My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

> I was probably the most severely bullied kid at my school.

> I was demonstrating my erudition

Those two things might have been linked. I wasn't there, but I'm suspicious.

Fortunately the author learns better by the end of the article, but it stuck out to me because LLMs have made people suspicious of five dollar words like delve so to use the word erudition in this day and age is a choice.

Well, in the timeline, this was after the author was bullied.

Also, he says:

> In essence, I became an example of obnoxious precocity, a heartfelt young wordcel.

So it doesn't sound like disagrees with you either way.

It's all in the preamble before the later sections of learning and my implicit point was that my social awkwardness got better when I stopped trying to show off how smart I am. It still comes out occasionally, and I don't try to be condescending, so I do really appreciate my close friends when they give me feedback when I am.

My other point though is that as people using AI to generate content take the time to tell ChatGPT that it sounds like ChatGPT and to rewrite it to not sound like that, that people are going to be suspicious of anything recondite that isn't in common parlance. But I'm a believer in xkcd 810, so what can I say.

Trying to show off how smart one is is probably part of the motivation behind many interesting comments posted on here, and more generally, a big motivation behind a huge number of the useful things people do. Doing it in a non-obvious way requires additional ingenuity. The cumulative effect of people trying to show off how smart they are has undoubtedly greatly accelerated the development of our species.