I appreciate your commitment to precision, specificity, and disclaimers, to rule out what you don’t mean and to pinpoint exactly what you do mean. I aspire to clear communication, too, and it’s obvious to me that you’ve put orders of magnitude more effort and skillpoints into it than I could ever imagine doing in my own attempts to communicate. (The best I can personally do is write in a longwinded manner, since my attempts at concise language are too easy to misunderstand.)
That said, this has downsides, too. For instance, I’m not a native speaker and my reading speed is slow. By the time I reached the object-level points in this post (which was already split up! originally it was 3⁄4 meta or setup stuff!) I’d forgotten some of the meta points or didn’t understand how they related to the object level.
Also, LW is high context, and sometimes we expect people to know things that they should know but don’t, or did know but forgot. For example, only by the last sentence of this post did I vaguely understand what the stag hunt stuff was about. So I’d recommend adding one sentence at the start to explain what the title and Stag Hunt refer to.
(Another minor problem here is that without the concept handle “stag hunt”, I could not necessarily find this post in the future, even if I remembered you wrote it and browsed just your essays.)
Meta comments on this post:
I appreciate your commitment to precision, specificity, and disclaimers, to rule out what you don’t mean and to pinpoint exactly what you do mean. I aspire to clear communication, too, and it’s obvious to me that you’ve put orders of magnitude more effort and skillpoints into it than I could ever imagine doing in my own attempts to communicate. (The best I can personally do is write in a longwinded manner, since my attempts at concise language are too easy to misunderstand.)
That said, this has downsides, too. For instance, I’m not a native speaker and my reading speed is slow. By the time I reached the object-level points in this post (which was already split up! originally it was 3⁄4 meta or setup stuff!) I’d forgotten some of the meta points or didn’t understand how they related to the object level.
Also, LW is high context, and sometimes we expect people to know things that they should know but don’t, or did know but forgot. For example, only by the last sentence of this post did I vaguely understand what the stag hunt stuff was about. So I’d recommend adding one sentence at the start to explain what the title and Stag Hunt refer to.
(Another minor problem here is that without the concept handle “stag hunt”, I could not necessarily find this post in the future, even if I remembered you wrote it and browsed just your essays.)