Harvard Professor Explains The Rules of Writing — Steven Pinker

I'm here at Harvard in the office of

Steven Pinker and he's written nine

books and devoted his life to studying

language and cognition and writing. And

so what we did in this interview is we

started off with the really practical

stuff. We started off with his rules for

writing. And what makes him unique is

that he's been thinking about AI since

the 1980s. So if you're interested in

doing great non-fiction writing in the

age of LLMs, well, this interview is for

you.

[Music]

I want to talk about the curse of

knowledge and I want to talk about this

this cartoon from your book which says

good start needs more gibberish. Yes.

When I uh pose the question why is there

so much bad writing? Why? Why is there

so much academies and bureaucrates and

corporates? People's favorite answer is

captured by that cartoon. Namely, that

bad writing is a deliberate choice. That

it's uh in various versions, it's uh

academics with nothing to say dress up

banal ideas with gobbledygook to show

how sophisticated they are, or uh

pastyfaced nerds get revenge on the

girls who turned them down for dates in

high school. Mhm. Uh people want to uh

uh erect a kind of uh cult that no one

else outsiders can't penetrate because

they haven't learned the the uh the

jargon. I don't think that's the best

explanation for bad writing. Uh partly

it's personal. I just know enough people

who have plenty to say. They're

brilliant people. They uh have no desire

to offiscate. They're just uh

incompetent. They just uh don't know how

to express themselves clearly. There's

something called Hanland's razor. Never

attribute to malice that which can uh

adequately be explained by stupidity.

Yeah. And uh that these are not stupid

people I'm talking about, but it's a

kind of stupidity in not knowing um

where your audience is coming from. And

I illustrate it with an anecdote uh of a

conference in technology, entertainment

and design, better known by its acronym

TED, where a brilliant molecular

biologist had been invited to present

his uh latest

findings. He launched into uh what was

obvious to me is the exact kind of talk

that he would give to his peers in

molecular biology and that uh within

about 4 seconds he had lost everyone

because he just spoke in jargon without

even introducing what problem he was

solving, why it was significant. It was

you know launched right into the the

experiments. There was a room of several

hundred people from many walks of life

from you know to entertainment from

design and it was obvious to everyone in

the room that no one was understanding a

word obvious to everyone except the

distinguished biologist who was just

clueless. Now this is you know not a

stupid man but he was very stupid when

it came to communication namely not

everyone knows what you know. Now the

curse of

knowledge term from economics is um the

difficulty that we all have in knowing

what it's like not to know something

that we know. That is to subtract

something from your brain. Put yourself

in the shoes of your your audience your

whether it be public speaking or in

writing. Figure out where are they

coming from. What do they know? What

don't they know? I think that's the main

cause of bad writing. But you get um

abbreviations and acronyms that no one

has any way of knowing. You have jargon

that is known only to a tiny little

clique. You have um abstractions. The

level of the stimulus was uh

proportional to the intensity of the

reaction. And what it really means is

that uh you people kids look longer at a

bunny than a a truck. Uh so that is it.

It's so familiar to you that you don't

think it's worth explaining to people

concretely what they're supposed to be

seeing. Right? So all of these are

manifestations of the curse of

knowledge. Goes by other names.

Egoentrism, absence of a theory of mind.

