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I'm sorry, but I have to briefly rant about something that has annoyed me for YEARS:
"Not grading it" would be fine with me, as the student. I don't like grades in the first place!
What the teacher means is: "I will automatically assign a failing grade, no matter how good the work is." [EDIT: "...just as if you had turned nothing in at all".] That is distinct from "not grading it", and is what the teacher should say instead (if it is what he or she actually means).
Some teachers explicitly start students with a failing grade (0), and add points to it with each successive assignment, until you finish the semester with (ideally) a passing grade.
Under this model, do you think that "not grading it" and "assigning it a failing grade" are equivalent? If not, why not?
No. "Not grading it" would mean fewer points in the denominator of the student's grade, where by "grade" I mean the quantity (points earned)/(points possible).
(Edit: "Yes" changed to "No", which is what I meant.)
Why is a grade (points earned)/(points possible)?
Wouldn't it make more sense for a grade to be just points earned? I realize that we mostly work inside a percentile system, but that's for the purposes of normalization, not because we actually believe that 1 good work is better than N decent works.
Expecting assignments not turned in not to count either for or against the grade is sort of like expecting people who have done really poorly in Spanish class to speak worse Spanish than those who never learned the language at all.
What is socially reasonable to expect is beside the point. The point is that appealing to social knowledge to resolve ambiguities when it would have been easy enough to speak precisely constitutes sloppiness.
If we're treating "sloppy" as a pejorative, then I don't think this is true as generally as you're stating it. By the same logic, we could say that measuring anything in units smaller than micrometers is "sloppy." Yes, greater precison is always possible, but it's not always necessary. This is actually a clearer way to describe what's going on in the other fork of this thread--we're disagreeing about where the necessary minimum of precision in language is, in that particular case. (At least, that's what I thought we were disagreeing about; if you had a different idea, I suggest we either get on the same page or drop it entirely.)
That's an interesting question, of course, but it's not one that directly bears on the issue here.
I don't actually know the answer.
It does bear on my original point; the teachers I've had that used such a system indicated that we had a score of 0; each assignment was worth a specified number of points (not a percentage score), and we would get up to that many points added to our score by completing it. It just seemed to me that you wouldn't object under such a system, but I guess you don't feel that way.
If you encounter this situation in the real world, I suggest asking for clarification, such as, "Does that mean we can skip it, or that we'll fail?" Once you encounter the phrase many times, and always with the latter definition, updating would suggest that any future uses will have the same (not quite literal) meaning, allowing you to be more confident in your understanding. If there is still enough doubt remaining, then ask every time.
This method works even if you can't think of alternatives but realize that people don't always mean what they say. "Does that mean we can skip it?" is an adequate way to express, "This is my understanding of what action I am allowed to take without penalty; please check it and let me know if I am correct."
Encountering many situations where you require this question/answer method to determine what someone really means would show that it's a necessary component of understanding neurotypical communication. As someone who has problems with literal-mindedness, constantly asking questions and updating based on the responses changed my relationships significantly for the better.
After years of suffering through the process of academic enslavement I completely agree with the sentiment of this comment.
No, what the teacher means is "I will act as if you had not turned in anything at all", and "I won't grade it" is a perfectly reasonable shorthand for that.
No! Assigning a grade of 0 for not turning it in is grading it! The 0 is still a grade!
"I won't grade it" = "It won't count as a graded assignment [for you]."
The referent of "grading" is a specific pattern of action that involves reading and evaluating the paper. The teacher will not perform that pattern of action on papers that are turned in late. Depending on how the grading formula works, the relevant cell in the Excel spreadsheet might even remain empty.
What the teacher should say depends on what the formula is. If the formula ignores empty cells, then the teacher can say "I won't grade it". If, on the other hand, the formula treats empty cells as if they contained the value 0, then the teacher should not say "I won't grade it", but should instead say "I will assign it a grade of 0".
"Grading" means "scoring"; it does not refer to a specific ritual performed by the teacher to arrive at the score. What if the teacher decided to score each student's paper by means of a random process, such as rolling dice? Would you say that the teacher "did not grade" the papers, or would you say (as I would insist) that the teacher graded the papers in an unfair manner?
Furthermore, whatever the semantics of the verb "grade", it is the impact on the student's score, and not the teacher's behavior, that is relevant, and consequently it is to the former that the teacher should be referring. (Indeed, the reality is that that is the intended referent, and the teacher is simply referring to his/her own behavior as an oblique, implicit way of referring to the impact on the student's score. I object to such an oblique way of speaking.)
