“On Slop” by Jan

TL;DR: What is slop, and why? Is it fundamental? Is it in the room with us right now? And, most importantly, how do we exorcise it?

Previously in this series: This Week In Fashion and On Automatic Ideas

A potential post for this Substack starts when I pick up an idea by talking to a smart person or revisiting an evergreen topic. The idea then simmers for weeks before, with help from Claude, I run experiments or work out the argument behind the idea. If the idea survives some mild red-teaming[1]. I then draft section by section with Claude[2], and eventually the post lands here.

The fact that I am using AI to write should not come as a shock - it is essentially the premise of this blog. Hence, I will not apologise. Okay, no, changed my mind, I will apologise. Some recent posts contained some very sloppy language that some of you rightly noticed. Mea culpa.

In the grand scheme of things, I do not think this is a huge deal[3]. Every post is a choice between publishing something imperfect and not publishing at all, and I force myself to publish[4]. Still, you deserve prose that doesn’t [...]

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Outline:

(00:08) TL;DR: What is slop, and why? Is it fundamental? Is it in the room with us right now? And, most importantly, how do we exorcise it?

(01:30) Inside you there are two slops

(02:50) De-slopping

(11:32) A bet about fuzzy tasks

The original text contained 13 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
June 9th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x3rMzXcRkJwaMdBCa/on-slop-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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