Harvard Professor Explains The Rules of Writing (Steven Pinker Interview)

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.

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.