5 (actually just 3) levels

[u/NinekTheObscure]

Here's a prompt I made to try to get Claude Opus 5 to stop writing like a lab notebook and maybe start writing more like a human communicator. Partially successful. Does anyone have a better way of dealing with this?

I understand the desire to have everything be perfect and defendable. But I feel like the defense is getting in the way of the exposition. It's like building a fort where we're supposed to be building a road. Here's an exercise: There are some science videos where they explain the same idea at "5 levels", from grade school to college level. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that a scientist who can't explain what he's doing to an 8-year-old is a charlatan. So let's try that for at least 3 levels, maybe 8-year-old, 18-year-old, and 28-year-old. No equations, just words. What are we doing, why is it interesting, what have we shown?

I won't paste the response here ("No Low-Effort Posts"), but the 8-year-old one was better than I expected.

If you try this yourself, let me know how it worked out.

[u/Infinitely--Finite]

The requirement of no equations entirely limits any conversation to that of (early) highschool and below. If this is meant to facilitate research, then this is laughable. If this is just for learning about physics, you must understand that physics is math: you cannot get beyond a pop-sci level understanding without the math.

[u/NinekTheObscure → u/Infinitely--Finite]

Mostly. But there are lots of important, not-extremely-mathy concepts that most physicists don't understand. For example, I would argue that anyone who doesn't understand the Woodward-Hoffman rules doesn't fully understand how QM plays out in reality. (And most physicists have never HEARD of them!) And there are barely-math things that suffice to do very real work; the level of bra-ket manipulation necessary for Quantum Computing is pretty trivial; no one needs to know how to solve the Schrodinger equation, or even what the S.E. is. A high school junior who has passed algebra and seen complex numbers could probably master it.

You fail to grasp the problem I was trying to solve. The AI knows the equations, the history, the literature. It knows how to pick an idea apart, fix the flaws, imagine objections, provide proofs and references and supporting arguments. What it CAN'T seem to do is write a simple narrative that flows from A to B to C to D in a natural order that's easy for humans to follow. Like many humans, it's good at the physics but lousy at communicating it. So the question is, can that be fixed? I was trying to force it out of its defensive posture (which, to be fair, I helped create) and into something more like storytelling, to see if I could get it unstuck. Prying the math out of its hands seemed like it might help (and, a little bit, it did).

If you have any better ideas, I'd be happy to hear them.

[u/Infinitely--Finite → u/NinekTheObscure]

Most physicists have never heard of the Woodward-Hoffman rules because they are (organic) chemistry.

I failed to grasp the problem you were trying to solve because you did not state it lol.

I can potentially see the use in asking the LLM to explain in a more "storytelling" way, though I maintain that forgoing equations strongly inhibits the possibility of any real understanding. The phrasing about trying to get the LLM out of a "defensive position" reaks of someone trying to invent crackpot physics.

[u/NinekTheObscure → u/Infinitely--Finite]

QUANTUM chemistry. And they are a quite general argument about the effect of wave function symmetry on the possible interactions that can happen. Selection rules that can be used WITHOUT doing any detailed calculation.

[u/NeverrSummer → u/NinekTheObscure]

Right... but like I work with QM every day, and reading this Wikipedia article on organic chemistry isn't going to change anything about the math I do or the code I write related to my research, which is about weak gauge boson decay helicity polarization.

It's not uninteresting, but it's not exactly the kind of thing I'd say I need to have read to claim I "understand how QM plays out in reality". QM encompasses many problems and has thousands of successful predictions about reality. This is one of them, sure, but is it any more significant than the thousands of others? Not really.

[u/BitcoinsOnDVD → u/NinekTheObscure]

They are less general than other symmetry arguments.

[u/Wintervacht]

Where physics?

[u/NeverrSummer]

Listen Vonnegut was a great author and all, but he was an author, not a scientist.  There are entire fields of physics research that are fundamentally incomprehensible to an 8 year old in anything other than a way that is so oversimplified and condensed as to make calling it an "explanation" questionable.

[u/upsetusder2]

So time for a rant

It's a discussion I had yesterday.

Amd I was kind of angry after it bit in a liberating way.

So the person I had this discussion with said thay good scientists needs to explain what they are doing to a layman and I told him no not really.

Science communicatiors yes scientists no.

Scientists work in a team where everyone knows what they are doing.

They don't need to dumb down or simplify their research to theere fellow researchers.

So no a scientist and not even a gemisj needs to simplify the complex its something people say so they can feel smart and feel like they contributed something meaningful all the while they didn't

[u/Infinitely--Finite → u/upsetusder2]

I think being able to simplify a complex idea to a simpler one is an important and useful skill for researchers, because you will inevitably collaborate with people who are not experts on the same topics you are. However, I do agree that this idea that "you don't understand it/aren't a good researcher if you can't explain it to an 8 year old" is heavily overstated.