That is a theory of what's going on in

other people's minds. And I if I had to

identify the the single biggest flaw in

writing and communication, it would be

that. That's it. So when you're writing

your books, I know you go up to Cape K

you write for like, you know, as long as

you possibly can. Now, I would assume

that one way to get around the curse of

knowledge is just to talk to the kinds

of people who would be reading your

book. Yeah. You show it to people. So

what do you do? What do you do? Cuz you

you know, you write really intensely. So

when you're writing, how do you get

around that? Well, I do something that

is I know is not good enough, but I do

it as as best I can, which is I try to

imagine what it's like for someone not

to know what I know. that is I I try to

cultivate my sense of empathy. But the

problem with the curse of knowledge is

you don't know when you're subject to

the curse of knowledge because something

that seems so obvious to you that you

don't even question whether other people

know it turns out not to be obvious. So

anyway, I try uh but at the end of the

day, I show it to people. Uh when my

mother was alive, I would always show

her a uh a draft of my book, not for the

reason that most academics site with

namely referring to my mother as the

epitome of a, you know, unsophisticated

you know, not very well read, not very

bright person. My mother was uh

extremely intelligent, extremely well

read, very sophisticated, but she wasn't

a cognitive psychologist. She wasn't a

psycho linguist. she didn't know what I

knew. And you know, when I write, I

don't write for just a random sample of

the population. They don't they don't

buy my books. Um I I I write for people

who are intellectually curious, who have

some degree of education. However, not

for peers in my field. Uh and so my

mother being an example, but also of

course when you publish for a commercial

publisher, you have an editor, and the

editor is typically, you know, very

smart, but again, not in your field. And

I show it to people in different fields

who are academics. But it's surprising

how uh insular even academics are when

it comes to other academics. Sometimes

there'll be people here in this building

in my own department, sometimes my own

subdivision within my own department

like students and they'll give me their

thesis proposal and I just don't know

what they're talking about. sometimes in

my own field because they've been

immersed in like five or six people in

their lab their supervisor and the other

grad students and a couple of posttos

and a research assistant and they've all

been consuming the same jargon that as

soon as they step outside that tiny

little circle they're unintelligible.

Yeah. So even showing it to if I'm

showing it to a friend who's, you know

an economist or a historian or a

political scientist or an evolutionary

biologist, not being a cognitive

psychologist, they'll say, "I'm sorry

but I don't just don't know what you're

talking about." Yeah. In terms of your

writing, you've done so much work

looking at vision and how the brain

works. And it seems like a lot of your

writing advice is informed by that. Like

I guess if I were to try to summarize

it, it's like a lot of our brain and

basically the ma way that we move

through the world is indexed heavily on

vision and so writing well means being

concrete and helping people see what it

is that you're trying to write. Is that

a good way of describing it? Yes. And

that would be my the probably the second

bit of second advice on the list. The

first one being find some way of getting

into get into your reader's heads, but

don't just depend on your ability to get

in their heads. actually get a flesh and

blood person to actually read it and see

if it makes any sense to them. So that'd

be number one. Number two is you know I

study language and you know as a writer

I live in language but language is kind

of overrated in the sense that what

understanding consists of is not a bunch

of words. It's not blah blah blah blah

blah blah blah, but language is a means

to an end of getting people to

appreciate what you're the ideas you're

trying to convey, which are not just a

string of verbiage. And those ideas very

often are visual, you know, and and

motoric, that is, you know, bodily

emotional, auditory, but they're they're

sensory um or they're even conceptual

but they aren't just a bunch of vowels

and consonants, right? And so

constantly allowing your reader to be

able to form a mental image uh based on

what you're writing is the next key to

to to to good writing. That is don't

talk about a uh a stimulus if you mean a

uh a bunny rabbit, right? Uh don't talk

about a a level or a perspective or a

framework or a paradigm or a concept.

All of which mean a lot to you in your

day-to-day work, but no one can form an

image of a paradigm in their mind's eye.

