MendelSchmiedekamp comments on Mental Crystallography - Less Wrong

14 Post author: Alicorn 27 February 2010 01:04AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (55)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: MendelSchmiedekamp 01 March 2010 02:31:42PM 0 points [-]

When you're trying to communicate facts, opinions, and concepts - most especially concepts - it is a useful investment of effort to try to categorize both your audience's crystallography and your own.

This is something of an oversimplification. Categories are one possible first step, but eventually you will need more nuance than that. I suggest forming estimates based on the communication being serving also as a sequence of experiments. And being very strict about not ruling things out, especially if you have not managed to beat down your typical mind fallacy.

And that's just for a simply dialogue. Communication in a public forum with other audiences and even other participants, well, that is even more complex.