Justin Owings

Going from zero to one is like a sigmoid curve. So much effort, so little to show for it. But if you keep going, things start happening, and eventually, they accelerate. Everything changes. "You can just do things" is only step one. justinowings.com/you-can-just-d…

Prompter: Tell me about this. AI: It's not X. It's Y. As clear as it gets. Persuasive too. Clarity to a receptive audience. The illusion of meaning. x.com/david_perell/s…

Someone should tell Elon about the doorman fallacy. cc @rorysutherland

The problem is all these platforms fail to account for how relationships in real life work: Relationships in real life are two-way streets. They have some element of symmetry to them. You have to listen to your friend's boring story or look at the photos of their trip because…

Artificial imitates life. (I.e., Mimicry is the secret to man's success a la Rene Girard and Joseph Henrich, etc.) Now life imitates artificial.

Common knowledge that we react emotionally and instinctively. That whole thinking fast brain exists for our survival. No surprise we respond in the same way with AI writing, which is organized around being helpful and polite to the prompter, building rapport, pacing and leading…

Why are audiences, like LLMs, receptive to "It's not X. It's Y?" After all, its heavy use is why the LLMs adopted the expression. Seems that people, when they are sold on an idea already, find a clear-cut expression like "It's not X. It's Y" compelling. Consider the recent…

Rain offshore.

Except it's all the LLMs.

"What's focal is causal." @RobertCialdini Why em dashes the current scapegoat of AI writing:

Everyone keeps talking about em dashes.

A smarter play (were it possible) would be to nerf the ability of AI to be less persuasive. There is a problem with how LLMs have learned to communicate, which is connected with how they've learned to construct arguments. All the LLMs are tireless listeners, mirroring the…

Opposing counsel just filed a Motion with four em dashes. It also says “in today’s ever-evolving legal landscape” and “let’s unpack this.”

The continued relevance of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations (and other writings from antiquity) is proof that technological progress falls short of solving for the fundamental struggles of existence.

My Horseshoe Theory of Perverse Urbanism: Neither the urban high-rise nor auto-dependent exurban development would exist without all the policies that promote them. Both are extreme caricatures of human habitat born out of post-1800 central planning.

"More than" and "go beyond" are special cases of the "It's not X. It's Y" rhetorical pattern. (Gotta catch'em all.) The question they beg: What narrative is being sold with this rhetoric? Why is [whatever] not enough?

There is something to the back and white clarity of AI writing. Take its proclivity for the "It's not X. It's Y" contrastive (negation followed by assertion). The nuanced approach to opposites is the harmony, as with Heraclitus, "There is harmony in the tension of opposites, as…

This is too good. ChatGPT asked to write an email response to this tweet, doubles down with an "It's not X. It's Y." "But hear me out — sometimes those two dashes aren't just dramatic flair. They're doing work." @UnAIify 🎯 unaiify.com/un/sA3LhUkm

Just wait til you notice the "It's not X. It's Y." This isn't an email. It's a mission statement (per your email). cc @UnAIify

How can we think harder with writing? How do we avoid falling into rhetorical traps, i.e. falling for writing that feels good, feels right (like the now ubiquitous "It's not X. It's Y" pattern)? Take this line from the article, for example: "Writing compels us to think — not in…

There is some kind of irony at play here. The lead paragraph of this article makes the case for writing as thinking using the contrastive "It's not X. It's Y" rhetoric, a negation-affirmation loved by AI/LLMs (@UnAIify for highlights). What about this turn of phrase snags so…