I honestly don't understand the resistance to conceding me this point. I can perhaps understand if people aren't as bothered by this kind of thing as I am, but...why the need to actually defend what is clearly less-than-maximally-considered language? Do people really not understand where I'm coming from here? In this, a place where I thought sympathy for logical precision mixed with skepticism of institutionalized education? Exactly what mistake do you think I'm making, all ye hordes-of-orthonormal-upvoters? Or is your apparent disagreement just a way of signaling disapproval of my having made the complaint (as I am inclined to suspect)?
You are obsessing over a trivial nit and then blowing up in frustration that nobody gets it. Four paragraphs over the distinction-without-a-difference between "won't grade" and "grade 0"?
No, I'm "blowing up in frustration" (an exaggerated description, I think) that people are stubbornly disagreeing. As I said, I understand if folks think it's a trivial matter. What I don't understand is the apparent disagreement on the matter itself, and the best explanation I can come up with is that people are trying to show their disapproval of my having introduced the topic. (Why wouldn't they have just said that directly? Because upvoting orthonormal's comment was just easier.)
Actually I suspect it may run deeper, and may have to do with a reflexive tendency some people have to resist strong claims (or expressions of strong feeling) in general.
Unrequested arbitration from someone who just read the thread:
"I won't grade it" cannot be taken literally as obvious shorthand for "I will assign it a grade of zero". That this is what it means is obvious to many people but only because they have spent a decent amount of time in an institutional context where everyone is already clear what it means.
That said, it also isn't obvious that "I won't grade it" means "I won't include the assignment as part of your final grade." The word "grade" is ambiguous between meaning "giving a number or letter that ostensibly represents the quality of work" and "reading and analyzing the assignment so as to form an opinion regarding what number or letter would best represent the quality of the work". Assigning a 0 without looking at the assignment is certainly a grade under the former meaning, but it isn't really under the latter meaning.
This ambiguity is resolved only when people are aware of the context and pragmatics surrounding the statement (for example, some people will probably infer that professor won't just let them not do the assignment and so interpreting the statement as "I won't include the paper assignment as part of your final grade" is too optimistic).
So when orthonormal says
He is basically right. We use shorthands and euphemisms all the time and their literal ambiguity or inaccuracy is not really legitimate grounds for criticizing those phrasings...
...until people misunderstand. Komponisto says the first time he heard this phrasing he didn't understand. I don't know if this misunderstanding persisted until he received a failing grade for an assignment without realizing that would be the consequence, but it doesn't matter. Given that assignment failure is usually a big deal, any reasonable chance of miscommunication should be headed off at the pass (no pun intended). Many professors are explicit about this and there is no evidence that suffer significantly as a result. College freshmen are particularly likely to misunderstand because they may not have heard the phrase before and are in a new environment whose contextual cues they are not used to. Further, neurotypicality issues arise in these circumstances and it is important that language users keep in mind that the contextual cues that are obvious to them or even most others may not be obvious to everyone (Nancy and Silas's excellent exchange covers this well). This goes for the participants in the above debate, also.
So komponisto is totally right that professors should be explicit about what they mean. But he is wrong that the professors are really, truly misspeaking (instead of just being somewhat unclear) and he should recognize that other people will sometimes get annoyed with those who insist a statement is wrong because they don't pick up on the obvious-to-some-but-not-to-others contextual clues which supply the meaning of the statement. It kind of reminds us of the grade school teacher who, when we asked if we could go to the bathroom, replied "I don't know. Can you?"
Or they could ask a simple question. I don't understand why people feel the need to go into this huge analysis when conversation is a fluid and interactive process.
Awareness of context and pragmatics can be tacit or explicit, and if you don't tacitly understand that you need to ask a question, some explicitness might help.
My handy example for communication failure on that sort of thing is a time when I was turned away from a restaurant for not being dressed properly. It took asking the same question a bunch of times to find out that the specific issue was that I was wearing shorts.
My impression is that the person I was asking had trouble imagining that anyone didn't already know his concept of "dressed properly".
There is a distinction, and there is a difference. Just because the difference is small doesn't make it go away.
Surmise: that's because you've only gotten around to mentioning your real objection in this post, two replies down from the top of the thread. It's not the inconsistency. You mean to say you object to the prof's use of his greater power in this situation to frame the conversation to his benefit.
