Not downvoting as I see some potential here, but also not upvoting. This post is very long, with little structure, and an unclear / tedious to derive takeaway. I’d recommend at a minimum splitting into sections, such as the AstralCodexTen “I II III IV V VI …” scheme with opening/closing summaries. I would also guess at least half of it could be removed without damaging what you intend to convey.
In other words, there might be good content / ideas in here, but it would take too much effort for me to extract them. There are a great many things competing for my time, and I must be choosy about what I spend that time on.
I gave it a quick skim and found this section that seemed likely to be trying to make a fairly concrete disagreement, but kinda bundling that concrete disagreement with a vague disagreement about the entire worldview in a way that made it harder to parse an update from:
Yudkowsky reasons—I infer—that because people who do this aren’t obviously lying, then there’s no reason to assume that they must be, and therefore their expression of belief is done to convince themselves that they really do believe what they say they do. I find this unlikely.
Yudkowsky’s reasoning is speculative, and it is given as a proposed explanation for an observation he initially finds rather mysterious: He doesn’t understand why people believe things that they—according to his reckoning—have the mental faculties to deduce are a right load of old codswallop. Or, rather, that those beliefs don’t produce any observable evidence that the belief-holders will regularly interact with. So those people actually don’t believe, but just think they do.
I’d be interested in you trying a shorter post that lays out the point you’re trying to make here more succinctly.
I will accept the advice from Dentin about adding sections as valid, but I will probably not do it (simply because I don’t think that will cause more people to read it).
I tend to reject advice that is along the lines of “I can’t understand what your post is about, try changing the formatting / structure, and see if I understand it then” as violating “Norm One” (see my commenting guidelines).
For example, a request to add sections (or in this case, to reduce the size of the overall piece) isn’t technically wrong advice, as those things may potentially increase the quality of the piece. But when those requests are accompanied by “I didn’t understand it because it lacked _”, I think that those requests are too burdensome on the author, as they create a sort of implicit contract between the author and the commenter in which the author bears the responsibility of performing the work request in exchange for some probability that the commenter will say “Okay, looks good now” and then offer some substantial discussion to the major claims / arguments.
I can summarize one of the major points here, e.g., later on I write:
In that linked piece, for example, he admonishes one not to assume that people can easily interpret what you meant. Therefore, if someone says to you that you aren’t making sense to them, believe them.
In other words, I believe the Sequences claim (and are wrong about) that the burden is always on the speaker to assume that when someone says they didn’t understand you, it was you who made the error, and it is on you to correct the error, if you want to be understood. My model of human minds says the prior on the probability that the speaker made a mistake in transmitting the information over the probability that the receiver of the information made a mistake (which can be corrected) or that they are being deceptive, is quite low.
I totally understand where you’re coming from, and I apologize for straddling the line on Norm One. I saw that it was heavily downvoted without comment, and that struck me as unhelpful.
Regarding the post itself, it wasn’t a matter of being unable to understand. It seemed likely to me that there were insights there, and that if I spent enough time on it I could pull them out. It was more about the other demands on my time, which I suspect isn’t a unique circumstance.
Regarding probability of mistake, I think that’s an unhelpful way of looking at it. IMO it’s not so much mistake, as ‘interface incompatibility’. A particular presentation style will be varying levels of compatible with different readers, with different message acceptance and error rates at different receivers. The total transmission of information is across the distribution. Minor changes to the presentation style sometimes have outsized effects on total information transfer. Words are hard.
The general point is that if your goal is information transfer, it’s less about ‘mistake’ than getting the best integrated product across the distribution. If you have a different goal (“just getting the words out” is common for me), then optimizing for delivery may be irrelevant.
Not downvoting as I see some potential here, but also not upvoting. This post is very long, with little structure, and an unclear / tedious to derive takeaway. I’d recommend at a minimum splitting into sections, such as the AstralCodexTen “I II III IV V VI …” scheme with opening/closing summaries. I would also guess at least half of it could be removed without damaging what you intend to convey.
In other words, there might be good content / ideas in here, but it would take too much effort for me to extract them. There are a great many things competing for my time, and I must be choosy about what I spend that time on.
Same.
I gave it a quick skim and found this section that seemed likely to be trying to make a fairly concrete disagreement, but kinda bundling that concrete disagreement with a vague disagreement about the entire worldview in a way that made it harder to parse an update from:
I’d be interested in you trying a shorter post that lays out the point you’re trying to make here more succinctly.
I will accept the advice from Dentin about adding sections as valid, but I will probably not do it (simply because I don’t think that will cause more people to read it).
I tend to reject advice that is along the lines of “I can’t understand what your post is about, try changing the formatting / structure, and see if I understand it then” as violating “Norm One” (see my commenting guidelines).
For example, a request to add sections (or in this case, to reduce the size of the overall piece) isn’t technically wrong advice, as those things may potentially increase the quality of the piece. But when those requests are accompanied by “I didn’t understand it because it lacked _”, I think that those requests are too burdensome on the author, as they create a sort of implicit contract between the author and the commenter in which the author bears the responsibility of performing the work request in exchange for some probability that the commenter will say “Okay, looks good now” and then offer some substantial discussion to the major claims / arguments.
I can summarize one of the major points here, e.g., later on I write:
In other words, I believe the Sequences claim (and are wrong about) that the burden is always on the speaker to assume that when someone says they didn’t understand you, it was you who made the error, and it is on you to correct the error, if you want to be understood. My model of human minds says the prior on the probability that the speaker made a mistake in transmitting the information over the probability that the receiver of the information made a mistake (which can be corrected) or that they are being deceptive, is quite low.
I totally understand where you’re coming from, and I apologize for straddling the line on Norm One. I saw that it was heavily downvoted without comment, and that struck me as unhelpful.
Regarding the post itself, it wasn’t a matter of being unable to understand. It seemed likely to me that there were insights there, and that if I spent enough time on it I could pull them out. It was more about the other demands on my time, which I suspect isn’t a unique circumstance.
Regarding probability of mistake, I think that’s an unhelpful way of looking at it. IMO it’s not so much mistake, as ‘interface incompatibility’. A particular presentation style will be varying levels of compatible with different readers, with different message acceptance and error rates at different receivers. The total transmission of information is across the distribution. Minor changes to the presentation style sometimes have outsized effects on total information transfer. Words are hard.
The general point is that if your goal is information transfer, it’s less about ‘mistake’ than getting the best integrated product across the distribution. If you have a different goal (“just getting the words out” is common for me), then optimizing for delivery may be irrelevant.