There are a whole bunch of ways that trying to optimise for unpredictability is not a good idea:
Most often technical discussions are not just exposition dumps, they’re a part of the creative process itself. Me telling you an idea is an essential part of my coming up with the idea. I essentially don’t know where I’m going before I get there, so it’s impossible for me to optimise for unpredictability on your end.
This ignores a whoooole bunch of status-effects and other goals of human conversation. The point of conversation is not solely to transmit information. In real life information-transfer is a minuscule part of most conversations: try telling your girlfriend to “speak unpredictably” when she gets home and wants to vent to you about her boss.
People often don’t say what they mean. The process of translating a mental idea into words on-the-fly often results in sequences of words that are very bad at communicating the idea. The only solution to this is to be redundant, repeat the idea multiple times in different ways until you hit one that your interlocutor understands.
Humans are not Vulcans, and we shouldn’t try to optimise human communication the way we’d optimise a network protocol.
1 and 2 are absolutely correct, but for specific subsets. Outside such subsets, this optimisation still applies.
3 is correct sometimes as reversed advice. I see your point in 3 often (usually implicit). My post reverses that in response to it sometimes going too far.
It seems I went too far. Hence the expanded original:
Adjust how much to omit based on the concentration and domain-intelligence of the listener. Your starting point should probably err more on the side of “omit more redundancy” than it currently does.
If you, the listener/reader, fully understood what I tried to say, it is very very likely that you (specifically you) could have fully understood had I compressed my communication in some ways tailored to you.
There are a whole bunch of ways that trying to optimise for unpredictability is not a good idea:
Most often technical discussions are not just exposition dumps, they’re a part of the creative process itself. Me telling you an idea is an essential part of my coming up with the idea. I essentially don’t know where I’m going before I get there, so it’s impossible for me to optimise for unpredictability on your end.
This ignores a whoooole bunch of status-effects and other goals of human conversation. The point of conversation is not solely to transmit information. In real life information-transfer is a minuscule part of most conversations: try telling your girlfriend to “speak unpredictably” when she gets home and wants to vent to you about her boss.
People often don’t say what they mean. The process of translating a mental idea into words on-the-fly often results in sequences of words that are very bad at communicating the idea. The only solution to this is to be redundant, repeat the idea multiple times in different ways until you hit one that your interlocutor understands.
Humans are not Vulcans, and we shouldn’t try to optimise human communication the way we’d optimise a network protocol.
1 and 2 are absolutely correct, but for specific subsets. Outside such subsets, this optimisation still applies.
3 is correct sometimes as reversed advice. I see your point in 3 often (usually implicit). My post reverses that in response to it sometimes going too far.
It seems I went too far. Hence the expanded original:
Efficiency trades off with robustness.
If you, the listener/reader, fully understood what I tried to say, it is very very likely that you (specifically you) could have fully understood had I compressed my communication in some ways tailored to you.