[zozbot234]

You can nowadays paste the text from pretty much anything that's in the public domain into a near-SOTA LLM such as Kimi or GLM and it will give you a pretty nice summary of what it's about in modern language (Extremely useful: the LLM tendency to go overboard on formatting nicely balances out the wall-of-text format from historical publications, which was aimed at saving paper and minimizing manual layout effort), and then gladly tell you about all the things in the historical text that would be absolutely beyond the pale today. (Sometimes you have to nudge it by prompting "How would this text be received today?" or something like it after it has put its nice summary in context, but once you do that it tends to be quite thorough.)

[doubletwoyou]

I beg of thee, use that brain of yours and read a text that was made scarcely more than a century ago, a blink of an eye in the grand scale of the changes of the linguistic features of English, and interpret it for yourself.

[mapontosevenths]

I'm in favor of using all the tools available to better yourself, including LLM's. However, for things like this the I would argue that one should first try to understand it on their own.

Sometimes the work is the POINT. We read things like this not just to learn about the past, but for novelty and to exercise our critical thinking powers. To outsource that labor before even trying is like going to the gym and having your butler lift the weights. The weights got lifted, but what was really accomplished?

[zozbot234]

Historically, these texts were often consumed (especially in formal or semi-formal settings) by either having them read aloud for you or reading them aloud yourself. They were more like a written-down formal speech to be slowly pondered upon than something to be read smoothly and silently on one's own, which is how we now regard almost all texts. There was "labor" involved but that labor was not really about being more literate or exercising more critical thinking: it was simply about slowly recreating in one's mind the kind of broad structural scaffold we now expect to see in a text as a matter of course. It's in fact easier to think critically about a text when its sections and structure are clearly laid out, and having a LLM do this for you is a nice way of avoiding personal tendencies and biases that might lead one to misinterpret what the text is really about.

[mapontosevenths]

>Historically, these texts were often consumed (especially in formal or semi-formal settings) by either having them read aloud for you or reading them aloud yourself.

In the middle ages this was true, mostly because few people were literate at all and the words didnt have spaces between them. The ability to read silently was regarded as impressive.

By 1911 reading silently to yourself was the expectation of a normal literate adult. Only hillbillies and their ilk could not.

This is a simple text, intended to be legible even to school children of the era. It's also very structured already.

Their contemporary English was a bit different, but not so far removed that you should need assistance.

[zozbot234]

It was very much the norm in formal and semi-formal gatherings. They didn't have conference talks with PowerPoint slide decks, their own equivalent was to read out articles or papers. This often extended to university-level lectures, in a practice that was arguably carried over from the middle ages as you mention, but was very much still in use.

> It's also very structured already.

It's definitely not very structured by modern standards. The length of paragraphs alone would be described as "wall of text". Again, this was an ordinary practice back in the day, aimed at saving costly paper and reducing the manual effort involved in physically laying out the work on the page. It was far from exceptional: to a first approximation, most texts from the early 20th c. or before will look like that.

[simonklitj]

Yes, let the LLM bias and misinterpret it instead.

[stereolambda]

Entertaining to think that "that's too difficult to read for us nowadays" and "look at these unacceptable things" already sound pretty much like some poor Medieval literates who got their hands on Ovid or Lucretius, while under the rule of king Theodoric or something.

I don't have to say I don't question that we are very civilized and powerful.

[quamserena]

You can also read the text yourself and draw your own conclusions...

[BigTTYGothGF]

How is that not "modern language"?

[smallerize]

You didn't really explain what that does for you. Why do you paste it into an LLM?

[zozbot234]

I'm not sure if you're familiar with public domain texts from around the 19th or early 20th century, but they were not intended to be skimmed or speed-read the way we'd skim a modern text prior to getting into a more attentive close-reading. Even their short magazine articles were actually the near-equivalent to our scholarly papers, and were often read aloud at length in parlor gatherings. So having a LLM split the text into manageable sections for you and provide a hint of what each lengthy wall-of-text paragraph will be about is actually a huge gain in readability.

[smallerize]

Oh well that was the whole point to me. If I wanted to read something that's not from 1911 I could just do that lol

[BigTTYGothGF]

The trick is to have a basic level of literacy and then you don't need the machine to chew it up for you like a mother bird.

[keane]

Mostly from a bit further back but you might enjoy https://earlymoderntexts.com/texts

[Dylan16807]

So before you were talking about summarizing whole articles and asking the LLM to find the things that would be "beyond the pale", but now you're just suggesting using it to insert paragraph breaks and section headings?

[zozbot234]

The LLM will easily do both for you. Particularly the thinking it does when constructing the summary generally involves a structured close reading of your text, and you can easily think of it as providing "paragraph breaks and section headings".

[Dylan16807]

Sure it could do both, but the question is what are you suggesting?

If you're suggesting it alter the text beyond organizing it, people are going to be upset. And your first suggestion sounded like that.

[smallerize]

I think the word "summarization" might be throwing people off. This is like an expansion.

[qmr]

> So having a LLM split the text into manageable sections for you and provide a hint of what each lengthy wall-of-text paragraph will be about is actually a huge gain in readability.

Perhaps your attention span needs improvement.