You're right that "I will not grade it" is the wrong phrase to use. The correct one is "I will fail you on this assignment," which the prof is deliberately avoiding because being honest makes him look more responsible for the student's bad outcome than necessary.
Standard Divisive Topic Warning: I suspect there are some here who object to the power dynamics in academia, which are covert for reasons both good and ideological. I know there are also academics here who will naturally take issue with that characterization.
I don't see how that's more "real" than his other objection -- he mentioned that it's not obvious that "I won't grade it" actually means "I'll grade it zero". And as a real autistic-spectrum person, I can completely sympathize with missing these expected transformations you're supposed to make. The fact that he has additional good reasons doesn't take away from this, and it doesn't justify a teacher's use of sloppy language when clear language is just as easy.
Clear language is not just as easy for neurotypicals. It's contrary to their models and their habits.
Your failing to know this isn't an autistic spectrum thing. People are generally very bad at modeling minds different from their own.
I'm not claiming that it is, as a general rule. I'm just claiming that the intrepretative assumptions they make about their speech are much more likely to match their audience's, thus mitigating the effect of unclear speech.
I didn't fail to know it; when teachers have said what komponisto complains about, I've understood what they really meant. But I also recognize it's because I made some assumptions about the teacher's disposition that someone wouldn't necessarily realize had to be made, especially if they were autistic-spectrum.
As a recent example, one time I was asked, "Did you come prepared to make a payment today?" Since I didn't know I would have to make a payment at that time, I said no, on the grounds that my failing to expect it is a lack of preparation. Then I realized they meant "Are you capable of paying today?" and were just using a roundabout way of saying it.
My apologies for misunderstanding and being a little sharp about it.
Oh, I hadn't heard you explicitly claim that before. It doesn't change my impressions at all but it is still interesting to fill in my mental check-list of people's identification with the label.
Meh, it's still self-diagnosed. I've never gotten a professional diagnosis, which is why I only claim I'm on the spectrum. And in the context of the comment you're replying to, my point was just that my claim to the title is much more realistic than that of a certain someone else who doesn't seem to understand the problem with using "I won't grade it" to mean "I will grade it zero."
Peh. Professional diagnosis. I've got professional diagnoses of all sorts of things purely because it allowed access (or cheaper access) to substances that authorities have decided to exert control over. To be honest I think it's easier to act the part of having various diagnosable conditions than it is to act neurotypical. (And even there a lot of high IQ spectrum folks avoid a diagnosis because they're so good at emulation.)
I don't understand either. I agree with you that it is the wrong phrasing to use (when you say "I won't grade it" and expect that to be equivalent to "I will give it the grade 0"). I'm certainly not as passionate about the issue as you are, but it seems like a valid point. I've been reversing some of your downvotes on this.
Please count me as a counterexample to you-know-who's claim of "You are not obviously right to people other than yourself."
(I just noticed this comment. My reply to your earlier comment takes almost exactly the same position.)
You are clearly far more passionate about this triviality than I am, to the point of being less nice than I prefer my interlocutors to be, so I'm going to cease to talk to you about it. You can pretend you got me to agree if you want, I don't mind.
Hmm, I'm quite puzzled. If you think I was being non-nice, that suggests a misunderstanding. Did you perhaps interpret the final paragraph of the grandparent as directed at you personally? (It wasn't; it was directed at the 5 people who upvoted orthonormal's aggressive reply and whoever has been downvoting my comments in this thread.)
I voted up orthonormal, although I did not downvote you. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt re: your niceness-related intentions, and explain:
This is a confrontational phrasing. The use of the second person is aggressive in context, and the aside where you strongly specify which answer you think is right comes off like a status grab ("When you make your choice between these two options, bear strongly in mind that I think this").
The teacher's behavior is the sole determinant of the student's score. Even if you showed that there is some normative reason to speak only in terms of the latter, that wouldn't indicate that the teacher is in fact speaking in those terms. The fact that the teacher should speak about relevant matters doesn't prevent a ramble about a faculty ski trip from last February; why should it prevent a digression to teacherly grading-related habits?
Obliqueness is an epidemic, but you seem to be drawing the line very uncommonly. I would be only a little more surprised if you had chosen to rant about someone expressing an intention to turn on their lawn sprinkler, saying that this is objectionably oblique because what really matters is that the grass will get wet, not that it be delivered by a particular device.
