Wouldn't people not knowing specific words or ideas be equally compatible with "you can't refer to the concept with a single word so you have to explain it, leading to longer sentences"?

At first, I thought this post would be about prison sentences.

I got curious and checked if DeepResearch would have anything to add. It agreed with your post and largely outlined the same categories (plus a few that you didn't cover because you were focused on an earlier time than the screen era): "Cognitive Load & Comprehension, Mass Literacy & Broad Audiences, Journalism & Telegraphic Brevity, Attention Span & Media Competition, Digital Communication & Screen Reading, Educational & Stylistic Norms". 

The last one I thought was interesting and not obvious from your post:

• Widespread literacy also had an effect on social norms. It wasn't just that sentences got shorter to accommodate the average reader, but also that it became more socially expected that writers accommodate the reader rather than the reader being expected to live up to the elite demands. This was partially connected to the rise of compulsory schooling. Once you're demanding that everyone learn to read, you kind of have to accommodate the limits of their abilities rather than just telling them "get good or gtfo".
  • DR: More people could read, but to reach this broader audience, authors were compelled to write in a plainer style than the ornate constructions of previous centuries. We can view this as a shift in the social contract of writing: instead of readers straining to meet the text, the text was adjusted to meet the readers. Shorter sentences were a key part of that adjustment. [...] By the early 20th century, the norm had shifted – long-winded sentences were increasingly seen as bad style or poor communication, out of step with a society that valued accessibility.
  • (This claim seems like it matches common sense, though DR didn't give me a cite for this specific bit so I'm unsure what it's based on.)
• DR also claimed that there was a "Plain Language movement" in the 1960s and 1970s, that among other things pushed for simpler sentences. Its only cite was to a blog article on readability.com, though Wikipedia also talks about it. You mentioned e.g. the Flesh-Kincaid formula in a descriptive sense, but it's also prescriptive: once these kinds of formulas get popularized as respected measures of readability, it stands to reason that their existence would also drive sentence lengths down.
  • E.g. Wikipedia mentions that Pennsylvania was the first U.S. state to require that automobile insurance policies be written at no higher than a ninth-grade level (14–15 years of age) of reading difficulty, as measured by the F–K formula. This is now a common requirement in many other states and for other legal documents such as insurance policies.

There were a few other claims that seemed interesting at first but then turned to be hallucinated. Caveat deep researchor.

From the full article:

• OpenAI's ChatGPT: 339 million monthly active users on the ChatGPT app, 246 million unique monthly visitors to ChatGPT.com.
• Microsoft Copilot: 11 million monthly active users on the Copilot app, 15.6 million unique monthly visitors to copilot.microsoft.com.
• Google Gemini: 18 million monthly active users on the Gemini app, 47.3 million unique monthly visitors.
• Anthropic's Claude: Two million (!) monthly active users on the Claude app, 8.2 million unique monthly visitors to claude.ai.

Wow. I knew that Claude is less used than ChatGPT, but given how many people in my social circles are Claude fans, I didn't expect it to be that much smaller. Guess it's mostly just the Very Online Nerds who know about it.

This:

It doesn’t just cost more to run OpenAI than it makes — it costs the company a billion dollars more than the entirety of its revenue to run the software it sells before any other costs. [...] OpenAI loses money on every single paying customer, just like with its free users. Increasing paid subscribers also, somehow, increases OpenAI's burn rate. This is not a real company.

Seems to contradict this:

The cost of [...] the compute from running models ($2 billion) [...] OpenAI makes most of its money from subscriptions (approximately $3 billion in 2024) and the rest on API access to its models (approximately $1 billion).

OpenAI is certainly still losing money overall and might lose even more money from compute costs in the future (if the reported expenses were reduced by them still having Microsoft's compute credits available). But I'm not sure why the article says that "every single paying customer" only increases the company's burn rate given that they spend less money running the models than they get in revenue. Even if you include the entirety of 700M they spend on salaries in the "running models" expenses, that would still leave them with about $1.3 billion in profit. 

The article does note that ChatGPT Pro subscriptions specifically are losing the company money on net, but it sounds like the normal-tier subscriptions are profitable. Now the article claims that OpenAI spent $9 billion in total, but I could only find a mention of where $5.7 billion of that goes ($2B on running models, $3B on training models, $0.7B on salaries). If some of the missing $3.3 billion was also spent on running the normal product, that'd explain it, but I'm not sure where that money goes.

