The article spends two paragraphs explaining the link between openness and disease, and then even links to the wikipedia page for parasite load
...which is no more than a stub, and suffers from the same problem. In fact, I was probably even more irritated by the Wikipedia article than the post. It abruptly mentions “openness to experience” as if the reader were perfectly well expecting a discussion of human personality in an entry on biological parasites.
‘came into it with really strong pre-conceptions of what it would be about, and didn’t bother to update them based on what was actually there’.
I was able to comprehend the article, but it didn’t feel satisfactory. The problem was that I was “offended” by the unprepared juxtaposition of concepts that I wasn’t expecting to be juxtaposed. You could call this a “really strong pre-conception of what it would be about”, in a negative sense: I didn’t think it would be about that.
This is exactly what inferential distance is: when the writer is “on a different planet” from the reader.
...which is no more than a stub, and suffers from the same problem. In fact, I was probably even more irritated by the Wikipedia article than the post. It abruptly mentions “openness to experience” as if the reader were perfectly well expecting a discussion of human personality in an entry on biological parasites.
I was able to comprehend the article, but it didn’t feel satisfactory. The problem was that I was “offended” by the unprepared juxtaposition of concepts that I wasn’t expecting to be juxtaposed. You could call this a “really strong pre-conception of what it would be about”, in a negative sense: I didn’t think it would be about that.
This is exactly what inferential distance is: when the writer is “on a different planet” from the reader.
Your irritations should be correlated, since gwern is the author of that abrupt addition to the WP article as well as of the above post.