Finds

Anna Potapova recently reposted her article about creating a global content design community, and it’s stayed on my mind.

On the one hand, of course we have a global content design community: Experiences are made in languages all over the world, and all of that content can (and should!) be designed to be fit for purpose.

On the other hand, of course we have a fragmented content design community, dominated by English because of historical and current efforts to build empires of wealth, power, and other forms of domination.

And even in this newsletter, I’m using phraseology most common to American English: the use of “of course” for emphasis, the rhetorical device of repetition of emphasis, and the “one hand… other hand” framing.

So how do we decide to use clear language or less-clear language? By working in these roles, we have a responsibility to respect the intended audiences. We make design choices to represent as many levels of meaning as we can, so that we can meet the many purposes for the experiences we create.

But none of us can understand all the possible nuances across all the possible languages, regions, and needs. There are more than 8 billion different ways to be a person, and there isn’t enough time in any one human life to know them all.

Each of us depend on having a network of people and a system of tools. If our network doesn’t include our worldwide content community, we’re missing out. Please check out Anna’s article about reimagining global content design communities, come to the Button panel (free, and will be recorded), and request connections with more worldwide content design folks online.

Flex & fumble

The wait is almost over for the second edition of Strategic Writing for UX! There’s still room for you at the release party, if you’d like to join me. I’ll be giving a peek into the new updates and additions, and giving away copies of the book.

My co-authors Maya Joseph-Goteiner, Kim Mats Mats and I turned in the full manuscript for UX Skills for Business Strategy on time, two weeks ago. We brought our complete ideas, and I’m proud of what we turned in… and it is still rough. We’re very much looking forward to the critique from the technical reviewers who O’Reilly invited to provide feedback.

The nature of showing work in progress creates its own emotional challenges. It’s certainly easier than it was when I was younger, but it’s hard to show work that I know isn’t as good as it will eventually be. There’s also the weird sense of let-down after pushing toward a deadline, going from long, intense hours of writing and editing to w a i t i n g.

My co-authors and I are meeting in person to review all of our technical reviewers’ feedback in just over another week. We will use a long weekend to plan the changes we want to make, then drive toward the final manuscript deadline in October. If you have feedback from browsing an even earlier, partial version, we’d love to hear it—and now is the best time to send it. Please let us know where we fumbled.

Philosophy

I recently learned about Cyc (pronounced “sike”). It’s an AI project that focuses on implicit knowledge—which is exactly what so many LLMs are so bad at. As this 2016 article describes, “Cyc also understands that if you let go of an apple it will fall to the ground; that an apple is not bigger than a person; and that a person cannot throw an apple into space.”

Cyc has been built over 40 years using hand-coded axioms in its own ontology. It has a system of implicit and explicit knowledge that has been created for it, or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that Cyc is that collection of knowledge.

In contrast, an LLM is trained on relationships within phrases, sentences, and larger clumps of text. So it can literally only “know” the things that are written about—it doesn’t know the things we don’t talk about. It doesn’t know the context that we leave out that detract or distract from our thesis. The neglected information might be too obvious, irrelevant, taboo, redundant, relevant-but-contradictory.

From this perspective, every communication is incomplete. If it contained all of the implicit knowledge, it would attempt to be a complete model of reality, while reality is changing. There’s simply too much to communicate. This means that what LLMs do is fundamentally different from what people do: LLM word generation is all about sequencing the next word to include, while people spend most of their energy choosing what to leave out.  

I think about this unspoken information as it works within human communities, too. You probably belong to a community, whether professional or personal, that has unspoken, unwritten rules that would be hard to explain to a newcomer. It’s this kind of implicit knowledge that allows insiders to navigate the community more successfully. A person with more implicit knowledge about the community knows who’s more likely to be enthusiastic about a new idea, who’s likely to squash it, and what the likely frictions will be for timing, resources, and other needs.

I’ve been reading science fiction since I could read, thanks to my parents. I am enthusiastic about comprehensive definitions of “personhood” that include non-human entities. But until my Dad mentioned this Cyc project, I hadn’t made any connection between implicit knowledge and what it means for personhood or community.

I wonder how many more connections my community will help me make, tomorrow.  

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I write these newsletters myself, and I stand by what’s in them. If you have kudos, concerns, or questions, please tell me. —Torrey