@DavidPerellChannel

Some lessons I picked up from the interview:

1. The curse of knowledge is the biggest threat to clear writing.

2. It can be harder to write about a topic you’re an expert in because it’s so easy to forget what it's like to not know something, which makes you overestimate what the reader knows.

3. The easiest way to fight this curse of knowledge is to show drafts of your writing to people outside your field.

4. Shakespeare said: "Brevity is the soul of wit." The point is that saying something in fewer words will almost always make it better because it requires less cognitive load for the reader to understand.

5. Ok, let's try again: Saying something in fewer words will almost always make it better.

6. Ok, one more time: Remove needless words.

7. One reason why writing is harder than speaking is there's no real-time feedback. You have to imagine the audience's reaction.

8. The best thing you can say about how LLMs write is that the sentence structure is sound. But the downside is how generic and banal the outputs are.

9. 18th and 19th century writing is more vivid because the abstractions that modern writers use hadn't been invented yet. Calling somebody "pathologically aggressive" isn’t nearly as vivid as saying: "They grabbed me by the throat."

10. Generalizations without examples are useless, and examples without generalizations are pointless. You need to marry them both. Generalizations show the big picture. Examples make them concrete.

11. The more vivid a piece of writing, the more people can form a mental image of what you’re saying. Avoid abstractions: frameworks, paradigms, concepts. All those things. Get concrete, so people can see what you’re actually talking about. For example, don’t talk about a “stimulus that awakened your senses” when you can say: “I got excited because I saw a cute bunny rabbit.”

12. Academic writing should be clear. I mean… if the taxpayers are funding most of the research, shouldn’t they be able to understand it?

@ba-aliou

English isn't even my second language. However, I've progressed a lot especially in writing. All thank to the book The Sense of Style of Steven Pinker. I read the book more the 4 times. It's fantastic and full of wisdom. I really recommend it for everyone out there who wants to get better at English.

@Matt-Ergon-h6t

What I learned from this video about writing in the era of AI is that you have to tell people your piece is about AI to catch their attention when it really isn't.

@guitaro5000

18:51 It's at this point, you can tell that the interviewer finally became enlightened. What a wonderful moment!

@quemoiettoi

I love this : “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” Heraclitus

@tonsetz

It's definitely worth it just because it's Steven Pinker, but the channel totally clickbaited the thumbnail and section titles. The conversation has nothing to do with LLMs.

@silentm999

Speaking gives us direct engagement, body language, and tone. We can say something in a confusing way, but back up and say it in a different way, or six different ways, to make sure that we are understood. 

Writing is an indirect connection to others. We are subjected to even more filtering through the readers perception versus speaking. We absolutely have to get feedback to improve. This is why people join workshops. To make certain that their writing messages are delivered.

@johnmoyer99

For those interested in the AI issue, AI isn’t discussed until about 38:00.

@gabrielstroup

One of my favorite scientists, the first to instill in me a love for language, and now helping me on my fiction-writing journey. Thanks for sharing the wisdom!

@sabinedoebel3392

I read the Sense of Style years ago and have it on my shelf, but I love seeing/listening to Pinker talk about the ideas in a conversational style. Thank you!

@litterahouse4681

Abstraction is the mind’s greatest gift—it frees us from the prison of the literal and invites us to imagine beyond what is seen.

@garrettvantiem4637

I loved this interview! I wrote a 4k word essay and was both shocked and thrilled after taking a week to knock it down 2K. I didn't think it could be done, and then afterword I couldn't believe I'd been so bloated.

@PiGDoGAniMaL

Turgid. 
Brilliant!
The content already had me. 
The use of this descriptive word is the icing on the cake.

@Codetutor-DemystifyCoding

Four mins into the video, I had to upvote it. I am sure I am going to find it highly usefull.

@matthewlakajev

Dude your content is just the best!

@joemedley195

I’ve been editing on a free for all corporate wiki for the last year.  I’ve been removing wordiness and corporate speak with impunity that whole time. No one has ever complained.

@steveneardley7541

On bad writing in academia. I discovered that one of my graduate professors had won a writing award. I was perplexed; I always thought this person was a BAD writer. I hunted down the winning article, and the first sentence had an eight-word parenthetical expression in it. It was an insult to good writing. I joined with other grad students in history to form a writing group, and the faculty acted as if we were a subversive group. One of the chief idiocies of academic history departments is that they won't admit that it is the well-written history books that survive and have influence. They act as if it is all about "truth."

@luminousconfetti2674

It was a lot of fun, was very exciting. 
I am a big fan of Prof. Steven Pinker.

@joryiansmith

Steven is truly an exceptional teacher and person. We're lucky he's on humanity's team 🙏

@ash_stuart

This was illuminating. I apply some of these in my writing so it was good to have validation, and then you learn about new things or new ways of looking at the same thing, which is ever more rewarding. Thank you David, great interview.