@dynomight
“The act of creating a narrative forces you to confront contradictions”

Well, the act of connecting your sentences and paragraphs makes it more likely, though not inevitable,* that you’ll acknowledge contradictions (“However…”, “On the other hand…”) and express more comparisons and judgements generally (“Similarly…”, “More importantly…”, “That contrasts with…”). Which LLMs are unsurprisingly bad at.

But this is hazardous: you need to go out of your way to explain the extra judgement you’re making, so it’s really easy to skip it without readers noticing. For example,
• X.
• Y.
avoids judgment, while “X. However, Y.” and “Y. However, X.” make implicit rankings of importance but don’t back them up. Which reminds me of an essay I read years ago that claimed some historian was regarded as conservative rather than liberal merely because of “the order of his paragraphs”.

* Not inevitable because you can verbalize a list with “Firstly,…”, “Secondly,…” etc, or you can equivocate with connectors like “Also…”, “At the same time…”, or “Meanwhile…”.