So, how do you do that? Like one thing

you've said is use for example all the

time. Uh what else can we do? Um so

often you know visual metaphors uh are

are helpful. One of the reasons that

often the the pros of other eras strikes

us as so much more vivid is I was going

to say lush. Lush. Yes. Partly because

they had the advantage of of uh writing

before there were you know several

hundred years of academia and

intellectuals inventing terms and

abstractions and they had to appeal to

uh images that were part of people's

common knowledge. So instead of saying

something like aggression um or

antisocial behavior, they might say the

spirit of the of the hawk needed into

our flesh. Yes. Uh you know, we wouldn't

write like that because we can say, you

know, aggression or antisocial behavior

but uh and that's jargon that a lot of

people are familiar with, but they

weren't always with us. And before that

there had to be some way of referring to

it in terms of an image that everyone

shared. And I think that's why often the

writing of previous centuries just

strikes us as so much more more

gripping, so much more evocative and

powerful that they had to appeal to

visual metaphors. Yeah. I've never

thought about that before because a lot

of the Bible's like that. I think of

like I don't know why the owl of Manurva

came to mind. Like there's just all of

this symbolism in in in animals. It

always is uh is striking. And so what

you're saying is like a lot of the

concepts that academics and and and

people brought in obviously they're kind

of a more efficient way to communicate

but they do lack that kind of visual

quality that makes writing vivid. That's

right. So they they do make it in fact

they're essential for doing the work

within the profession. Um, you have to

be able, you know, if you're a

biologist, you have to be able to, you

know, talk about things like ecosystems

and species and and systems and reagents

and uh, potentiation. All these concepts

that you don't want to have to go back

to basics and talk about, well, there's

a certain amount of chemicals and we

call that a concentration and when it

increases over time, we call it, you

know, you're beyond that after you're a

freshman. And so you have more and more

abstract terms that you could refer to

enormous bodies of knowledge just with

like two syllables. That's very good

right? The problem is that then now when

it's time to convey them to someone who

isn't at the pinnacle of of

specialization in your field, because of

the curse of knowledge, you're apt to

forget that these abstractions which are

kind of basic to you are just don't even

need to be defined aren't basic to

anyone else. Hm. What do we need to know

about writers about how hard writing is?

And I mean it in this way. Speaking

comes so naturally to us, but then

writing is something that we sort of

have to learn, right? You watch a kid

and you talk to a parent who has a

20-month-old, they're like, yeah, you

know, they're speaking now. They're

like, oh, you know, you wouldn't believe

it. You know, they're talking so much

they're crawling around, and it's always

like, yeah, it's like that. And then you

talk to them who have a parents who have

a 8-year-old kid, it's like, how's the

writing going? It's like, well, you

know, it's going little slow. there's

not that same excitement. And so it's as

if like why is it that writing is so

unnatural in a way that speaking is so

natural? Like what is going on there

scientifically and then practically?

A number of things. One of them is that

in um in conversation

um you don't never have two people that

are kind of parachuted on a stage and

immediately have to begin a

conversation. They have some common

ground to begin with. Mhm. They know why

they're there. They they're talking

about something that is in the air that

they're both familiar with. It was the

reason for them having the conversation

in in the first place. Uh they can get

away with using terms that in context

are perfectly clear like this and that

and the thing and what I was talking

about and uh she uh whereas if you are

not privy to that little social circle

you may not know who they're referring

to. M um in writing you're wrenched from

the context. Uh someone's picking a book

up off the shelf and you know they've

never met you and they may be living in

a different country. You might be dead.

Uh they've got to pick up all of this

detail from what's there on the page

not what's in not the the common ground

that the two people bring to the

conversation. Right? Also, you know the

when you're speaking, you know that

you're speaking to someone. You know

their idiosyncrasies. You're a little

bit better at uh avoiding the curse of

knowledge partly because you get

feedback like the furrowed brow, the

quizzical expression, the uh the what

the the request for clarification, I'm

sorry, I just don't know what you're

talking about. uh in real time and you

know in the body language, the

engagement uh even in in a live audience

uh any speaker knows when people are

starting to fidget and and and and drift

off as opposed to continuing to be

riveted. None of that is available in uh

in writing. Absolutely. How about this

one?

I think generalizations without examples

and examples without generalizations are

both useless. Yes. Well, and useless

might be a bit strong, but yeah

generalizations without examples I

find even in my field nine out of 10

times I just don't know what they're

talking about. It's like what do you

like like give me an example. Uh just

it's too because a generalization

erases detail. um it it uh sweeps over

particulars. You often just can't really

know what it's referring to. And and and

the abstract words in a language just

aren't precise enough. They often have

we have probably a hundred concepts for

every word in the English language. And

so a particular word uh especially if

it's abstract won't call to mind a

particular reference. the

example pins it down to what's the

what's the the general ballpark that

you're talking about? What is it? What

is theam the generalization

generalization about? Now examples about

generalizations it's well why did you

just tell me that like you know and your

point is uh and appropo of what? One of

my favorite ways to think about this is

that there's always a trade-off between

context and compression. So, if I could

wax poetic for the next 5 hours about my

train ride to Boston, but that's way too

long. Or I could tell you, yeah, it was

an easy train ride, but then you didn't

actually get anything from that cuz

there's no context there. And that maybe

we're always kind of balancing the

examples kind of give us that context.

