Claude 2

Today I tried out Claude 2 by Anthropic. It’s a bit like ChatGPT except that you can input 100,000 tokens and upload long documents that are the size of books.

First, I went through the process of generating a story idea and exercises. This took a couple hours at a relaxed pace. I might have taken a nap in my chair at one point. At the end of the process, I had world building characters, plot points, and writing exercises specific to the story concept. I preferred ChatGPT’s ideas more when I went through the process, there but I might be able to improve Clade’s creativity depending on my input.

At any rate, it generated a number of good exercises I could use to develop the story we brainstormed together. Here’s an example.

8. Present/Concurrency - Person/Rival
   Use concurrency to contrast Bartholomew’s and Tarima’s leadership styles as they both address their followers.

Then I uploaded a whole paper and had Claude summarize it. This is one area where Claude definitely wins. With ChatGPT I usually have to paste papers in one section at a time. Here, I had it summarize an entire paper: The Science of Scientific Writing.

Here is a summarized version of the main points from the scientific paper on writing clearly:

Writing clearly is crucial for effective communication, but scientific writing is often dense and hard to understand. The authors argue this doesn’t have to be the case - complex ideas can be expressed clearly without losing their sophistication.

The key is understanding how readers process information. Readers don’t just passively receive words on a page - they actively interpret the text based on certain expectations about how ideas will be structured and presented. Writers can use these expectations to their advantage to make their writing more comprehensible.

Some techniques the authors recommend:

• Keep subject and verb close together. Don’t separate them with lots of interrupting words or phrases. This makes the sentence flow better.
• Place the most important new information at the end of a sentence - this is where readers emphasis naturally falls.
• Start sentences with familiar information that links back to what came before. Put the new, key info at the end. This gives readers context first, emphasis second.
• Use active verbs that clearly state the action. Passive voice and vague verbs like “be” and “seem” are confusing.
• Provide background information before asking readers to consider something new.

Think of writing as a conversation with the reader. Apply these techniques, and scientific writing can be just as clear and engaging as an animated chat. The complexity of the ideas doesn’t have to translate to dense, impersonal text - with a little structure and empathy for the reader, complex concepts can be communicated clearly.

I don’t know how long Anthropic will be offering free access to Claude 2, but it’s worth looking into.