Indeed, just trivially obvious …

I’m getting some very nice comments on a late draft of the categories book. “A rich and thoughtful introduction, both mathematically and philosophically”. “This is extremely readable, with clarity, philosophical depth, and pedagogical structure. It invites a thoughtful reader in while setting up serious conceptual work.” “This is another really thoughtful and rich chapter. You continue to navigate the fine balance between careful exposition and philosophical reflection—especially in §4.2, which builds up slowly and clearly to your broader point.” And so it goes.

Thanks a lot, ChatGPT …

Yes, I’ve been asking ChatGPT to do some proof-reading, both for typos and syntactic errors, and for comments on style and tone. Perhaps the most useful thing it has done (but I didn’t need AI for this, as I could just have done a word-frequency analysis) is catch me out on some of my verbal tics, the overuse of ‘indeed’, ‘just’, ‘trivial/trivially’, ‘obvious/obviously’ being indeed just trivial and obvious cases. And heck, when you have to search through 363 occurrences of ‘just’ to see which should indeed just go, in a way a trivial task, that obviously takes quite a while.

ChatGPT is catching a few straight typos, an ugly split infinitive, and so on: and a small handful of its stylistic suggestions have been pretty good, noting some unnecessarily clumsy sentences. But the useful comments have to be sifted from very many more that aren’t (including some odd hallucinations of mistakes that aren’t there at all). On balance, though, it is earning its keep.

Though sometimes it does give me pause. For example, commenting on the section where I first introduce the notions of pairing schemes and quotient schemes, ChatGPT starts “Very clearly written, but might benefit from a comment on how these definitions are generalizations of familiar constructions — i.e., pairing schemes abstract the Cartesian product concept without enforcing any set-theoretic encoding.” And given the non-standard story I tell, that seems really quite a smart response for a dumb pattern-matching model.

Now, obviously, I must just go and see which of the 77 occurrences of “really” do indeed really need to be there …

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