This would be a reasonable thing to say if you were obviously right to people other than yourself, who stubbornly held out in spite of having clearly already lost out of pride or stubbornness or some incomprehensibly arcane reason. You are not obviously right to people other than yourself. That doesn't mean you're wrong; but it means you can't get away with this sentence and sound nice.
This phrase is sneaky. "Less-than-maximally-considered" is probably denotationally true of every piece of natural language humans actually use. But the implication is that it is not just non-maximally considered; but inadequately considered, and as I said above, that's not clear to people other than you. Also, you're implying that people are actively defending the usage of language to which you object, which seems to me a mischaracterization.
Now you are insinuating that disagreement with you constitutes flouting those values, which is insulting and kind of a cheap shot. (I thought you, a regular contributor to Less Wrong, would have more mindfulness and give a measured, polite reply...!)
This is just an attack on orthonormal, whose comment was not particularly objectionable in any way except inasmuch as it attempted to correct you. Am I next? Also, it looks to me like people have made attempts to specify your mistake. If you don't understand them, there are polite ways to ask for clarification. This ain't one of them.
Do you have any reason apart from this incident that Less Wrong is particularly hostile to complaint? Or that disagreements are hard to find here, such that you should have high priors on apparent incommensurate opinions really being fake signaling tools?
Thank you, because it was frankly shocking ("devastating" might be a tad too strong, though not that much) to find myself accused of non-niceness when I have on several occasions made a point of trying to increase the niceness level of this place, even linking to your post on the subject!
I was certainly right about there having been a misunderstanding. Your comment reveals that you interpreted my words in ways that I did not anticipate. For instance, it never would have occurred to me that use of the second person, as in
could be construed as "aggressive" or "status-grabbing". I think what happened here was what I had surmised: because my comment was a reply to yours, you interpreted it as if I were speaking directly and specifically to you ("Hey, you, Alicorn, would you really say this?"), when in fact I was addressing you only in a sort of rhetorical way, your mild comment being merely the latest and most proximate component of an unexpected and incomprehensible onslaught of disagreement represented principally by orthonormal's comment and (most particularly) its score.
Despite our shared concern for niceness, it appears we may have substantially different conceptions of what it entails. Consider this:
What?! I thought what I said was exactly the kind of thing a nice, polite person says when they're puzzled in the way I was. As opposed to, e.g. "Are you people out of your freaking minds??" I even added the word "honestly", specifically to signal that I wasn't just being rhetorical: I really genuinely did not understand.
Again, how in the world was that impolite? (I suspect this may be a case where we, using only written text, are suffering from the absence of cues such as intonation and facial expression, which can be crucial in communicating "tone".)
The disagreement was, as I have said, unanticipated. The reason I didn't anticipate it did indeed have to do with my model of readers' attitudes toward verbal precision and toward the educational system, represented in this case by the sort of teacher who would say "I won't grade it" rather than "I will give you a score of 0". How was communicating this insulting or a cheap shot?
It was most certainly not an attack on orthonormal (who in general is a fine contributor by my lights); in fact it was expressed in a somewhat lighthearted tone, as indicated by the archaism "ye". Orthonormal's comment may not have been "objectionable", but, good golly, how was it worth 5 (now 6) upvotes? Especially when, if you stop to reflect, it couldn't possibly have communicated anything that I hadn't considered: of course the teacher means he/she will treat it as if the student turned in nothing! (And that means giving it a grade of 0.) Could anybody have reasonably expected that I would have read that comment and said "Oh, hadn't thought of that, thank you for pointing it out"? My contention was that "I won't grade it" wasn't a reasonable shorthand; consequently the comment amounted to a mere denial, and not even an attempted refutation.
Now, speaking of niceness, I have to say that I think you were uncharitable to me in the parent comment. For example:
The difference between that sort of silly thing and my actual complaint is nothing short of stark. I'm talking about a teacher saying that he or she will not award a score as a sort of euphemism for awarding a particular low score (such as 0). Do you see how that's a more reasonable complaint than your example, even if you don't think it rises to the level of being reasonable in absolute terms?
Anyway, I hope this helps to clarify things, and I hope I didn't seem non-nice in this comment.
Oxford types have a solution for this problem, it's a pronoun called "one".
