Ideas that people bring up in conversations are ones that they implicitly vote are interesting.
- Ideas that people bring up in conversations are ones that they implicitly vote are interesting.
- There are nearly infinite things that you could say in an open-ended conversation; the things you do choose to say are a tiny subset, the subset that you thought was most useful to say.
- This is a consistent and significant bias in the kinds of things you say.
- An idea that lots of people choose to talk about is intrinsically more likely to be interesting than a random idea.
- Things that people take the time to write down in a personal letter are another threshold of quality.
- Things that people take the time to write down in a book are another threshold of quality.
- If you pull this curatorial judgment across all of humanity, something interesting comes out.
- This is one of the reasons that LLMs can be powerful; they're trained primarily on the most distilled collective votes for interestingness across society.