And then the generalizations are the

compression. And it's actually in like

the swing in the dance of the two of

those that good writing and good

communication happens. Yeah. So for

example, if I were to say that familiar

words don't have to refer to the literal

meaning of their their parts, you can

understand that. And you kind of say

well, yeah, yeah, okay. And then I say

well, for example, um, a bathroom isn't

necessarily a room with a bath. And

going to the bathroom doesn't

necessarily mean going to a room that

has a bath. Breakfast isn't necessarily

breaking a fast and Christmas isn't

necessarily doesn't necessarily refer to

Christ's mass. Um, now having said that

I think you now understand what I mean

when I said say that the meaning of a

familiar phrase doesn't necessarily

correspond to the meanings of its parts.

Hopefully that now makes some sense to

you now that I've given you the

examples. Without the examples, you

know, you could nod and say, "Oh, that

sounds plausible." But you really

wouldn't have understood it. Let's roll

with

that. If adults commit adultery, do

infants commit infantry? If olive oil is

made from olives, what do they make baby

oil from? If a vegetarian eats

vegetables, what does a humanitarian

consume? A writer is someone who writes

"And a stinger is something that stings.

But fingers don't fing, grossers don't

gross, hammers don't ham, humdingers

don't humding, ushers don't ush, and

habarddashers don't

habdash. What's going on there? Why'd

you pull this out? So, this is a quote

from Richard Letterer. I deserve no

credit for that that witism. And and I

love this. I think it's so good.

Letterer has written a number of

delightful books like Crazy English and

Anguished English. um he's a a has a

marvelous ear and a a fabulous collector

of quirks and errors and oddities and

blunders in in the English language. Uh

so that that whimsical list is quite

profound because it indicates a lot of

truths about

language such as that uh over

time compositions of of words compounds

or words with a prefix and suffix can

sometimes drift away from the uh

original meaning. The case of adultery

uh for example it is related to

adulterate namely to commit adultery is

to you know introduce a foreign

substance namely you know semen into a

uh the the a woman where it it doesn't

belong. Uh but that whole connection has

been completely lost. Also in many kinds

of compounds there are uh a number of

different semantic

relationships that can hold. So for

example uh olive oil is oil made out of

olives. Baby oil is oil for babies.

So there isn't a logical a single

logical relationship between the

different parts of the the compound.

Language is so uh ancient. English

itself is

um depending on on how you count maybe

you know 1500 years old or or more but

it came from Germanic which came from

Indo-Uropean and who knows where that

came from that a lot of words uh can uh

completely uh obscure their uh origin.

You have to go to a dictionary to find

them out, but they're kind of like

fossils of processes in the language

that are long long dead. You know where

how the er got into finger. I I would

have to look up the etmology to to tell

you, but it's not the same as say

singer, which comes from the rule that

er uh turns a verb into a noun for the

kind of person that typically engages in

that activity. That's a rule that's

still alive and well in the English

language. Whereas we have the fossil

record of lots of rules that died long

ago. When you're writing, like if I were

to basically map out almost like a

gradient of our conversation, I'd say

like curse of knowledge, I would almost

I'm being very haphazard here. I'd say

like equal parts left brain, right? And

then we sort of moved into kind of a

leftrain side of the conversation. And

then I think of what you've said about

language should be a source of pleasure.

Like I think of that in beauty, right?

You talk a lot about beauty, also in

your photography. You're very interested

in that. That to me is more rightrain.

So like when you're writing, when you're

actually sitting down at the keyboard

what are some of the more rightrained

maybe less verbal concepts that drive

your writing? Well, certainly visual

imagery, that is, can I form an image?

Can my reader form an image? Um, euphan

that is sound, you know, that that is

uh is there some poetry in the pros? Uh

and I uh read aloud or at least mumble

or at least mumble to myself, my pros.

