Given randomized sections of text either drawn from either Aristotelian Logic texts or modern physics texts, they would easily be able to discern the Aristotelian Logic from the obtuse mathematical phrasings. To them the smartphone loaded with Maxwell's texts, Jacksons Electrodynamics, Goldsteins Classical Mechanics etc. is talking "math".

The ability to recognize outlier writing style says nothing about content quality.

Mike Judge (widely known from the MTV series Beavis and Butthead) studied physics. One of his movies "Idiocracy" about a modern day average-educated protagonist who accidentally ends up in a future decaying society filled and run by intellectually retarded people contains scenes where this future uneducated population considers his speech "gay" simply because of his higher level of education.

Could the adversarial prospects of job loss, edge loss (a long expensive difficult education replaced by tensors fitting megaprojects that take a couple of weeks), etc. combined with recognizable communication patterns also explain our pejorative references to LLM-isms? Personally I'd prefer LLM's to communicate in mathematical terms, but all the LLM-isms are effectively a mirror of our contemporaries.

Either we complain because algorithmic responses look like a mathematics textbook ("just fix my python array plz, why are we talking about "sets" and "injective" and "Lipschitz continuity"?), else we complain its "pretty printed to natural language".

We should also recognize large language models are in a "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.

When a reader considers some text as mathurbation, are they really just abreacting the awareness of lack of education?

How could anyone possibly expect Fourier optics "pretty printed" to non-mathematical language to result in any satisfactory experience?