I think this is in fact what’s going on. GPT2 can say things that don’t make sense with a fluent prose style; therefore it is possible to have style and make no sense.
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In fact you can have note-perfect, sophisticated, convincing style without coming one inch closer to making sense.
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Style and sense may just be two disjoint capacities. If I’m speculating I tend to think the “cortical algorithm” is for style, and sense is extrapolated from something striatal or related to motor/kinaesthetic learning.
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Personally it’s frustrating because I have awesome style and just enough sense to keep up, and most of the people I know are sorta “sense-supremacists” who think that skill profile is a hallmark of bad people.
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A lot of people just don’t believe in their hearts that different skills are a thing, that you can be good at one thing and bad at another. And people especially don’t like the notion that you can be better at the stylistic part of writing than the “making sense” part.
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But look: my mom, who worked in academic publishing, could do a brilliant job editing a math manuscript for style without knowing calculus.
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She also subconsciously imitated the accent of whoever she was speaking to. And picked up Romanian by listening to phone conversations. She had a freakishly good ear. I’m convinced this is a single phenomenon.
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If I watch an episode of Peaky Blinders I’ll acquire an Irish accent by osmosis for the next hour. I subconsciously pastiche whichever writer I’ve been reading lately. I can’t *not* mirror conversational tone & emotion. One phenomenon.
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I claim Scott Alexander has the same thing: writes compulsively, great at style pastiche, nobody believes him when he says he’s bad at math.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
Among the rationalists, I always thought that Paul and Wei Dai were like the opposite of this: their ideas make more sense than anyone else's, but their style is so boring few people read them.
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Exactly. Though I disagree with Paul about some stuff, he’s clearly extremely good at the structural/logical thought thing.
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