Something that's again a highly

recommended writing tip. I didn't invent

it. Yeah. Often when you read a draft of

your own pros and if you can't

articulate it smoothly, that you

probably your reader won't be mentally

sounding it out smoothly either, right?

Um the aesthetics sometimes come from

even things like um uh paying attention

to the uh metrical structure of language

that is the rhythm. Oh, tell me about

that. there is a a regular rhythm to to

language and that uh it's not perfectly

you know tick- tock tick- tock like a

metronome but there are beats and if you

disrupt it too much then it it does

interfere with speech but it also

interferes with reading even though it's

just characters on a page. Uh even the

aesthetics of uh sibilent sounds

generally too many chosen

uh make it make pros a little unpleasant

and I will often

um pick a synonym that avoids the

sibilent uh at least too many siblance

in in a row. Um, I'll often go with um

alliteration just because it again

there's a little a little spark of

pleasure, sense of style. Sense of

style. Yep. Even when it isn't, you you

don't want to make it too conspicuous

otherwise it starts to feel forced. But

often a bit of alliteration can just

make the sentence roll past more easily.

Why do you think that you as much as

anybody have been the person to kind of

stomp your feet, kick and scream about

the how bad academic writing has been

over the years? Like when I think of who

has been like, "Guys, what are what are

we doing?" You sort of been in one of

the for the front runners. What about

it? I mean, besides the obvious, what

about it has just bothered you so so

vividly? Yeah. Part of it is um just the

sheer waste that is there's an awful lot

of really brilliant work a lot of really

smart people you know in in academia and

you know why are they doing it just to u

you know entertain each other and you

know closed little circle I mean

taxpayers pay for it uh it should be

accessible they should give it away they

should state it in a form that that it's

accessible there's also when even within

the profession uh there's just an

enormous amount of wasted effort and

potential for misunderstanding in bad

pros. It's like if I'm reading, if I

have to read something, it's a student

paper or it's a paper in my own field or

I'm reviewing a grant proposal or

peer-reviewing a manuscript or

evaluating for someone for tenure. If I

have to read the same paragraph like

five or six times in order to know what

they're talking about, for one thing, I

might get it wrong. Then what, you know

what's the point? Another is why should

I have to read it five or six times? I'd

rather be doing something else and

uh so there there's waste, there's

confusion. Uh there's also foregone

opportunity for pleasure and and beauty.

It's enjoyable to to read um something

that's wellcrafted and it's annoying to

read something that's stilted and turgid

and and bloated.

Um there many reasons and it does it it

does get under my skin when academics

devote so much brain power into the

scholarship and then just blow off the

essential task of letting the world know

what you've done. Yeah. It's a true

virus in the modern world. Yeah. uh you

know I take a particular interest in it

not just because I do try very hard even

in my academic writing to be

clear but since I'm someone who actually

not just studies stuff as an academic

but studies language

um I get particularly annoyed at people

in the field of linguistics and psycho

linguistics because so many of them are

such bad writers it's like you study

language if what you're studying is what

makes a sentence difficult to understand

why don't to pay attention to your own

research and make your sentences less

hard to understand.

Yeah. What is it that you love so much

about children's explanations? Things

like clouds are water vapor. Smoke is

fire vapor. Oh, yes. Uh you do see

things uh Yes, that was from from my u

my grandson. Uh I mean it is it's it's

poetry. It's a a new juxosition. There's

such a freshness to children's

explanations. Yeah. Yeah. because they

aren't writing in in cliches and partly

because they haven't uh accumulated this

mass of abstractions like the writers of

a few centuries ago who had to grasp for

some common image. Uh

children without the uh decades of of of

uh of acquired jargon from academia have

to appeal to something that they can see

and that other people can see. Yeah.

There's a there's a guy who I follow on

Twitter who I've really come to like and

in his bio it says listen to children

they haven't forgotten how to see. And

um I know a YouTuber and one of the ways

that she comes up with her ideas is she

has conversations with her friend's kids

who just ask these crazy questions like

how deep is the ocean? How how high

would a tower need to be in order for us

to get to heaven? And then like I have

another friend who when he was a kid he

thought that clouds were produced by

those little smoke things uh sort of

like chimneys. So he thought that those

were like cloud creators. And there's

such a freshness to just how children

see and how they talk about things. And

like you said they're they're they can't

possibly think inside the box because

they don't even know the box exists.

