TheOtherDave comments on Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People - Less Wrong

86 Post author: lionhearted 01 December 2010 08:25AM

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Comment author: David_Gerard 01 December 2010 07:38:20PM *  4 points [-]

slightly more noise (polite words).

You just assumed your conclusion: that polite words are not part of the signal.

Opposite plausible assumption: If the communication is deprecated or even ignored because of the absence of polite words, then the polite words are important to the communication and should be considered part of it.

As I said, to make assertions like this one needs actual numbers. If you don't have any, that's fine, I don't either ;-) But I can recognise that we've reached the stage of opposed but plausible statements, which means we have something falsifiable, and maybe should have a go at doing so. If no-one has already.

Exercise for the reader: Which words in this comment are noise?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 01 December 2010 07:52:16PM *  2 points [-]

We could, I suppose, experiment.

But I share your intuition, both that this is probably well-covered in the sociolinguistics literature, and that politeness markers can increase the effectiveness of a communication.

It's also worth noting that what counts as "noise" (in the sense we're using it here, which includes redundant signal) depends on my audience. If I know who is reading my words and I know what their priors are, I can communicate way more efficiently -- I only have to provide evidence for the places where our priors differ. (Case in point: in pretty much any other community, I would have needed to use more words to express that thought, rather than rely on a shared understanding of "evidence" and "priors".)

Anyway, I don't feel like actually, you know, doing research, but I'll ask around among the appropriate cohort of my friends and see what comes up.

ETA: Heh. Your most recent comment said essentially the same thing. Ah well.