I find it slightly amusing in a situation where you are highly critical of polite euphemisms, that are generally well understood (chance of error is far below 1%), you make your point with imprecise language by using an ambiguous pronoun "you" rather than the unambiguous "one". In my experience people make this error with ambiguous pronouns at a far higher frequency than not-graded vs grade of zero.
komponisto's tone would indeed be unjustified and not nice if his arguments had been rebutted and were only obvious to himself. As far as I can tell, nobody has actually rebutted komponisto's arguments, and a couple other people do think his view is obviously right.
orthonormal gave the following objection:
The argument is that the equivalence in meaning between the two phrasings is so close the two are interchangeable. komponisto rebuts this argument:
Later, SilasBarta argues that non-neurotypical people might be confused by such oblique language.
Right now, komponisto's position lacks a convincing rebuttal. There could still be counter-arguments (e.g. "people who find 'will not be graded' confusing are atypical and they don't matter", "people who find 'will not be graded' confusing should learn to make inferences and detect euphemisms, because these are valuable skills"). But nobody has made any such potential rebuttals, unless I'm missing something.
(And there are rebuttals to those rebuttals: "people who have trouble with euphemism-detection deserve accommodation, not marginalization", "euphemism detection is a valuable skill, but in the student-teacher relationship, clarity of communication is more important than teaching that skill.")
You offered a potential rebuttal, but it hardly closes the case:
I don't think it's uncommon to hold certain types of communication to a higher standard of clarity, and communication of expectations between a teacher and student may be a good example. It's a good thing for students to feel that the teacher is talking straight to them about potential punishments that could effect their futures, rather than talking in euphemisms.
It actually is perfectly fair for komponisto to query why people aren't conceding the point, since his argument lacked real rebuttals at the time (and still does). To me, it sounds like he is saying "agree with me or show me how I'm wrong." Since he seems to actually have grounds for being confident in his position, his tone reads as passionate to me, rather than an "not nice." If someone shows some stronger arguments against his position, and he persists with the same tone, then I would say that he is being "not nice."
Several people have been rubbed the wrong way by komponisto's communication style in this discussion, which could well be evidence that it could use improvement. Perhaps if komponisto had spent more time eliciting counter-arguments before arguing that people should agree with him, then he would have avoided that interpretation. Yet calling him "not nice" seems to require acting as if his argument has holes in it which haven't yet been shown, and requires a particular interpretation of the socioemotional content of his posts that I don't share:
By saying that "'I won't grade it' is a perfectly reasonable shorthand," it does sound like orthonormal was defending the acceptability of the oblique phrasing. If komponisto is mischaracterizing orthonormal, let orthonormal be the one to say so.
The question we should ask is whether is it reasonable for komponisto to believe that his position on this subject is so strong that he is justified in considering disagreement with him to be flouting rationalist values. As far as I can tell, his position might be strong enough to justify such a level of confidence. Yet I am not convinced that it is, so I think his meta-comments about rationality on Less Wrong would have been better saved for later. I'm willing to call his comment overconfident, but I'm not willing to call it insulting or a cheap shot.
I disagree that "Exactly what mistake do you think I'm making, all ye hordes-of-orthonormal-upvoters?" needs to be interpreted as an attack. While I wouldn't object to orthonormal's comment, his phrasing wasn't the gentlest.
Yet after you made this post, some people have appeared (e.g. Silas) who do think that komponisto is right (though they think the point is trivial), so perhaps he can get away with saying something like that without being not nice.
Personally, I would have preferred to see a bit more back-and-forth on the substantive issue in this discussion before either of you attempted to go meta (komponisto about why people were disagreeing and their rationality, and you about him being "not nice," or being the only one who holds such a position).
First of all, this breakdown is much more "not nice" than anything that komponisto said, in the sense that it is explicitly negative against komopnisto's post. Komponisto wasn't actually explicitly negative.
Secondly, I think it's unfortunate and unjustified for people to cop out of disagreements based on rudeness or "discursive impropriety". Even if you didn't like what you perceived, that doesn't give you the justification to "victory by secession".
That's not what she did. She explicitly declared that she was done with the argument, not that she won it - by standard debating rules, she forfeited.
And whether she updated as much as she should have is her business, not yours.
And she was reporting her feelings and their sources precisely as requested, not setting out to slander anyone.
To be perfectly frank, I would suggest that the entire thread should have been dropped after her original comment, and should be dropped now.
Taken literally, sure. But everyone knows what the teacher means, so why argue semantics?
(a) The first time I heard it, I didn't realize what the teacher meant.
(b) What if the teacher says "It won't be graded"?
(c) By using this expression, the teacher is tacitly imposing and enforcing a value system in which "having things graded" is desirable -- a value system to which I reserve the right to object.
(d) Because people should say what they mean and mean what they say.