Yes. Right. And there were there there

there are have been in history various

features to remind people of the the the

originality and the freshness of of

kids. There was a regular feature from

my childhood called Kids Say the Darnest

Things from a television host named Art

Art Link Letter. Long I've heard of him.

Oh, you have? Okay. Yeah. In fact, what

has survived him and the uh and the

feature of the the program is the say

the darnest things or even the verb the

darnest nouns which you'll often see in

uh adopted in headlines and in it's

become itself a kind of a formula but he

originated it. Johnny Carson the

longtime host of the Tonight Show. Yeah.

uh would sometimes have features where

they he he'd read

um answers kids answers to questions to

to to much hilarity. How does humor

factor into all this into writing? Yeah

exactly. Like and even maybe even the

science of humor like words that are

funnier because you have that great talk

from like 10 years ago where you I'm

going to recommend it. Yeah. Well

there's I guess like everything, there's

an art to it because you don't want to

when it's strained, you get groans

instead of laughter. Yeah. So, it has to

be appropriate. Um it it can't just be

something that has been repeated so

often that people have heard heard it 37

times before. Right. And humor

specifically depends on freshness. Yeah

it it does. And it also depends. Humor

does have

um much in common with good writing.

There's the line from uh Hamlet which uh

brevity is the soul of wit. Yeah. Now uh

it's a great saying for a number of

reasons. One of them is even the term

soul as opposed to is essential for wit

or is important for wit or even the

essence of wit. Um those are ways that

we would say it now. But the soul of

wit, you have to think for a minute.

Soul being the the deepest deepest

essence, but it's a mono syllable and it

has so much of resonance that you know I

guess that that that Shakespeare really

was a good writer, wasn't he? Yeah, I've

heard of that guy. Yeah. Um but it's

also it is uh it is true and it's a good

example of itself because it is so

brief. M uh it was reiterated centuries

later in the famous style manual the

elements of style by uh white where um

professor uh in lectures at Cornell that

EB White uh recalled and then turned

into a book uh would say that the first

rule of writing is omit needless words.

Now again it's a beautiful example of

itself because there are no needless

words in it. And he said that sometimes

professor would be so adamant and um uh

so insistent that this was the almost

the only thing you needed to know about

writing that he would just not know what

to do except repeat it and you'd say

omit needless words. Omit needless

words. Omit needless words. Uh and you

know as with you brevity is the soul of

wit. aside from being an example of

itself, it is so true that sometimes

uh when I have to uh compress an article

to fit into some fixed space, especially

if I'm writing for a newspaper or

magazine and say, you know, unlike

academia where you can u blather on uh

with no one telling you to shut

up, when you have to write for a paper

they'll say, "Sorry, 800 words." And if

it's, you know, 800 83 words, the editor

will chop off three words and you don't

get to say what they are. And I can

often mangle the meaning. So you have to

actually learn how to say something in

800 words or however many words it is.

But what I find is often just the

exercise of squeezing it into that uh

that maximum limit just improves the

pros as if by magic. It's like oh you

know damn I have to like make this

shorter and I thought I had said it

perfectly. Then often when you do it

you find, you know, it really has

improved in quality having gotten rid of

those needless words. You know, partly

it's because of mental effort. Namely

every every syllable, every word is more

cognitive processing by your reader. If

you can get the same message in uh

quicker, that's often le less work. Uh

but it also makes it uh aesthetically

more pleasing. You have to work within

the constraints of the English language.

the the uh the melody, the the rhythm

the music of the language. It forces you

into often into concrete language

instead of woolly idioms and and and uh

cliches. Brevity as a solo is good. It

kind of just hit me how good of a line

that is. I've heard that a thousand

times, but it never it never punched me

in the chest like it just did. I got to

ask. I mean, sorry. The reason I brought

it up is Oh, yeah. In humor. Yeah. And

it's a soul of wit. I mean, wit used to

mean a lot more than just, you know

haha. Uh, you know, it meant uh, you

know, trenchness and appropriateness. U

but wit in the sense of just raw humor.

