I’ve been worrying a bit over the philosophy of creation and dissemination in the era of LLMs (large language models). I feel we are overly impressed with the byproduct or even the bycatch. LLMs do complete some tasks, write code, and produce superficially convincing texts. In my opinion, this is not always the true or valuable work product. What LLMs produce tends to be byproduct of actual work: descriptions, claims, and so on, and not the actual work.
I’ll try to make the above sensible through some examples. I’ll start with a deep software engineering concept.
“… code in fact is not an asset. What is your company’s asset is the experience and knowledge that the people who have built your code have gathered during the construction of that code.”
From: Alan Cooper.
The idea is: software usually has value because it does something of value. The more source code used to implement a process, the more expensive the process becomes to adapt and maintain. Thus one can consider source code size as a liability. A related idea is: universities are supposed to produce researchers and advancements, papers merely being a necessary support of those primary products.
Closer to my intended point is Gian-Carlo Rota commenting on the nature of mathematics.
We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of “proving theorems.” Is a writer’s job mainly that of “writing sentences?”
It is of an older time that Gian-Carlo Rota believes his audience may share the minor premise that a writer’s job isn’t just making text.
Continuing the literary perspective we have the famous “murder your darlings” advice.
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it-whole-heartedly-and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
From: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, “On the Art of Writing”, 1916.
This is the opposite of the indiscriminate over-dressing and polishing of every possible idea we see from so much LLM assisted work. Rota had more to say on the need to throw out candidates ideas.
ROTA: There is a ratio by which you can measure how good a mathematician is, and that is how many crackpot ideas he must have in order to have one good idea. If it’s ten to one then he is a genius. For the average mathematician, it may be one hundred to one. You must have the courage to discard lots of attractive ideas. This is a feature of creative thinking that the man in the street fails to realize.
SCIENCE: And you have to try out all those ideas?
SHARP: Pretty much, but you mustn’t become infatuated with the sound of your own words. You have to be ruthless in throwing out your own bad ideas. You have to constantly weed your own garden.
I feel that checking, editing, and deleting are in fact harder and more unpleasant than initial writing or noodling and polishing. If a LLM user takes on this necessary filtering they can possibly produce good work. If a LLM user doesn’t have a strict enough personal filter, they flood the channel with slop.
Categories: Expository Writing Opinion
Tagged as: coding math mathematics Philosophy writing
