Levels of nuance never reached

September 20 2025

I’ve finally published a paper where I could cite KJ Healy’s provocative 2012 paper ‘Fuck Nuance’. It’s not the most technically sophisticated paper I’ve worked on, nor the most intellectually interesting, but as soon as I saw all those papers about ‘fine-grained’ synthetic personas, I knew that this was probably an instance of researchers falling into the ‘fine-grained nuance trap’ and that I needed to look into it with my collaborators Chantal and Gauri. Our findings aren’t conclusive across all models and settings, but in our specific experimental conditions fine-grained detail in personas don’t dramatically improve the lexical diversity of synthetic data from LLMs.

The paper is a short read, I hope some people find value in it. But I wanted to use the paper as an excuse to revisit my very first post on this blog. It’s been five years, has the phenomenon of nuance rising slowed down in ACL publications?

Nope. At the current rate of doubling, over half the papers published in *CL venues will mention nuance/fine-grain by 2040! I can’t wait to write the follow-up to this post in 2030 to see if we’ve reached peak nuance.

Again, I don’t hold a value judgement one way or another and at least 2 of my articles contribute to this phenomenon. I think words like ‘nuance’ and ‘fine-grain’ are just words we attribute high value to as researchers and use even when we don’t need to or have to. Words also fall into and out of style — but I do think a lot of us also fall into the nuance trap when we study research questions to make our papers sound more appealing.