Unless they're deliberately lying, people always believe they're saying what they mean. The correspondance between verbal language and thought is not perfect; in the teacher's head, as in those of many other commenters here, this particular example is sufficient to be clear. In yours, and some other commenters', it is not. I don't see any way to meaningfully determine which view is "correct."
What you appear to mean--at least, what people tend to mean when they say that--is "people should say things in a way which is immediately clear to me." I hope you see why this is a tall order for people who may not know you or understand how you think very well.
I don't think this is true at all. I think such people believe they're saying something close enough to what they actually mean, and that social conventions don't require them to take care to make their language as unambiguous as possible. This last part is the problem.
Again,"sufficient to be clear" is not the right criterion; the right criterion is the ideal of "no possible way to misunderstand". (Achieving that is impossible; how much less possible is it when they aren't even trying?)
This makes it sound like "clear to me" is a highly idiosyncratic criterion. There is such a thing as objectively less ambiguous language.
The basic issue here is people not thinking carefully enough while they're speaking. It's really a question of quantity of thought, not style of thought.
I think they believe they're saying what they mean, but what you say is what's actually happening. More generally, I think you're talking about how people should act, and I'm talking about how they do act, which is making it sound like we disagree more than I believe we actually do.
Yes, and I stand by that--even though, as you say, there is such a thing as objectively less ambiguous language. Which parts need to be less ambiguous in order to guarantee understanding varies from person to person. Even if the truth is so simple that people who aren't neurotypical require, on average, less ambiguity than neurotypical people do, that doesn't mean you can communicate with all of them exactly the same. Which parts you can fudge depend on the previous experience of the specific individual you're addressing. If I say, "Hey, did you see the less wrong thread about grading?" you would know what I meant, but someone unfamiliar with LW would be entirely justified in calling that sentence confusing. Someone who's, say, a weaver, might go off on entirely the wrong mental path.
By that logic, I think it's absolutely reasonable for a teacher above the first grade level to assume that all of their students are generally familiar with the mechanics of grading and potential penalties for late assignments. Of the two intepretations of the disputed statement, "you will receive a score of 0" is much more plausible than "you will be freed from having to do the assignment" to anyone who's been in academia for any length of time. I agree with you that the chosen wording could be, objectively, clearer; I do not believe there was sufficient reason to expect it would be misinterpreted that it was negligent not to be clearer. If I ask you to "make me a sandwich," I don't expect you to be tripped up by the real grammatical ambiguity and wonder if I would like you to put me between slices of bread. I expect you to go with the plausible choice.
I do agree with you that most people don't think very much about how they communicate. This frustrates me a lot, because it's something I think about a lot and which is important to me. But I don't find this fact as inexcusable as you appear to. Shortcuts and built-in amibiguity are a part of, as far as I know, every human language. In almost all situations, they resolve without conflict. Very few humans have ever had reason to consider that their use of language is insufficiently ambiguous. (When ambiguity does result in conflict, we assume by default that the other person is wrong, misunderstanding or stupid--which is not good or useful, but happens, and reinforces our belief that the way we communicate is fine.) Could most people benefit from learning to communicate better? Absolutely! But they don't know that.
Being upset that humans speak ambiguously is a little like being upset that humans shake hands. You're free to dislike it, and choose not to engage in it, but actually being unhappy every time it happens is going to get exhausting. A more productive thing to do in both cases would be to educate people about what's wrong with it and how they can do better ... in a communication style, of course, which they will find compelling and convincing, even if you wouldn't.
Which is why, if you give me a few years, I'll have a degree in this.
ETA: Skipped something I think was important: While I do agree that we should strive to be clearer in our communication, I don't think it's feasible or even a good idea to try to be as unambiguous as possible all the time. Thinking carefully about everything you say is difficult and tiring, and it takes a long time. Optimizing for unambiguity would be a sacrifice of mental energy and communication throughput which I don't think it's worth, given that the system really does work most of the time. In my experience, it's easier and more useful to try to optimize for the specific understanding of the person you're addressing, which may include being less ambiguous but almost certainly includes choosing particular ambiguities that the listener is likely to understand as intended. This still uses some mental energy, but not as much (at a guess, that's because it's a more natural thought pattern), and it doesn't sacrifice throughput because you're just choosing your shortcuts more carefully, not abandoning them altogether.
