That’s as may be… but surely the threshold for “sufficiently simply” isn’t as low as one screen of text…?
this does not seem like an impossible requirement for almost any scoped argument I can remember seeing (that is, a claim which is not inherently a conjunction of dozens of subclaims), including some very advanced math ones. granted, by making it fit on one screen you often get something shockingly dense. but you don’t need more than about 500 words to make most coherent arguments. the question is whether it would increase clarity to compress it like that. and I claim without evidence that the answer is generally that the best explanation of a claim is in fact this short, though it’s not guaranteed that one has the time and effort available to figure out how to precisely specify the claim in words that few; often, trying to precisely specify something in few words runs into “those words are not precisely defined in the mind of the readers” issues, a favorite topic of Davis.
(I believe this to apply to even things that people spend hundreds of thousands of words on on this site, such as “is ai dangerous”. that it took yudkowsky many blog posts to make the point does not mean that a coherent one-shot argument needs to be that long, as long as it’s using existing words well. It might be the case that the concise argument is drastically worse at bridging inferential gaps, but I don’t think it need be impossible to specify!)
this does not seem like an impossible requirement for almost any scoped argument I can remember seeing (that is, a claim which is not inherently a conjunction of dozens of subclaims), including some very advanced math ones. granted, by making it fit on one screen you often get something shockingly dense. but you don’t need more than about 500 words to make most coherent arguments. the question is whether it would increase clarity to compress it like that. and I claim without evidence that the answer is generally that the best explanation of a claim is in fact this short, though it’s not guaranteed that one has the time and effort available to figure out how to precisely specify the claim in words that few; often, trying to precisely specify something in few words runs into “those words are not precisely defined in the mind of the readers” issues, a favorite topic of Davis.
(I believe this to apply to even things that people spend hundreds of thousands of words on on this site, such as “is ai dangerous”. that it took yudkowsky many blog posts to make the point does not mean that a coherent one-shot argument needs to be that long, as long as it’s using existing words well. It might be the case that the concise argument is drastically worse at bridging inferential gaps, but I don’t think it need be impossible to specify!)