Something I’ve found very helpful is when I have a murky idea in my head that would take a long time for me to articulate concisely, and I use an LLM to compress what I’m trying to say. So I type (or even dictate) a stream of consciousness with lots of parentheticals and semi-structured thoughts and ask it to summarize. I find it often does a great job at saying what I want to say, but better.
(See also the famous Pascal quote “This would have been a shorter letter if I had the time”).
P.s. for reference I’ve asked an LLM to compress what I wrote above. Here is the output:
When I have a murky idea that’s hard to articulate, I find it helpful to ramble—typing or dictating a stream of semi-structured thoughts—and then ask an LLM to summarize. It often captures what I mean, but more clearly and effectively.
Agreed, the messiness of the original text has character and humanity that is stripped from the summarized text. The first text is an original thought, exchanged in a dialogue, imperfectly.
Elsewhere in this comment section, it's discussed about the importance of having original thought, which the summarized text specifically isn't, and has leeched away.
The parent comment has actually made the case against the summarized text being "better" (if we're measuring anything that isn't word count).
Learning to articulate your thoughts is pretty vital in learning to think though.
An LLM could make something sound articulate even if your input is useless rambling containing the keywords you want to think about. Having someone validate a lack of thought as something useful doesn't seem good for you in the long term
Yeah, so the problem I’m solving is not that I don’t think enough about something, or even that I don’t think about it in the right way. “Murky” was maybe the wrong word. It’s more that I often find my audience does not have the longest attention span or forgiveness for sloppy writing; thus, the onus is on me to make my thoughts as easy to digest as possible.
As someone in a similar position, I have found I benefit from practicing - but also, LLMs are a really useful tool for that practice!
Learning how to condense what I say focuses me to think about what is and isn't important - and it also forces me to think in terms of "style" and "audience".
(My natural writing style is much more verbose - I want to address all sorts of branching objections and tangential concepts. I find parenthesis really useful, because I can dump a bunch of stuff there and it's a clear marker that you can safely skip it all)
LLMs are also useful, because I can ramble, work out my own summary, and then compare to the LLM. Or, when I was just starting out, ramble, get an LLM to summarize, and then try to work out my own summary that captures what it missed.
Aside from practice being inherently beneficial, I also find that being able to form my own summaries helps me catch when the LLM has misunderstood, hallucinated, or just subtly changed the emphasis - for instance, your original example was indeed much cleaner, but I wouldn't have felt like you were really truly a fellow rambler just from reading that.
Hopefully you don't mind a rambling post. If you want a TL;DR an LLM can probably do a decent job ;)
(ChatGPT Summary: Practicing summarization improves clarity, audience awareness, and writing focus—especially for naturally verbose thinkers. LLMs are helpful tools for this, both as a comparison point and a learning aid. Writing your own summaries sharpens understanding and helps catch LLM misinterpretations or emphasis shifts.)
Your original here is distinctly better! It shows your voice and thought patterns. All character is stripped away in the "compressed" version, which unsurprisingly is longer, too.
(See also the famous Pascal quote “This would have been a shorter letter if I had the time”).
P.s. for reference I’ve asked an LLM to compress what I wrote above. Here is the output:
When I have a murky idea that’s hard to articulate, I find it helpful to ramble—typing or dictating a stream of semi-structured thoughts—and then ask an LLM to summarize. It often captures what I mean, but more clearly and effectively.