Both the original discussion of this and the current one, not to mention numerous other discussions about other things, exemplify the following pattern:
I point out that phenomenon X is bad. Then, instead of replying with "I agree", or "I agree that it's bad, but don't think it's as bad as you do" or even "I agree with you about how bad it is now that you've pointed it out, but wouldn't myself have bothered to raise the issue", people come up with elaborate justifications, rationalizations, or explanations of X, which (I hypothesize) are basically intended to signal distance from "anti-X fanaticism". The parent comment is yet another example of this.
Folks, there just isn't any need to defend the teacher here -- unless you actually want to take the position that saying "I won't grade it" is preferable to saying "you will receive a score of 0" (and if anyone is tempted to take that position in reply to this comment, be forewarned that I simply won't believe you're being honest unless you say something genuinely surprising, that I hadn't thought of). I did not say I was still confused by the teacher's meaning, and I do not need an explanation of the fact that human language is imprecise in general, and of the reasons people say the ambiguous things they do. I'm not stupid, and I'm not even autistic. I'm aware of the social conventions that are operative here, and I'm not proposing that teachers speak to their students in Lojban. All I'm doing is expressing disapproval of the fact that some teachers say "I won't grade it", and proposing that they say "I will give it a score of 0" instead. This is really pretty simple; in particular, it would require much less effort on the teacher's part to implement this suggestion than you spent writing the parent comment. It's an easy, low-cost net-improvement on the world.
Agreeing with a "fanatic" doesn't make you a fanatic. You're allowed to agree with me and yet not feel as strongly about the matter as I do. You don't need to signal your distance by presenting superfluous rationalizations of the bad phenomenon. In fact, you don't even need to point out that you don't feel as strongly as I do -- because simple agreement carries no implication that you do feel that strongly!
No one really disagrees with me here; if you doubt this, ask yourself whether anyone would protest that a teacher who actually said "you will receive a score a 0" should instead have said "I won't grade it"! Rather, the dialectic pattern of apparent disagreement is due to the fact that my original complaint violated two social rules: (1) it was tangential to the post; and, more importantly (2) it expressed a strong opinion not already established as a group-defining belief -- something which is generally frowned upon in most human groups, but especially goes against the self-image of folks here as calm, reflective, "rational" people.
So, while I appreciate your concern with communication, and don't want to discourage you from further pursuing your efforts in that area, I am obliged to point out that your comment -- like those of many others -- didn't communicate anything to me other than resistance to my strength of feeling.
I just dropped in to agree with this: "it expressed a strong opinion not already established as a group-defining belief -- something which is generally frowned upon in most human groups, but especially goes against the self-image of folks here as calm, reflective, "rational" people."
I care about lots of things that are not themes of LW. I get a pretty negative reaction whenever I express such feelings -- even when I don't think I'm being particularly fanatical. I don't believe it makes you foolish to have strong opinions or preferences about a variety of things.
You didn't just do that.
You said that the teacher's words don't match their meaning.
Explanations may be a poor way of promoting beliefs, but belief in that fact would discourage your claim that the teacher's statement has a precise meaning.
I think newerspeak's take is pretty good. It quite late (and rather temporarily) that you switched from discussing lack of clarity, especially the need to learn a new idiom, to discussing what is bad about the phrasing. (except that I strongly object to newerspeak's use of "wrong phrasing.")
I disagree with that interpretation, perhaps because of a meta-ambiguity about which of two questions we're discussing:
Which of two example wordings should the teacher have used?
Was there anything wrong with what the teacher said?
These are obviously related but by no means the same. You seem to be assuming that the dispute is about the former (which, as you say, we all seem to agree on); my understanding was that it is about the latter. Specifically, I interpreted you as believing that the teacher's wording was so unacceptable as to warrant correction, and this is what I disagreed with and presented arguments against. I suppose that, yes, that means we were arguing about your strength of feeling, but that's exactly what I was trying to do. If I seemed to claim that I was arguing about anything else, that was a miscommunication.
I appreciate that you made a point of distinguishing between disliking the nature of this particular discussion and disliking this kind of feedback from me in general.
ETA after discussing in IRC: Also, you seem to be relying on the premise that less ambiguity in language is universally better, and for the reasons outlined in my previous comment I don't think it's that simple.
Now that I think about it, the real point I should have made is that getting noticeably angry on the Internet about language usage is sort of low-status (only the first level above using poor spelling and grammar); the second level is to let such things pass, and the third is to remark wittily on bad usage (or only remark openly on it when it has bad externalities).
