Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mjr00 162 days ago
The map is not the territory.[0]

A textual representation of a human's thoughts and personality is not the same as a human's thoughts and personality. If you don't believe this: reply to this comment in English, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Swahili, and Portuguese. Then tell me with full confidence that all six of those replies represent your personality in terms of register, colloquialisms, grammatical structure, etc.

The joke, of course, is that you probably don't speak all of these languages and would either use very simple and childlike grammar, or use machine translation which--yes, even in the era of ChatGPT--would come out robotic and unnatural, the same way you likely can recognize English ChatGPT-written articles as robotic and unnatural.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

1 comments

That’s all a non-sequitur to me. If you wrote the text, then the content of the text is what you wrote. So “what to write” == “content of the text”.
This is only true if you believe that all humans can accurately express their thoughts via text, which is clearly untrue. Unless you believe illiterate people can't have personalities.