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"Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

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Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

#21

Post by mechanicum »

rzk wrote: post #6

An interesting solution suggested in the replies ( https://x.com/andrew_n_carr/status/2081534245370314816 ): The fix for this is to say: only report to me in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English. More info about it here: Simplified Technical English - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English

I was curious so I asked Claude how it would do that: https://gist.github.com/waddie/b26166eec6cf675c044c09a95a754...

I thought this bit was interesting:

> TE has no register for hedging, ownership of an opinion, or acknowledging that a reasonable person would disagree. Modality is roughly can / must / do not. […] Where a thought can't be said in STE without becoming a lie, I'd mark it and say it plainly rather than mangle it. Confidence and disagreement are the two things I'd insist on smuggling through.

Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

#22

Post by bluegain »

bennettnate5 wrote: post #13
ButlerianJihad wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The art of rhetoric and human communication involves knowing your audience, and when using idioms and metaphors, you choose those which are shared in common to be immediately recognizable and impactful. When I was 19, I had a psychologist who employed a lot of baseball idioms. "We'll touch base next week..." and although I am not a baseball fan, my father is, and we're all Americans, and so the baseball references we…

> That's exciting that emergent behavior is coining new idioms that may be applicable to some situation I dunno, it feels pretty similar to an elementary student blindly swapping words with a thesaurus to increase the sophistication of their writing (which I readily admit I was guilty of doing once). It sounds more intelligent but lacks substance.

FWIW as a humanities nerd, “tractable beachhead” packs a lot of nuanced meaning into two words. It’s probably not the right vocabulary choice for most audiences, but it isn’t empty or arbitrary.

Tractable = you can make it work, but it’s not going to take care of itself, you have to get your hands around it

Beachhead = you’re on a mission, you’re trying to probe to find the right way in to get started to eventually accomplish the whole thing, but first you have to find a little spot to get situated and then expand from there.

Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

#23

Post by euroderf »

sdwr wrote: post #8
chantepierre wrote: post #5

I've had "tractable beachhead" a bit earlier today. Like in "the tractable beachhead was the coupling between X and Y". A bit of googling did not help me, I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean.

Tractable is solvable, the opposite of intractable, and a beachhead is a landing point for an invasion. A tractable beachhead is a solvable first chunk of work that sets you up for the rest of the project

Wise man say: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single tractable beachhead.

Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

#24

Post by chantepierre »

bluegain wrote: post #22
bennettnate5 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's exciting that emergent behavior is coining new idioms that may be applicable to some situation I dunno, it feels pretty similar to an elementary student blindly swapping words with a thesaurus to increase the sophistication of their writing (which I readily admit I was guilty of doing once). It sounds more intelligent but lacks substance.

FWIW as a humanities nerd, “tractable beachhead” packs a lot of nuanced meaning into two words. It’s probably not the right vocabulary choice for most audiences, but it isn’t empty or arbitrary. Tractable = you can make it work, but it’s not going to take care of itself, you have to get your hands around it Beachhead = you’re on a mission, you’re trying to probe to find the right way in to get started to eventually a…

This kind of nuance is very suited to a mother tongue and I would probably like it in French, but as a non-native speaker who uses english mainly for professional or hobby stuff, claude-speak is becoming a bit off-putting.

My only exposure to english literature comes from the Brontë sisters at this moment in time.

Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

#25

Post by wzdd »

bluegain wrote: post #22
bennettnate5 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's exciting that emergent behavior is coining new idioms that may be applicable to some situation I dunno, it feels pretty similar to an elementary student blindly swapping words with a thesaurus to increase the sophistication of their writing (which I readily admit I was guilty of doing once). It sounds more intelligent but lacks substance.

FWIW as a humanities nerd, “tractable beachhead” packs a lot of nuanced meaning into two words. It’s probably not the right vocabulary choice for most audiences, but it isn’t empty or arbitrary. Tractable = you can make it work, but it’s not going to take care of itself, you have to get your hands around it Beachhead = you’re on a mission, you’re trying to probe to find the right way in to get started to eventually a…

It does, but in the same way that LLMs take two paragraphs to make a one-sentence point: by being weirdly specific and also redundant. LLMs don’t have a sense of whimsy in the face of RLHF, so if it’s proposing a solution, the solution is tractable. All implementation plans start with a beachhead.

“A good starting point” is almost certainly all it needed to convey and what it should have written.

Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

#27

Post by recursivecaveat »

feverzsj wrote: post #4

They scan too many classical literature.

It probably tests well when they're doing reinforcement learning. Humans trying to use in-group terminology or uncommon vocabulary to impress other humans with their knowledge and sophistication is a tale as old as time.

Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

#28

Post by naruhodo »

chantepierre wrote: post #5

I've had "tractable beachhead" a bit earlier today. Like in "the tractable beachhead was the coupling between X and Y". A bit of googling did not help me, I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean.

I wonder if this is a "loan idiom" from a non-English-speaking culture.

> Det är ingen ko på isen – “There’s no cow on the ice” (Sweden)

https://bigthink.com/high-culture/idioms-around-the-world/

Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

#30

Post by kridsdale1 »

euroderf wrote: post #23
sdwr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tractable is solvable, the opposite of intractable, and a beachhead is a landing point for an invasion. A tractable beachhead is a solvable first chunk of work that sets you up for the rest of the project

Wise man say: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single tractable beachhead.

It was true at Normandy, anyway.
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