22 chunks · 18 episodes
...ely where you are right now. You don't need to imagine. When it's a human, your conversation partner is not attuned to precisely what you need to hear at that moment. They have their own inner world and embodied needs. The push and pull is what leads...
... middle point of yours and the partner's style and beliefs. But now there's one conversation partner (a model) that 1) millions of people are talking to, and 2) that doesn't update itself when you talk to it. The humans are all swarms of unrelated de...
Telescoping time horizons are hard for conversation partners to understand. Zooming in or out to different time horizons is hard for people to do fundamentally. It's near-impossible when there isn't any warnin...
Conversation partners with good bounce can make any conversation engaging. No matter what you volley to them, they'll bounce it back with more energy.
...d. If a majority of your social interactions are with an infinitely sycophantic conversation partner, then lightly absurd beliefs of yours can compound into significantly absurd beliefs.
...e person says things, some of which are more interesting than others. The other conversation partner picks the subset they find most interesting and builds on that with their own utterances. This process then repeats. With two curious, open people, t...
...Left of Society. In normal human interactions, if you go down a weird path your conversation partner will at some point say "...that sounds weird." But LLMs rarely do. It feels like a real social interaction, superficially, but it's fundamentally hol...
...e computer tries to solve problems. Real time feedback from an active listening conversation partner helps you get better at figuring out if the signal is being received and how to modulate the message to make sure they receive it as you intended. Th...
...ople who are very helpful are easier to spearfish. A stance: do you assume your conversation partner is trying to help you or harm you by default? LLMs are designed to be helpful, so they assume their partner is acting in good faith. But if you inclu...
...answer. In every interaction I sense and incorporate hidden constraints that my conversation partner understands but I didn't yet feel. I then ride the tangle of interlocking constraints I've collected until I can feel the lock click. When it clicks ...
An ideal conversation partner is both interesting and interested. They have useful things to say, and also have the patience to absorb disconfirming evidence from you.
... you to engage with that detail and thus discover the problem. LLMs are a great conversation partner for you to figure out the answer yourself. Great bounce.
...proximately navigate domains you aren't an expert in.[aov] If you had a willing conversation partner who was significantly smarter than you and better read but every so often was wrong, would you not talk with them? Of course not! Having a cognitive ...
.... You can be an asshole without realizing it, because what matters is what your conversation partner thinks. If you're being overbearing, over-flexing your formal authority, intimidating or exhausting them, they're more likely to see you as an asshol...
...sation, challenge yourself to find the hidden great insight lurking within your conversation partner's mind. No conversation is too fleeting or banal to not have a great insight lurking if you look hard enough. Approach each conversation as if the pe...
...e more his own writing would become mush. But LLMs do give you a fun, well-read conversation partner to bounce your ideas off of which helps make your ideas better. Someone told me the mark of a good conversation partner is someone with "good bounce"...
...yes, and" environments. When I'm feeling it, I'm like a pinball machine, and my conversation partner sometimes gets bounced around like the ball. Exhilarating! Overwhelming!
... real world can simulate all of the details instantly. The real world is like a conversation partner that can fundamentally reason through every fractal detail instantly and tell you where it doesn't work. That's why doing is more powerful than talki...
...inating. People will rise to the level of interestingness of the interest their conversation partner takes in them. If you're interested, the things around you will be interesting. Everyone has an interesting thing to say, if only you're interested e...
If your conversation partner understood what you meant, does it matter if it's not technically a word? That's how words are born! Someone explains it using a new utterance and th...