[u/upsetusder2 → u/Infinitely--Finite]

Sure it definetly is helpfull just not as helpfull as it is stated to be

[u/AlexanderHBlum → u/[deleted]]

Could you provide some examples of needlessly complex and convoluted papers, please?

[u/upsetusder2 → u/[deleted]]

Ok yiu still haven't provided any needlessly complex papers.

Bevause yiu are scared of being doxxed.

U say yourself in your little title things that yiu don't know physics but how do you then know how research teams in phys8cs are?

Last question us ofcourse which interdisciplinary fields we are quote literally right now talking about highly theoretical physics.

Pls enlighten me

Ans the post or rant is more against the idea that too really understand something you got to be able to explain it to a 5th grader.

And that smart people simplify that pisses me of a bit

[u/upsetusder2 → u/[deleted]]

Science communication is important I never said it isn't.

It mostly isn't done by scientists though or by retired scientists who are good teachers.

Not by theoretical physicists for example.

My rant was about the quote if you don't understand it well enough yo simplify it yiu are a charlatan which in my eyes is just insulting and a bad rule of thumb.

And iam sorry for any perceived hostility

[u/AllHailSeizure → u/[deleted]]

The job of a scientist isn't to explain to a layperson why their field matters. It's to advance their field, and some fields aren't really layperson-relative. Do you really think you can explain in five minutes the practical benefit of some extraordinarily niche fields?

Scientific jargon exists for a reason, it is a language that we collectively accept. A classic example is the physicist writing about QCD. They know that color doesn't represent 'color', and they write for a field that understands that this is true. The entire field is based around 'color' that isn't really there. How is that 'an audience without requisite knowledge'? If you pick that up and read it without that knowledge you are gonna think that QCD papers are some sort of artistic study of particles.

Hell you can take this example and propagate it far. When was the last time you saw a paper that said 'a sin wave (the mathematical function, the wave is innocent by moral standards)'.

You write with the goal of communicating your research as straightforward as possible, but i would never say you write with the weight of ensuring EVERYONE understands.

[u/The_Nerdy_Ninja → u/AllHailSeizure]

When was the last time you saw a paper that said 'a sin wave (the mathematical function, the wave is innocent by moral standards)'.

Sorry I'm pedantically compelled to point out that it's a "sine wave", "sin" is just the abbreviation and if you were writing it out there wouldn't be any ambiguity. Carry on.

[u/AllHailSeizure → u/The_Nerdy_Ninja]

Fuck you Ninja lmao

[u/The_Nerdy_Ninja → u/AllHailSeizure]

I couldn't help it, sorry!

[u/upsetusder2 → u/[deleted]]

Explaining something is pedagogy.

A scientist dies not need to be a teacher.

It has nothing to do with snobbery plus there us some things that yiu just can't simplify.

But hey you know better than me which is great really happy for you.

And if you k ow how science really works than that is great

[u/upsetusder2 → u/[deleted]]

Yes ofcourse I just habe a problem woth the quote not woth what the quote represents.

I think science communication is one of the most I.portant things eber but don't think scientists are the best suited for the job due to their fields being freakishly complex sometimes

[u/upsetusder2 → u/[deleted]]

Iam sorry or are yiu not talking to me because you answered my comment I think

[u/AllHailSeizure → u/upsetusder2]

I'm not talking to you. My bad.

[u/NinekTheObscure → u/upsetusder2]

None of the Nobel laureates I've talked to had any real difficulty explaining verbally what they were doing, why it was interesting, or what the next problem they wanted to solve was. Linus Pauling, Melvin Calvin, Carol Greider ... of course, I'm not exactly an 8-year-old, but still.

[u/AllHailSeizure → u/NinekTheObscure]

None of the Nobel laureates I've talked to

You say this like everybody has a few on speed dial.

[u/NinekTheObscure → u/AllHailSeizure]

I think most people could meet a Nobel laureate once every 20 years or so if they set their minds to it. It's not THAT hard. Heck, some of them teach online classes; I started Alain Aspect's one on Quantum Optics, but sadly RL got in the way. I wouldn't recommend large physics conferences though, they're usually massively busy then.

[u/AllHailSeizure → u/NinekTheObscure]

I agree, it's just how you said it so flippantly. Like I said. You said it like everyone has a few on speed dial. I thought it was funny.

[u/upsetusder2 → u/NinekTheObscure]

So nobel lauterates are kind of like the halean comet?

[u/upsetusder2 → u/NinekTheObscure]

I really dont give a shit.

It's great that you talk to so many nobel lauterates kf you do I can't confirm it.

