I'm curious how this seed/hash/prompt of an idea relates to ladders of abstraction?

Consider "Uber, but for X"

This wasn't a thing you could deploy as a term pre-Uber.

I'm not sure what this means for your analogy, but it does seem important. Somehow branding an idea reifies a ... callable function in? ???

Maybe something like (just spitballing)

The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?

Which maybe complicates the value story... terseness isn't intrinsic to the idea, it's earned by prior reification work?

Hmm

Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?

> Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?

Yeah, this feels right. It's like a process of condensing: new ideas brought to life condense metaphors into more compact forms and so make language more dense and expressive. This idea reminds me of Julian Jaynes's description of metaphor condensation in Origin of Consciousness.

A lot of hard work goes into novel products, but once that work has been proven, it is substantially more trivial for human or machine to copy. Groping around in the darkness of new, at the edge of what-could-be is difficult work that looks simple in hindsight to others who consider that edge a given now.

> The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?

Yeah, I think that naming and grouping things, then condensing them (through portmanteau construction or other means) is an underrated way to learn. I call this "personal taxonomy," and it's an idea I've been working on for a little bit. There is just tremendous value in naming patterns you personally notice, not taking another person's or group's name for things, and most importantly: allow those names to move, condense, fall away, and the like.

I left out a piece of my fragment above wherein I posit that a more constrained form of natural language to LLMs would likely lead to better results. Constraining interaction with LLM to a series of domain-specific metaphors, potentially even project specific givens, might allow for better outcomes. A lot of language is unspecific, and the technical documents that would truly detail a novel approach to an LLM require a particularly constrained kind of language to be successful where ambiguity is minimized and expressiveness maximalized (legal documents attempt at minimal ambiguity). I won't go into details there, I'm likely poorly reiterating a lot of the arguments that Dijkstra made here:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...