Sometimes You Don’t Need To Say Much To Get The Point

If you hang around academics for a bit you notice that they use a kind of shorthand.

Take the way we normally talk about AI in businesses.

We look at the way in which we’re going to use it to speed up coding. How we can create documents more quickly. How we can summarise information. How we can make games more accessible quickly.

And we go on about the implications. At length.

And then you listen to a good researcher who says five words.

“The epistemology is efficiency logic”

I always have to look up the meaning of epistemology. Wikipedia is helpful for this but the article is a rabbit hole and one should probably stay away from it.

In a nutshell, however, it’s about the theory of knowledge. How we know what we know.

And in this case – when it comes to AI – we’re trying to think about what we think it can do.

And that’s to make us more efficient. More productive. Able to do more with the same resources.

Hence, efficiency logic.

And that’s really all you have to say about that. You can now move on to the next point, if there is one.

The great thing about a well written paper is that each sentence is worth reading. Each one adds knowledge rather than regurgitating what has already been said.

You know how some books are really one idea spread over 300 pages.

A good paper has a hundred good ideas – expressed clearly and efficiently.

It’s not something that can be summarised. It’s already as compact as it needs to be. Any less, and you lose something.

This post is not a good example of that. It’s exploratory, ruminative and far from distilled.

If you had to summarise what I’m trying to say in a phrase, it might be back to Strunk and White’s timeless advice.

“Omit needless words”