Because it Speaks in Words - BiteofanApple

Because It Speaks In Words

June 29, 2026

There is a difference between knowing something, and truly understanding it. I think we've all had those moments, the ones where a truth you learned a long time ago really sits with you for the first time. It rests in your mind and stretches out, finally showing off the great expanse of nuance hidden deep within.

Photo: mine.

Most nights when you happen to spy the Moon, Jupiter, and Venus sitting in a line in the sky, you see them as the dots beside a crescent that they are. Yet sometimes, when framed amid the sunset sky above the wisps of silver cloud, you see them differently. You realize in that moment that you, your great-grandparents, Julius Caesar, and Aristotle all saw this same sky. It has always been for us. We know so much about Jupiter and Venus today, yet no human eye has ever seen more than you're seeing now.

I think we are all, in this time, realizing the true power of words and what they mean, not to those who speak, but to those who listen.

The Power of Stories

It was Eugene Wigner who famously wrote about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the Natural Sciences, the empirical fact that advanced math is eerily accurate at predicting the behavior of nature, so much so that, for me, it can seem like mathematics is perhaps the true language that nature speaks.

However, as children, we do not grow up with an innate understanding of complex mathematics, of this foundational language of nature. Instead we are all born with the innate desire to hear and to tell stories, of ourselves, of others, and of the world around us. Our well-known cognitive biases push us to accept stories that rhyme over those that do not, and believe the people we speak to. That last one is particularly important in this age because there are simply so many words out there ready to be believed.

Stories are how we share information and how we've warned, cast out, and praised each other for millenia. We tell stories, to ourselves and to others, about why we are successful (or not) and why others might be (or not). We moralize disease, in part perhaps because a moral story is easier to bear than the sheer randomness of a chaotic world. Our minds work to make sense of the world by finding patterns. As those patterns interweave and become cohesive narratives, a story emerges to explain the where and why. These stories are so critical to our understanding of the world that we hold on to them, make them part of our selves, and when they break down they can break the self too. In the end, all we have of the world and the only truth we know first-hand, are the stories we tell ourselves.

We communicate those stories, to ourselves and to others, with gestures, actions, and most importantly with words. That makes those words perhaps the most powerful force in human society. They are the fundamental interaction that holds our world together. It's the words from the past that we reach for as some justification or authority. It's words of the famous and the clever that we laud or reject. Even Mathematics, this jewel of the modern world, is communicated and taught in words. To our storied minds, these atoms of thought are everything.

Ulysses and the Sirens. John William Waterhouse<br>via Wikimedia Commons

Disinformation and misinformation have been rampant in the past, but never before has there been a world filled so chaotically with so many clamoring voices. The Ancient Greeks warned of Sirens and their terrible, entrancing songs, yet today sirens sound in our ears and on our eyes every moment of every single day.

However today, we have also come into a new thing, a step function in our communication. In this time we humans are not the only one who is talking. This is not because we are some perfect specimen of wordcraft, or that another species could not do what we do, but because our chosen, crafted interlocutor is not a mind like ours. It is a device which has no notion of truth or of morality. It is a parrot, who imitates our speech but does not understand it. It does not learn, and it cannot. Yet we still can, and we will learn what it tells us, regardless of its truth.

Words Without a Mind

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are a type of machine learning algorithm that have been around a long time. Random Forests are another. Both are very good at sifting through swaths of noise looking for the signal. SVMs and Random Forests help identify disease incidence in large populations, and find novel ways to identify genetic causes of complex conditions. Techniques like these were spreading in academia and industry a decade ago. I remember when Apple released a drag-and-drop app to help developers build simple models for recommendation systems! This stuff has been around for a long time.

Yet, if that's true, why did it take Large Language Models (LLMs) to break into mainstream consciousness? People had been hammering on the idea of...