I looked at your post:
It seems like a long post, so I just skip reading it.
I hope the suggestions are easy to derive from the above points.
The writing is not amazing but I didn’t get LLM vibes.
After reading the post, it felt very academic, or like an old book. Something about it makes me wonder if the LLM was too literal in its translation. I did an experiment translating Korean light novels with an LLM, and the result was also an uncanny valley where the translation was obviously correct but still hard to read.
I wonder if this has something to do with how as we read, we're also trying to predict what the word will be. If my internal predictor is looking for the sentence that would come next in a normal English text but instead gets the sentence that would come next in a Russian text, translated to English, I'm constantly thrown off and it's hard to read.
For what it's worth, it doesn't read like something written by an LLM.
I don't remember seeing it, and based on the title I probably wouldn't have clicked. I'm not sure what's wrong with the title but it feels kind of like a meaningless string of words at first glance (did you use an LLM to translate or create the title?). Some titles that feel more interesting/meaningful:
As for the article itself, it feels strangely hard to read to me, even if I don't recognize it as LLM generated explicitly. Like my attention just keeps slipping away while trying to read it. This is a feeling I often get from text written by LLMs, especially text not generated at my behest. Nothing in this post had the same feeling. So I think it's probably still worth translating things you want people to read by hand; it might be interesting to post a manual translation of the same article in a month or so to see how it does.
There are probably still plenty of ways you can use LLMs to speed up or enhance the process, e.g.
The idea itself I found somewhat interesting, and probably could find it more interesting/useful with the right framing. I agree that 10-20 is a reasonable expectation based on just the ideas.
All the LLM's know what LessWrong happens to be. After you asked the LLM to translate the post, ask it:
A) I want to post this on LessWrong. How do you think LessWrong readers will receive the post? What do you think the biggest issues of the post happen to be for LessWrong readers? What do you think LessWrong readers like most about the post.
After you hear the concerns from the LLM, you might have ideas about how to address the concerns. If so, tell the LLM your ideas about how to address the concerns and work it into the text. If you don't have ideas yourself about how to address the concerns, you can also ask the LLM for ideas.
B) Would you make any stylistic changes to the post, so that it matches better the expectations of readers of LessWrong?
C) How would [your favorite writer on LessWrong] write this post?
If you come up with any issues about the post yourself, you can also ask the LLM about those issues.
The original title in Russian is "Насколько сложно менять(ся)". This is a great title. "Насколько сложно" means "How difficult/hard is it" and "менять(ся)" means "to change (onesself)".
Translated directly into English, the title should be "How difficult is it to change (onesself)". This is a worse title than the original Russian, but not a terrible title.
The title you posted, "The Structure of the Pain of Change", is awful. It's unclear to me [from the title alone] what the post is supposed to be about. It gives Literary Theory vibes, and not in a good way.
Good titles are really important. I don't know if this title was LLM-generated, and I cannot tell just from the title itself. To me, the problem isn't that the post smells of LLM generation. The problem is that the title is mush.
what should I do next time?
Your post does not seem very LLM-style at all to me. It does, however, feel very long. I think the title of the post may also have been lost in translation - based on the content of the post I suggest something like "Peak Effort Comes Before Peak Pain".
Also I think a lot of the ideas in the post have been discussed pretty extensively here already. Not all of them, though. I think you probably would have gotten 10-20 upvotes if you asked the LLM you used for translation to condense your post down to 3 paragraphs while maintaining the core insights (and then of course verified that it did in fact keep the core insights).
Whatever you did with translation did succeed in avoiding the LLM slop attractor, so however you managed that, keep doing it (and also if it was something intentional and repeatable maybe write a post about that topic, since it is of interest to many here).
TL;DR: Recently I wrote a post that got much less karma than I expected. My best guess is that the main reason is that I translated it from Russian to English via ChatGPT, and this easily recognizable LLM-style convinced readers from the first lines that “There aren’t any original thoughts; it is a standard, machine-generated fluff piece”. Is it correct, or does the post itself contain any major issues?
More detailed thoughts:
And now, more detailed questions: