I don't think so. Everyone has stories, are stories summarizable? To some extent, but you lose the point of it. A well-written book has a lot of relatable stories in it, that helps make a point. Taleb's books or Haidt's Righteous Mind comes to mind. A summary is eminently forgettable.
Also arguably a truly complex topic is not summarizable. I've been studying the fertility crisis recently, and it's just one of those topics where everybody has is own opinion and a lot of theories make sense. In debate, a man who read only summaries wouldn't survive a minute to a man who actually reads.
> Also arguably a truly complex topic is not summarizable. I've been studying the fertility crisis recently, and it's just one of those topics where everybody has is own opinion and a lot of theories make sense. In debate, a man who read only summaries wouldn't survive a minute to a man who actually reads.
I think it's helpful to treat it like an orchestra and you're the director. It pulls up lots of synonyms but that's all it does. If you need synonyms it's great but life is more than that.
To chase of the lossless gives itself good examples in audiophilia. Good thoughts, myself still resisting to use Ai for anything except painting or photos generation I see the truth in sometimes feeling with 6th sense sometimes just giving it time, we live in times when problem presented to us is not solvable. Future is here, only its distribution is not even.
To the extent Tim Urban spent ten minutes to see if it was worth spending an hour watching the full video it's a reasonable bet. He did a follow up tweet (https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/1873583821217746957) which seems to support my hypothesis: "To the commenters disappointed in me for not watching the whole video: This was not a core piece of my research. While writing, I wanted clarification on something I had already researched. A searched turned up a video that seemed relevant and I wanted to know its basic points!" I agree with the risks you outline and the value of sweating the details, but AI summaries offer another "point on a trade-off curve" that may be worth using from time to time.
I think there are a broader set of attention management / energy management strategies that are worth considering as long as you balance the downside risks.
I believe there is a difference between writing concise, and writing a summary. The former attempts to cover all important details in the fastest way possible, the latter attempts to convey the general meaning of a body of text, enough so you understand the main points.
If you look at Graham’s essays, you wouldn’t call them summaries. But you would think them concise.
Agreed. We definitely read too much summary, and AI is going to convince a lot of people that's what audiences want, which is an unfolding turducken of tragedies.
But - a few decades back, newspapers (I hope everyone remembers what they are) were struggling because when the inverted pyramid style of telling stories (designed to be quickly scanned by eye without being "read") was used online, nobody read those stories to the end, so all the advertising and time-on-page stuff really started suffering. So: narrative journalism came along, to borrow techniques from fiction to get readers hooked right to the last sentence.
Meanwhile, social media kept making everything hastier and shorter-form and more summarised, and newspapers & big websites got more and more desperate for attention and resorted to even more stuff that audiences hate (while somewhat-successfully persuading those audiences that THEY were the problem, with their pathetic "shrinking attention spans") and...here we are, with a lot of newspapers no longer sustainable and a lot of social media no longer empowering its users.
The irony is so strong that I’m doubting myself here, but for an essay on the perils of summary, it relies on a deeply reductionist idea of what AI does, even now. Yes, the machine can summarize —and the cogs of capitalism enjoy cranking it that way— but also infer, suss patterns, raise interesting questions, elucidate tradeoffs (from just my own, free-tier use!)
>The output of [LLMs]… is an impediment to learning anything complex and creative
I’m curious what qualifies for either, here. Certainly not biochem or music theory, or Jobs’s take of creativity being “just connecting things?” Was it complex or creative, when Claude suggested me a suspended chord to punch up a melody I was noodling on?
I sense we’re about to gerrymander the heck out of what those adjectives mean, cutting out whatever the machine du jour can do.
The tragedy is that many AI applications lose the context in summarizing—they either focus on wrangling the facts or wrangling the fragments. So often, the story is lost.
Speaking of water the human body is 70-80 percent water.
Water is also associated with Spiritual life.
The principle of Spiritual life has to do with the transformation of water, in which you free up your solid, mortal identification, and through which you become transformable, watery, alive, and your Spirit-Life begins.
The life force is water. Emotion is water. I is H2O. I = H2O, meaning the sense of independent consciousness, or the body-mind-complex, equals water.
Whatever water can discovered to be, if you do samyama on it, if you enter into its molecular and atomic domain, then there is only one H Happiness.
This earth-world watery domain is the Radiant Water of Consciousness Itself.
It's so cozy to hide behind some Proust or Feynman quote.
But this article is a good reminder: you can always say some dumb irrelevant shit coming out from your true inner self. No need to hide behind other people's words or book summaries.
I already regret writing this but email newsletters, like the post office, have the romance of never rescinding the letter
Progress vs Perfection.
Share a ver.2 and I'll read it with as much interest!
why do you regret writing?
You could always say something 10% clearer with 30 more days of thinking
just keep editing the post and the email version works as an exclusive first-draft preview for subscribers ha
You have such a wonderful, unique, perspective on things, thank you for sharing your writing publicly.
Become unsummarizable.
That requires that one actually have a lot of worthwhile things to say.
Most people don't.