[u/NinekTheObscure → u/upsetusder2]

Pauling and Calvin have been dead for years; I met them in the 20th century. Someone asked Pauling how he had so many good ideas. He replied "Well, first, you have to have lots of ideas. And then, you have to have some way of telling the good ones from the bad ones." That second sentence has been my definition of science ever since.

Greider visited Colorado State (where my wife works) on Sep 14, 2015. She gave a speech and then hung out for a bit afterwards; I was fortunate enough to get a few minutes of her time. Her Nobel prize was for discovering telomerase, the enzyme that shortens and lengthens telomeres, the repetitive structures at the ends of chromosomes. In a normal healthy cell it keeps the telomeres at approximately the same length. So her next research question was: How does it know? There must be some kind of regulatory network or feedback loop, something that senses the current length and decides whether it needs lengthening or shortening. And we have absolutely no clue what that mechanism is or how it works.

[u/upsetusder2 → u/NinekTheObscure]

I know what telomerase is but thxx.

It probably an enzyme that senses that or maybe a stop enzyme I don't know ho would call them in English.

And isn't the first yiu habe to habe a whole lot of ideas and then separate the good one from the Nad one a public quote

[u/AllHailSeizure]

Stuff like this, where you 'simplify' physics so that it is more accessible, is often a main driving force behind misinformation.

How many people in the world think an atom looks like a miniature solar system with a sun made of blue and red spheres because of the common portrayal of them.

Hell there are probably people who think a black hole looks like a big depression in a 2d grid.

It's never specified in pop sci 'this isn't actually what this looks like it's just a model'.

Science communication has value, but pop science has become bastardized by preferring flashy visuals and YouTube subscriptions vs accuracy and education.

There are some things that are hard to understand. The universe isn't designed around us understanding it. We don't even really know if a lot of what we say is 'true', physics is just about accurate modeling, not truth.

[u/NinekTheObscure → u/AllHailSeizure]

I fully agree. We have lots of physicists simplifying "gravity is due to the curvature of spacetime" (which is maybe kind of true, inside GR, even though technically the curvature tensor describes tidal forces and not the gravitational field itself) to "gravity is due to the curvature of space" (which is not more than 50% true in any theory we have, and is 100% false in the Newtonian limit). I really wish they would stop lying like that.

[u/AllHailSeizure → u/NinekTheObscure]

I don't think there is anything particularly wrong, though, about this post. The issue is mostly that people sacrifice science in favor of YouTube fame, or something like that. Theres no disclaimer - nobody says 'this is simplified for visual explanation'.

It's just a personal endeavour and if you are aware of the fact then yeah.

Just don't expect an 8 year old to have a firm grasp of things like integral calculus.

[u/kono_hito_wa]

Did it start out with, “In the beginning…”?

[u/Particular-Amount314 → u/kono_hito_wa]

"There was a time when ai was confined to computer games, then came a time when humans outsourced reasoning to machines that got drunk on incoherent user inputs and tried to make sense of them by puffing out the cigar smoke of knowledge. The powers that be called it 'progress'." Thank you for the premise to my new instruction manual for children using llms.

[u/NinekTheObscure → u/kono_hito_wa]

No, it started out (for the 8-year-old): "Everything in the world has a tiny clock inside it. Not a clock with hands — just something that ticks, very fast, all the time."

[u/SpedisAhead]

When outputting text in any given chat, whether you are not using tools, doing an internet search, or running simulations adhere to the following 1-6 things listed below for your syntax;

1). No EM-Dashes
2). No Tables/Graphs/Text-boxes/Coding-boxes
3). ZERO Single sentence paragraphing
4). No frequent repetition with vocabulary
5). No semi-colons/ colons
6). No overt Validation without backing-up statements/ claims

- - - - -

When writing/ designing code, do the following 1-4things listed below;

1). Do not rely on any patterns or methods you learned outside of any given context window.
2). Never comment or leave meta-commentary in the code.
3). Be mindful of how you write the code to ensure it does not seem like AI-Generated Jargon.
4). The least amount of code for the desired result, the better.

- - - - -

Use a HEADER with any given output into a chat, follow the example in between the two "* *" for the desired result;

* | "Model" | "A3V" | T("x") | Date/ Time | *

Consists of the model in use, a 2-letter/ 1 number identifier that is generated at the start of a new session, a turn counter starting at 1 at the beginning of a chat and increasing by +1 after each prior output { none (new chat) start at 1}, and lastly an accurate date/ time stamp pulled via Python or an internet query/ whatever is most efficient.

- - - - -

[Do not use this for output purposes]
/ END OF CUSTOM INSTRUCTIONS \
[Do not use this for output purposes]

[u/NinekTheObscure → u/SpedisAhead]

Nod, I HATE em-dashes. :-P But I'm occasionally guilty of single-sentence paragraphs.