I find that for me, and I get the vibe that for many others as well, there's often a slight sense of moral superiority happening when conceptual rounding happens. Like "aha, I'm better than you for knowing more and realizing that your supposedly novel idea has already been done". 

If I notice myself having that slight smug feeling, it's a tip-off that I'm probably rounding off because some part of me wants to feel superior, not because the rounding is necessarily correct.

This policy is more likely to apply [...] if your existence is not publicly known.

How is "existence is publicly known" defined? Suppose it's public knowledge that "OpenAI has an AI agent project codenamed Worldkiller, though nobody outside OpenAI knows anything else about it". I'd think that the public knowing about OpenAI having such a project wouldn't change the probability of Worldkiller having something relevant to say.

I gave this comment a "good facilitation" react but that feels like a slightly noncentral use of it (I associate "good facilitation" more with someone coming in when two other people are already having a conversation). It makes me think that every now and then I've seen comments that help clearly distill some central point in a post, in the way that this comment did, and it might be nice to have a separate react for those.

Isn't the same true for pretty much every conversation that people have about non-trivial topics? It's almost always true that a person cannot represent everything they know about a topic, so they have to simplify and have lots of degrees of freedom in doing that.

This story from Claude 3.6 was good enough that it stuck in my head ever since I read it (original source; prompt was apparently to "write a Barthelme-esque short story with the aesthetic sensibilities of "The School"").

For six months we watched the pigeons building their civilization on top of the skyscrapers. First came the architecture: nests made not just of twigs and paper, but of lost earbuds, expired credit cards, and the tiny silver bells from cat collars. Then came their laws.

"They have a supreme court," said Dr. Fernandez, who'd been studying them since the beginning. "Nine pigeons who sit on the ledge of the Chrysler Building and coo about justice." We didn't believe her at first, but then we didn't believe a lot of things that turned out to be true.

The pigeons developed a currency based on blue bottle caps. They established schools where young pigeons learned to dodge taxi cabs and identify the most generous hot dog vendors. Some of us tried to join their society, climbing to rooftops with offerings of breadcrumbs and philosophy textbooks, but the pigeons regarded us with the kind of pity usually reserved for very small children or very old cats.

"They're planning something," the conspiracy theorists said, but they always say that. Still, we noticed the pigeons holding what looked like town halls, thousands of them gathered on the roof of the public library, bobbing their heads in what might have been voting or might have been prayer.

Our own civilization continued below theirs. We went to work, fell in love, lost keys, found keys, forgot anniversaries, remembered too late, all while the pigeons above us built something that looked suspiciously like a scaled-down replica of the United Nations building out of discarded takeout containers and stolen Christmas lights. Sometimes they dropped things on us: rejection letters for poetry we'd never submitted, tax returns from years that hadn't happened yet, photographs of ourselves sleeping that we couldn't explain. Dr. Fernandez said this was their way of communicating. We said Dr. Fernandez had been spending too much time on rooftops.

The pigeons started their own newspapers, printed on leaves that fell upward instead of down. Anyone who caught one and could read their language (which looked like coffee stains but tasted like morse code) reported stories about pigeon divorce rates, weather forecasts for altitudes humans couldn't breathe at, and classified ads seeking slightly used dreams.

Eventually, they developed space travel. We watched them launch their first mission from the top of the Empire State Building: three brave pioneers in a vessel made from an old umbrella and the collective wishes of every child who'd ever failed a math test. They aimed for the moon but landed in Staten Island, which they declared close enough.

"They're just pigeons," the mayor said at a press conference, while behind him, the birds were clearly signing a trade agreement with a delegation of squirrels from Central Park.

Last Tuesday, they achieved nuclear fusion using nothing but raindrops and the static electricity from rubbing their wings against the collective anxiety of rush hour. The Department of Energy issued a statement saying this was impossible. The pigeons issued a statement saying impossibility was a human construct, like pants, or Monday mornings.

We're still here, watching them build their world on top of ours. Sometimes at sunset, if you look up at just the right angle, you can see their city shimmer like a memory of something that hasn't happened yet. Dr. Fernandez says they're planning to run for city council next year. Given everything else, we're inclined to believe her this time.

The pigeons say there's a message in all of this. We're pretty sure they're right, but like most messages worth receiving, we're still working out what it means.