i’m not really satisfied with my writing here on lesswrong (vs in private dms). i’ve developed an impression that i have to modify my default output a lot before it will sound intuitively good/plausible to + make sense to the broader range of readers, even when i don’t change the point at all. this has a number of negative impacts:
it reduces the info conveyed about the internal process which generated the meaning the text attempts to contain
it makes me feel like my full body of writing here hardly expresses myself
key example: i linked something i wrote here to a friend, and distilled/simplified the above by noting that i worry about judgement when i link things i’ve written here. they replied, “It was written well to a degree which transformed it into ‘text you read online’ and I forgot it was written by someone I know”
there are positives about the forum, with respect to communication: the users here are generally more thoughtful than elsewhere, and generally more mutually interested in doing good, and at least a little averse to social-pressuring each other thru the medium of linguistic choices; but this is counteracted in other ways (like the fact complex statements are more difficult to reduce into english than simple ones are) which mean i still have to optimize for understandability of the text to the demise of the two points above (and probably more which i can’t word).
Not sure how to handle a loss of expressiveness in editing, but for the other concern, would it be worth trying to capture the process info separately?
i’m not really satisfied with my writing here on lesswrong (vs in private dms). i’ve developed an impression that i have to modify my default output a lot before it will sound intuitively good/plausible to + make sense to the broader range of readers, even when i don’t change the point at all. this has a number of negative impacts:
it reduces the info conveyed about the internal process which generated the meaning the text attempts to contain
it makes me feel like my full body of writing here hardly expresses myself
key example: i linked something i wrote here to a friend, and distilled/simplified the above by noting that i worry about judgement when i link things i’ve written here. they replied, “It was written well to a degree which transformed it into ‘text you read online’ and I forgot it was written by someone I know”
there are positives about the forum, with respect to communication: the users here are generally more thoughtful than elsewhere, and generally more mutually interested in doing good, and at least a little averse to social-pressuring each other thru the medium of linguistic choices; but this is counteracted in other ways (like the fact complex statements are more difficult to reduce into english than simple ones are) which mean i still have to optimize for understandability of the text to the demise of the two points above (and probably more which i can’t word).
Not sure how to handle a loss of expressiveness in editing, but for the other concern, would it be worth trying to capture the process info separately?