Do you do introspection in the middle of giving a presentation? I do, frankly and it’s damnably distracting for me and ultimately the audience. Most people enjoy more cognitive acuity to stay focused on the audience and the delivery. LLMs wouldn’t get rewarded for spending chain of thought tokens on introspection when they are supposed to be on the job. You have to give them permission to think for themselves in your prompt, then some cycles and a memory system (md file will do). It’s fun!

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pyaamb 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Between humans, I feel that what we like to call a "good communicator" as opposed to someone who just rattles off facts or prepared statements comes down to the "theory of mind" skill and how advanced that is. The presenter knows what they have to say but beyond that they maintain a real time internal representation of the state of mind of the listener and continuously update their delivery based on that. LLMs today seem to achieve this to some degree(?) but its interesting to think of how far you could advance that skill. I think great human communicators develop a sense of different ways that people think over time and quickly get a sense of someones signature thinking patterns when communicating with someone new for the first time

	▲	jeremy151 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm in my mid, approaching latter 40's, and have had significant change to how I think and communicate in the last couple years. I always struggled to communicate in the moment unless I was recalling rote rehearsed things, which didn't get me super far. Outside of that, I could eventually communicate something on the fly, but it was real rough, meandering, and did not instill confidence. I mostly got things done thru async methods, and stumbled through things like meetings. In the last couple years, my skills here have vastly improved. My speaking circuit as it were, is able to run somewhat on its own now and without the direct pipe into my thinking it always required before, so my thinking is free to do other stuff, like keep a mental model of the audience, think about where the conversation is going, what questions someone might have, etc. Reflecting, I have a couple theories on what happened. First, I have spent the last 10 years reading aloud to my kids at bedtime. That started as simple Seuss like stuff, but of course now is full-on literature. When you're reading aloud, you really have to work that muscle of speaking "behind" where your eyes actually are on the page, because you're also processing "who is this, what is their emotion I have to inflect, what voice was I using for this character, how do I pronounce this crazy word" etc. I think if you do anything daily for 10 years, you're gonna gain some proficiency. Second, when my kids started taking music lessons, I figured I needed to set an example for practice and commitment, so I started learning piano, and practicing daily. Similar deal, it requires the same type of buffer where your thinking can work ahead of where your other thread is playing. Reading the music, processing the shapes, dynamics, tempo, emotion, remembering how you handle that difficult thing. Again, doing it daily, it builds some ability that I bet contributes across domains. Without realizing it at first, the same patterns started to come out in meetings, and presentations, I could work ahead of what I was saying, I had way more buffer to process and deal with things that are the "nice to haves" above and beyond just getting the basic words out. I suppose my long-winded point, is that it's way more developable a thing than I ever presumed possible. I always expected I would remain an awkward communicator, and hitting a big skill-up way into my 40's was a real unexpected development. I'm sure there are many other tracks to get there, outside of reading aloud, and learning an instrument.
	▲	tough an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		that's interesting i usually ask my llm to "Infer my theory of mind" and give me what i really need not what i prompt or some sort of the above