That's something that comedians know.

You pair down the jokes, you pair down

the lines. When you're using humor, the

shorter, the pathier, the funnier. Uh

if you drag it out, then you know, it

ain't funny. You can step on your own

punch line. you can uh telegraph

telegraph the uh the punchline.

So I went to uh Rockefeller Center the

other day and there's this called like a

big thing of stone and John D.

Rockefeller is talking about

his theory of society and the good life

and it was just remarkably well written.

Remarkably well written and then it's

the same thing with the Declaration of

Independence. There's just some

beautiful lines in there, right? We hold

these truths to be self-evident that all

men are created equal. It's just

beautiful writing. And what do you make

of how older writing, it seems like when

people think about it, it's like harder

to read. Thank God that writing's gotten

so much clearer and easier to read, but

at the same time, it does feel like a

kind of beauty and poetry, a kind of

reverence that I have for language

itself has been stripped away from the

English language at times. You do

sometimes feel that even again

Rockefeller is a good example because he

did not go down in history as a pro

stylist. Yeah. No, exactly. Thank you.

Thank you. That was a very important

part of that point. This was the CEO. He

was a oil magnet. Yeah. Right. And

likewise, I have a quote from Thomas

Edison in Enlightenment Now on how the

electricity will liberate women. Right.

And it's just beautifully written.

Beautifully written. Uh and and this is

a guy who spent, you know, hours with

you know, filaments and life light

bulbs. uh and and and uh but and he

could but he could write like an angel.

Uh Herbert Spencer, uh Oliver Wendel

Holmes, senior, that's a great example.

U you Charles Darwin, uh all these

people who were not themselves

uh um professional writers, they had

something else, but they were very good

at it. So it's an interesting question.

I think one reason is they were trained

themselves on the classics on on um

great works of of literature probably

because for many of them there wasn't

um the telephone radio uh let alone

texting social media um the way that you

presented yourself was through your pros

and so you cultivated it the same way

you you know kind of arranged yourself

in a mirror. This is other people how

other people viewed you. But you had

this stock because also that they were

educated on the the classics. They had

many good examples to draw on. But then

the the third reason is one that came up

earlier in our conversation. Namely

since they didn't have the benefit of

decades and decades of abstractions and

cliches, and they were kind of exploring

virgin

territory, conveying new ideas, and and

they didn't couldn't easily reach for uh

a canned cliche. They had to put new

ideas into forms that their readers or

listeners could understand. And that

forced them to draw on visual images and

metaphors and and um viv

vivid expressions and locationions. And

that is that there's been a um a process

that's been going on for longer than a

century called informalization

where uh you can see it in dress where

you know men no longer wear hats and

women don't wear gloves and Sometimes

you look at a picture of someone on a

hike from a century ago and you know the

men are wearing ties and the women are

wearing long dresses and you know

they're going they're going hiking. This

would be inconceivable to us. Um the

fact that people used to address each

other with you know with you know Mr.

and and and and Mrs. and we're all on a

firstname basis. Um I got in trouble in

the third grade for calling my teacher I

went to detention for calling my teacher

by her first name. Yeah. And that would

not happen now. That was I that that's

certainly familiar to me from my

childhood. It would be unthinkable. I

wouldn't have got gotten that attention.

I actually it's been like 20 years and I

still feel the shame that I felt in that

moment. It's crazy. It just wouldn't

have occurred to us. It was just you

couldn't have done that a million years.

The the fact that um taboo language uh

profanities are commonly woven into

speech which again would have been you

know unthinkable a century ago.

But there is this a process of greater

familiarity of less hierarchy partly as

a byproduct of democratization the the

erosion of traditional hierarchies of

class and uh education. Um there's a

kind of romantic um ethos where

authenticity, spontaneity are valued as

opposed to putting on airs. Uh thinking

carefully before you do anything. Uh all

of these have led to fancy language

being seen as more pompous stilted uh

distancing whereas the cultural value

has changed toward spontaneity

intimacy, naturalists, authenticity. So

I think many of us in having if we had

to put the effort into crafting pros the

way they may have a century or two

centuries ago, we'd feel, oh, people are

thinking I'm being too fancy and they

might you might even perceive you as

being too fancy, right? uh and and as a

result the conversational vernacular has

uh as opposed to the elevated the well

the well-crafted uh has come to to

characterize modern pros. So I got to

ask you were talking about being able to

pull a cliche or an abstraction. AI

takes that completely to the next level.

