Resist Summary

painfully quick thoughts about AI

future sightings

Most of what we read is a summary. The news is summary, many online writers aim to summarize studies or other things they’ve read, the most popular nonfiction works tend to be summaries. In the case of history books, sometimes they are summaries of older summaries.

I worry we read too much summary. About news especially I think of Goethe: “If one has not read the newspapers for some months & then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.” It is easier than ever to slip and fall into 1,000 mentions of current events, you do not really need to go looking for that information. If something is important, gossip will bring it to your attention soon enough. And if a new and popular nonfiction book turns out to be very good, you will often gain its wisdom through a kind of social osmosis.

There exists lots of good summary, it’s mostly a question of quantity. And some of it really is compelling. Will Durant’s Story of Civilization is a giant, sweeping summary. But it is most worthwhile when read with a mind to record some threads to follow deeper, later. The work’s value is not just in the bare facts, but in presenting you several hundred doors. You may be rewarded sooner, in fact, if you pick a door and explore it for some time on your own before returning to his grand narrative. Perhaps you become so pleasantly lost that you never return to the summary.

I find it hard to imagine Leonardo da Vinci or Sherlock Holmes spending so much time with summary. I suspect careful thinkers do not gain a mastery of mystery, or attention to detail, by scrolling Reddit or listening to current event podcasts or asking “AI” to summarize anything. Instead I imagine they spend their time with primary sources, correspondence, stories, engaging with their own senses in one way or another, or some other form of exploring the world in detail.

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It is an interesting feature of stories and fiction that they resist summary. You cannot read a summary of Anna Karenina and somehow stockpile its pleasures and charms. Narrative resists compression.

I think avoiding summary is even more important when writing, possibly its the first step to good writing. You are a primary source. Lots of people couch their opinions with citations, or “studies show”, or they create writing that is an attempt to shorten some portion of thought or history. But this mostly makes for less interesting writing. I think one should write as much as they can with their own empiricism, their own senses, giving the reader their own characterization of life or events.

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The opposite of summary is attention to detail.

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The output of Large Language Models (“AI”) is an aid to learning extremely simple things, and it is an impediment to learning anything complex or creative. The nature of the output, of summary, is speed things along. But the consequence is to avoid you having to build your own complex mental model of anything. I worry that without a complex model in one’s own mind, one may never notice complex relationships that are otherwise missed. A loss of attention to detail.

Getting an immediate answer can solve immediate problems, but if instead of a solution, you came upon a chain of reasoning, you might actually solve several future problems for yourself too. That chain of reasoning is the real learning. One of the advantages of intelligence is that its not context-free, just-in-time delivery. Good thinking builds on itself. AI, like all summary, strips context.

This has serious ramifications even for smart people. If you ask a machine to do something for you, you are at risk of not asking for what you want, but what it can do well. If what it can do well is summarize, and you rely upon the tool, you may tune your questions so that you get better answers. This looks like training a machine to do what you want, but its also training yourself to ask questions about the world in a certain way. What are the questions you are omitting?

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I believe Paul. AI will punish those who are not concise. Fewer people will read them. I doubt this is a good thing, long term. The world will become less detailed and more lossy. But most of all it will punish the people that use AI to learn. Tim Urban got the gist in three minutes. Does anyone know what he missed?

Walk more slowly if you can,

ss