This article I think exemplifies why many people do not follow this advice. It’s 39 pages long. I read it all, and enjoyed it, but most people I claim have a shorter attention span and would have either read half a page then stopped, or would have balked when they saw it was a 26-minute read and not read any of it. And those people are probably most in need of this kind of advice.
Language has a wonderful flexibility to trade off precision/verbosity against accessibility/conciseness. If you really want to rule out everything you don’t mean, you inevitably need a high level of verbosity because even for the simplest arguments there are so many things you need to rule out (including many that you think are ‘obvious’ but are not to the people who presumably you most wish to appreciate your argument).
Which is better? An argument that rules out 80% of the things you don’t mean (and so is ‘misunderstood’ by 20%), or an argument that’s 5X as long that rules out 95% of the things you don’t mean (‘misunderstood’ by 5%)? Most people won’t read (or stick around long enough to listen/pay attention to) the second version.
So maybe you intended to mean that there’s an important counterpoint, which is that there’s a cost to ruling out everything you don’t mean, and this cost needs to be carefully weighed when deciding where to position yourself on the precision/accessibility line when writing/speaking. There was room for this in the 39 pages, but it wasn’t stated or explored, which feels like an omission.
Alternatively, if you disagree and didn’t intend to mean this, you failed to rule out something quite important you didn’t mean.
I object that we need to weigh the cost of everything is a quite important thing to mention in this post. Weighing the cost of everything is a very important thing, but it is another topic on its own; It is a whole different skill to hone (I think Duncan actually wrote a post about this in the CFAR handbook).
This article I think exemplifies why many people do not follow this advice. It’s 39 pages long. I read it all, and enjoyed it, but most people I claim have a shorter attention span and would have either read half a page then stopped, or would have balked when they saw it was a 26-minute read and not read any of it. And those people are probably most in need of this kind of advice.
Language has a wonderful flexibility to trade off precision/verbosity against accessibility/conciseness. If you really want to rule out everything you don’t mean, you inevitably need a high level of verbosity because even for the simplest arguments there are so many things you need to rule out (including many that you think are ‘obvious’ but are not to the people who presumably you most wish to appreciate your argument).
Which is better? An argument that rules out 80% of the things you don’t mean (and so is ‘misunderstood’ by 20%), or an argument that’s 5X as long that rules out 95% of the things you don’t mean (‘misunderstood’ by 5%)? Most people won’t read (or stick around long enough to listen/pay attention to) the second version.
So maybe you intended to mean that there’s an important counterpoint, which is that there’s a cost to ruling out everything you don’t mean, and this cost needs to be carefully weighed when deciding where to position yourself on the precision/accessibility line when writing/speaking. There was room for this in the 39 pages, but it wasn’t stated or explored, which feels like an omission.
Alternatively, if you disagree and didn’t intend to mean this, you failed to rule out something quite important you didn’t mean.
I object that we need to weigh the cost of everything is a quite important thing to mention in this post. Weighing the cost of everything is a very important thing, but it is another topic on its own; It is a whole different skill to hone (I think Duncan actually wrote a post about this in the CFAR handbook).