And do you feel like AI then enhances

our almost inability to think originally

for lack of a better word? Like does it

keep the trend that we're seeing or are

LLMs like a new form and then maybe

actually create some new way of

communicating altogether? Yeah. Uh the

the output of LLM is is peculiar in one

sense. It's well written in the sense

that it tends not to be in academies in

jargon in the sentence structure tends

to be pretty um plain and sound. Uh the

even the progression of ideas tends to

be orderly. There tends to be an

introductory sentence and concluding

sentence. Um so in that sense it's good

writing. It's bad in the sense that it

is so generic and prosaic and you can

almost recognize the output of a large

language model. It's so so benile. Mhm.

Uh now perhaps it could be trained and

perhaps if you prompted it, you know

don't don't be prosaic, don't be uh

plain. Uh uh it'll be interesting to see

whether we come up with of uh with any

kind of style or or freshness, but it's

not the way it's designed. It's designed

as a mashup, as a pastiche of, you know

literally, you know, billions of of

examples out there. And it's an

interesting question why it should be so

uh at least why its pro style should be

sound. I mean I think that's the best

you could say about it. Whereas the pro

style of most you know academics you

know most lawyers most bureaucrats is

not sound. Why is it better? One

possibility is it's just been hammered

into shape through the fine-tuning and

the the feedback that is instead of just

regurgitating

uh an amalgam of right the reinforcement

learning the reinforcement learning and

the uh the stuff they don't really talk

about much but that might be essential

that is they're real human beings who

force it to uh into a you know a five

paragraph essay right the other is that

uh and this is completely speculative

but we know in visual beauty often a

composite is more attractive than the uh

elements that went into the composite.

So that if you take a bunch of faces and

you morph them together, the um

non-existent human being that comes out

of the morphing is more handsome or

prettier than all of the men's faces and

women's faces that went into it. Really

take a high school yearbook and you mash

together the several hundred faces and

the the result is is is pretty

attractive. Is that right? Wow.

Now, whether that can be true of pros

style, that is that if you were to

eliminate all of the

um god-awful convoluted constructions

and just came up with a kind of the

generic sentence structure, it wouldn't

be beautiful, but it would be clear.

That's a hypothesis. You've written nine

books. You're working on your 10th now.

with LLMs and the way they're going, if

you were to almost rewrite those books

starting now, how would you have written

those books differently? I mean, knowing

what we know about um Yeah, knowing what

we know about LLM and also your sense of

where the world is going and how it's

changing, how the world of writing is

changing. Would you have written the

same books? Um, probably not. I think

they I think I'd have to give greater um

weight to the power of abstracting

uh patterns from massive amounts of uh

input which in the um uh the the the

approach that I uh was kind of trained

in and that I then developed of you know

computational cognitive science, Chsky

linguistics, uh classic AI was much more

organized around um rules, algorithms

logic, kind of logical programming. It

was hard to imagine how with enough just

sheer input and training a neural an

associative neural network could extract

um uh sensible ideas and uh pros out of

this huge unstructured mass of input.

Mhm. Now, I don't think that shows that

the human mind is a large language model

because it would be the equivalent of a

child listening to language for, you

know, 30,000 years before they could put

put their first sentence clearly. Uh

and also kids don't just need to have

massive amounts of text pour into them.

They also are in a situated in a world

where they can figure out what the

people talking to them are trying to

say. uh and they're interacting with a

world and that's a very different style

of learning than just processing massive

amounts of text.

But still I think I would I I certainly

would have had to reconcile the

intelligence of large language models

with human intelligence with more

attention to the power of pattern

extraction from large input uh corpora

than I than I did. Well, thanks very

much for doing this. Thank you. It's

been a pleasure.