Semantic note-taking

> I’m going to write down what I hear, not what you say.

There is a mysterious boundary here that separates meaning from expression. I've been working on an idea that could move this boundary from the inside of the human mind into the realm of software. I call it the Story Empathizer.

story = meaning + expression

When we express ourselves in writing, we encode meaning into text. The result is a subset of all possible written text: intentionally written text. I call that subset "story".

The real challenge is to do this process backwards. To read a story - and see more than text - we need to unravel the original intentions of the writer. In doing so, we define a boundary between meaning and expression.

But what if we could take that boundary, and put it into software? Traditionally, we do this to the extreme: limiting ourselves to "context-free grammar", we minimize expression to zero; factoring it out of the equation entirely. Source code always means precisely what it says. All of the what and how is carefully preserved, but the why is nowhere to be found. Mystery averted. Natural language is full of mysterious why, locked away from syntax parsers in a cage of ambiguity.

If we can define that ambiguity, then we answer the why, and draw a boundary between meaning and expression. With that boundary, we could read more story, separating its meaning from its expression. We could go backwards, too: rewriting the meaning in terms of another story's expression. That's the process I call "empathizing".

Of course, all of this is so abstract, I'm struggling to tie it back down to reality..

There's a lot to criticize about the current crop of LLMs, but one area where I've found it to shine is in transcribing and summarizing meetings (I use Copilot in Teams).

Wherever I've worked, as the meeting organizer you're implicitly the designated notetaker. I'm not smart enough to take notes and listen simultaneously so have always felt at a disadvantage when organizing meetings. Copilot summaries have been a godsend for me as I'm able to focus 100% of my attention on the discussion knowing that the salient points will be captured for us by Copilot. And because I'm attending the meeting I can verify the accuracy of the summaries. So far, having used it in countless meetings, I've never found a fabrication.

I like to repeat out loud what I heard but in my own words. I believe it uncovers assumptions made by the speaker and lets newcomers learn about them. Sometimes, though, I feel like I am calling people out when the language used was particularly obfuscated. I think it does require some level of empathy and honesty in the organization.

From another point of view, seems like we had a shared document automatically created of the meeting transcription/summary it would reduce the friction and other biases. (Oh look, the LLM is dumb, it wrote that the project is over budget and we depend of risky integrations)