Comment by pixl97
9 hours ago
Most people don't think linguistically, we have way more conceptual thinking. What makes it difficult is we rarely realize we are thinking conceptually when writing because these concepts occur automatically and we don't notice it.
In school this lead to a lot of difficulties for me, one in writing those comments out for other people to understand, but the other seemed to be that when reading the average statements used in education for teaching I could map the same strings of language to multiple and sometimes conflicting statements because of the inexactness of the language used.
It turns out explaining concepts while leaving little room for different interpretation is hard.
> It turns out explaining concepts while leaving little room for different interpretation is hard.
This pops up as one of the annoying aspects of LLM writing, at least for coding models. They are always saying things like "this test only establishes this, not that." Much of the time, what they say is either obvious, or you get to thinking "maybe the test should establish the other thing as well."
As someone who does think linguistically, I often end up at odds with people who are expecting me to imply things in my text, when my text is written specifically to convey exactly what I mean and nothing further.
Yes 100%.
There is no undercurrent or symbolism, just read the email as written please.
I became aphantasic at ~15 and spent years after interfacing with non tech people over the phone and email.
In English it's so damn hard to be precise compared to languages like Portuguese.
Also, LLMs blather so fucking much context is impossible to track wtf they are even writing about.
* Fast screenshotting and arrows/drawijg should be first class on all OSes.
I’m curious about your statement that you “became” aphantasic. Any specific triggering event, or how did you realize this?
AFAIK aphantasia hasn’t been super widely known about until the last decade or two (obv I have no idea how old you are now)
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I've never heard of becoming aphantasic, how did that happen?
> explaining concepts while leaving little room for different interpretation is hard
To play devil's advocate: explaining concepts while leaving little room for different interpretation is also pointless. If you don't care about the interlocutor's interpretation, then why are you even talking to them? If the task is really deterministic, then automate it.
You have to learn the rules before you know which ones can be bent and which ones can be broken.
The problem I have is that when I'm asked to follow a procedure that you know just while reading it was created by someone with less experience and better/faster/cheaper ways are available to get to the same result. Deviation will however get you into trouble because the procedure is what is vetted and approved. Deviations from procedure could open one up to liability if things later do not work as expected.
School, and specifically learning is not deterministic.
While we can automate away most things, human learning doesn't seem to be one of them.
Yea, that's what I was trying to get at. It is not deterministic because the interpretation is the point. It is how the learner integrates the material. If you don't interpret, then you're not learning, you're just memorizing.
A teacher should therefore embrace the fuzzy nature of explaining concepts.
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Because the Junior eventually grows up to become a Senior, and they will be responsible for maintaining said automation.
Also, if it’s truly interpretive it leads to a “bus factor” of one, where somebody going on vacation or whatever represents a real timeline risk.