I don't think so. Everyone has stories, are stories summarizable? To some extent, but you lose the point of it. A well-written book has a lot of relatable stories in it, that helps make a point. Taleb's books or Haidt's Righteous Mind comes to mind. A summary is eminently forgettable.
Also arguably a truly complex topic is not summarizable. I've been studying the fertility crisis recently, and it's just one of those topics where everybody has is own opinion and a lot of theories make sense. In debate, a man who read only summaries wouldn't survive a minute to a man who actually reads.
> Also arguably a truly complex topic is not summarizable. I've been studying the fertility crisis recently, and it's just one of those topics where everybody has is own opinion and a lot of theories make sense. In debate, a man who read only summaries wouldn't survive a minute to a man who actually reads.
Agreed, complex topics are not summarizable.
I think it's helpful to treat it like an orchestra and you're the director. It pulls up lots of synonyms but that's all it does. If you need synonyms it's great but life is more than that.
funny enough I actually made my own website for synonyms: https://carefulwords.com
It's great. You should randomize the three words
Nevermind, you hardcoded in the examples
Some words have no associated quotes at all, so I wanted to make sure people saw examples with a good spread of words + quotes
If you're hardcoding in that shallowly then you need to universalize your code
To chase of the lossless gives itself good examples in audiophilia. Good thoughts, myself still resisting to use Ai for anything except painting or photos generation I see the truth in sometimes feeling with 6th sense sometimes just giving it time, we live in times when problem presented to us is not solvable. Future is here, only its distribution is not even.
To the extent Tim Urban spent ten minutes to see if it was worth spending an hour watching the full video it's a reasonable bet. He did a follow up tweet (https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/1873583821217746957) which seems to support my hypothesis: "To the commenters disappointed in me for not watching the whole video: This was not a core piece of my research. While writing, I wanted clarification on something I had already researched. A searched turned up a video that seemed relevant and I wanted to know its basic points!" I agree with the risks you outline and the value of sweating the details, but AI summaries offer another "point on a trade-off curve" that may be worth using from time to time.
I think there are a broader set of attention management / energy management strategies that are worth considering as long as you balance the downside risks.
I believe there is a difference between writing concise, and writing a summary. The former attempts to cover all important details in the fastest way possible, the latter attempts to convey the general meaning of a body of text, enough so you understand the main points.
If you look at Graham’s essays, you wouldn’t call them summaries. But you would think them concise.
Agreed. We definitely read too much summary, and AI is going to convince a lot of people that's what audiences want, which is an unfolding turducken of tragedies.
But - a few decades back, newspapers (I hope everyone remembers what they are) were struggling because when the inverted pyramid style of telling stories (designed to be quickly scanned by eye without being "read") was used online, nobody read those stories to the end, so all the advertising and time-on-page stuff really started suffering. So: narrative journalism came along, to borrow techniques from fiction to get readers hooked right to the last sentence.
Meanwhile, social media kept making everything hastier and shorter-form and more summarised, and newspapers & big websites got more and more desperate for attention and resorted to even more stuff that audiences hate (while somewhat-successfully persuading those audiences that THEY were the problem, with their pathetic "shrinking attention spans") and...here we are, with a lot of newspapers no longer sustainable and a lot of social media no longer empowering its users.
Summaries aren't going to fix this.
There is so much lost in truncation. Writing about this now, in fact: www.whitenoise.email
The irony is so strong that I’m doubting myself here, but for an essay on the perils of summary, it relies on a deeply reductionist idea of what AI does, even now. Yes, the machine can summarize —and the cogs of capitalism enjoy cranking it that way— but also infer, suss patterns, raise interesting questions, elucidate tradeoffs (from just my own, free-tier use!)
>The output of [LLMs]… is an impediment to learning anything complex and creative
I’m curious what qualifies for either, here. Certainly not biochem or music theory, or Jobs’s take of creativity being “just connecting things?” Was it complex or creative, when Claude suggested me a suspended chord to punch up a melody I was noodling on?
I sense we’re about to gerrymander the heck out of what those adjectives mean, cutting out whatever the machine du jour can do.
I like this but there seems to be a a logic flaw, as it refers a video, not text.
So. The question remains: is summarizing a YT video worth it? Many times I think it is.
I imagine summaries might be great when I want to decide if I really want to engage with something - but they should not substitute this engagement.
The tragedy is that many AI applications lose the context in summarizing—they either focus on wrangling the facts or wrangling the fragments. So often, the story is lost.
Speaking of water the human body is 70-80 percent water.
Water is also associated with Spiritual life.
The principle of Spiritual life has to do with the transformation of water, in which you free up your solid, mortal identification, and through which you become transformable, watery, alive, and your Spirit-Life begins.
The life force is water. Emotion is water. I is H2O. I = H2O, meaning the sense of independent consciousness, or the body-mind-complex, equals water.
Whatever water can discovered to be, if you do samyama on it, if you enter into its molecular and atomic domain, then there is only one H Happiness.
This earth-world watery domain is the Radiant Water of Consciousness Itself.
It's so cozy to hide behind some Proust or Feynman quote.
But this article is a good reminder: you can always say some dumb irrelevant shit coming out from your true inner self. No need to hide behind other people's words or book summaries.
Better is the enemy of good