My original response, in retrospect, was clearly meant to signal second-level sophistication. This one is, perhaps, attempting the fourth level (going meta on questions of language usage).
I disagree.
I think the default is something like believing that what one says is close enough to what one means, and the other person is obligated to pick up on what one means.
"If they don't they clearly lack ingroup connections, social awareness, status and are less likely to be the kind of people that are valuable allies. I should shun them." (For example.)
Yup. Not consciously, of course. I wonder if, generally, speaking, people don't instinctively distinguish between not knowing something and not caring about it. Hence ignorance of facts being conflated with stupidity about a topic, as well as the instinctive avoidance of people who don't already know the social rules of a community.
It can work that way. Or "If I keep repeating the same words, they'll get it." Or "If I yell at them, they'll get it."
I agree. I also think this is the source of the stereotypical male/female communication problem ("he never thinks about what I want" "she never tells me what she wants"), which I've posted about elsewhere.
I don't think the distinction is nearly that clear.
We use euphemisms all the time. Then there is the whole courtship protocol in which the meaning of what people say is entirely different to the words but definitely not (usually) the same thing as lying. In human interactions in general people often do not say what they mean and would be frowned upon if they did, they do not always need to outright self deceive themselves in order to meet this requirement.
Absolutely agreed. My point (which seems to have been unclear, from a couple of replies) was that people equate "saying something which I expect to be interpreted as what I mean" with "saying what I mean." Probably not on the conscious level--if you asked them, I would expect most people to admit that "do you want to come up for coffee" is not really saying what they mean--but in the part of the subconscious that has to quickly manage what's being said in realtime.
My favorite ambiguous piece of dating vocabulary: "I think we should see other people." Are you breaking up, or suggesting polyamory?!
Following on from that point it is also sometimes assumed that the lack of comprehension is actually a status transaction. High status people don't need to understand what other people are saying (when it doesn't benefit them) - and understanding too much can be a sign of weakness. In such cases incomprehension is disrespect.
The problem, of course, is that people also systematically underestimate inferential distance.
Brilliant. I hope someone tries to use that line on me when we're breaking up just so I can tease them about polyarmory. (I'm of the opinion that there is no reason breaking up can't be fun!)
I second AD's request for an example; I actually misread that paragraph the first time, but I think my misreading had some truth to it as well:
I'd thought you said that high-status people have less of a need to make themselves understood, i.e. they don't need to explain themselves to people who are lower status than they are. When they do choose to, it's with a tone of exasperation or condescension.
Which is one one of the reasons I don't take status signalling too seriously, at least in that situation. Communicating clearly and respectfully is really important to me--both on an emotional level (I feel strongly about it) and a practical one (people need to do it all the time and you're kidding yourself if you think it won't help you to be good at it). Someone who acts like it's beneath them to communicate respectfully to a given person is signalling high status, but demonstrating being some combination of "jerk" and "dumb about people," and the latter impression wins out.
The opposite of this is an old friend of mine who somehow developed the rare ability to, in an argument invoking tech cred and lots of status negotiation, stop and say "Oh, I haven't heard of X, what's X?" because someone made a point he didn't follow. It's hugely low-status, but it's the really productive thing to do, and he learned a lot that way. Based on what else I know about the friend, I highly doubt this is a conscious choice he made--I think he just naturally doesn't give a fuck about status. i respect that a lot and am trying to make a habit of doing the same thing (swallow pride and ask when I don't know something).
I like subverting status (showing respect even where it's "beneath" me and admitting ignorance). That's probably some kind of meta-status play, though. :)
I don't think I've encountered this theory before. Can you give an example?
There is some ambiguity in the phrase 'grade it', with the two of you using different definitions. Most teachers consider 'grading papers' to be the process of reading a paper, evaluating merits and granting symbolic value to your academic performance based on the quality of the work. Possible literal meanings are far more varied.
I think the teacher's meaning could scrape by as technically correct but it would depend on the details of how she inputs the marks. ie. If she doesn't do anything with the paper at all and the computer system defaults to either assigning 0 or outright failing you based off the lack of an entered grade then it is technically correct. If she explicitly types in a 0 then she would not be.
Even under this understanding of the term, the issue remains. Yes, if you interpret "grade" to mean "read", the teacher's statement becomes true. But then the problem is the omission of the important part: "...and papers I don't 'grade' (=read) receive a score of 0."
I think both you and I covered this technicality. It depends on how the system works. Receiving '0' isn't the same as not receiving anything. But I agree about the important part being missing.