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grouchymusicologist comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong
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Comments (289)
No apology needed, I appreciate the feedback. My comments often come out looking longer or wordier than they seemed while I was composing them, and I'll try to remember that tendency and keep a lid on it when possible.
Thanks for listening, but... when is it not possible?
I assume there are also limits to the amount of cognitive effort anyone wants to spend writing comments.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but yes, there are.
I'm not being sarcastic. Sometimes writing in a way that's easy for other people to understand is just hard. Speaking for myself, normally when my own comments aren't clear it's because I've spent as much time as I'm willing to spend on writing a comment trying to come up with clearer ways to convey my idea, not because it feels gross or because I'm not trying. (For example, I rewrote that last sentence at least 4 times and it's still pretty clunky.) This seems to come as second nature to some people, the rest of us have to struggle a bit.
None of this is intended to detract from your point. Clearer writing is better.
Yeah, what saturn said, pretty much. And as comments from Desrtopa and pedanterrific in this thread suggest, not everyone finds my writing as opaque as you do. If I can make my writing 10% clearer by spending double the effort on it, I'm only occasionally going to think that's a good tradeoff (particularly when the writing in question is blog comments and not, say, my professional work).
That's reasonable, but the unintended consequence is an evaporative cooling of people who won't do the work to read what you've written. This way, LW grows ever more incomprehensible to outsiders.
Forgive me, but this seems like a little bit of an overreaction. You're the only one who's called me out for writing style (although I have no trouble believing that others have thought the same thing and not said it). Frankly, I don't comment much, but when I do, my comments tend to be reasonably highly rated.
The incomprehensible-to-outsiders thing strikes me as a reach. LW by all appearances is growing rapidly without noticeable worsening in the quality of discourse or community, which is a remarkable accomplishment. When outsiders do complain about LW being unapproachable, it's not because of people like me writing long sentences. It's because of jargon, a lot of shared background that takes time to catch up on, and the novelty of some of the ideas.
I've already said I will make a reasonable effort to do better. So, respectfully, with that promise, I think I've shouldered enough responsibility for improving colloquy around here for the time being.
(Because I don't know how well in control of my tone I am, I want to clarify that I appreciate your feedback on my commenting style, and I very much do not want to come across as annoyed or snippy.)
You have absolutely shouldered enough responsibility. That's why I keep apologizing for picking on you.
If LW's goal is to attract a dozen (or however many) new members a month with the same basic capabilities, then yes, they are accomplishing that goal. Discourse remains qualitatively steady.
The top 1%, in effect, get wealthier. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
It sounds like you're implying that a typical comment/post on LW should be accessible, in terms of rhetoric and content, to everyone on the Internet. That idea, I dismiss out of hand.
The principle of charity moves me to look for an alternative reading. The best one I can come up with is that there's some threshold of accessibility that you have in mind, which you assert a typical LW comment/post should and does not achieve.
So, OK. Can you be somewhat more concrete about what that threshold is? For example, can you point to some examples of writing you think just-meets that threshold?
A sad story about plain talk.....
In the summer between high school and college, I took a couple of courses at a parochial school. At some point some of the other students said something, not unkindly, about the way I talked. I asked them what they meant, specifically. They nearly fell over laughing. After a couple of repetitions of my question and laughter, one of them managed to get out that they wouldn't ever have said "specifically".
I explained that I could hear the words they used, but I didn't know how I could tell what words they didn't use.
I don't remember what was mentioned (in a different conversation) as a respect-worthy SAT score, I just remember being shocked and horrified at how low it was and drawing on reserves of tact to (I hope) not show how I felt.
In retrospect, I now know that it's possible to acquire a feeling for what vocabulary set people use. It was also the only school or summer camp environment I was in (it got better in college) where people didn't harass me, and I wish I had observed enough to get some idea of what made the difference.
Ultimately, I don't think actual plain talk (in other words, not just using shorter words and sentences, but really communicating to a wider audience) can be done without empirical knowledge. I'm willing to bet a small amount that "plain talk" is the wrong thing to call it.
My friend had just gotten to college, and was half listening to his randomly assigned roommates talking about their SAT scores. He overhears: "Yeah, I got a 790". "Holy shit!" my friend interjected. "That's fantastic! Which section?"
"What do you mean which section?"
<awkward silence>
It's things like that which make me mentally apply the 'We Are The 1%' slogan... to IQ.
That's also a quote from "Perks of Being A Wallflower", incidentally. Which doesn't mean it's not a true story.
I'm skeptical of this story. Even taking for granted that this was when the test was still normalized to 1600 as the max, if one looks at even a mediocre state school a total of 790 would be clearly in the very bottom. Note that in this data, the bottom 1 percent for both is slightly over a 400 for both sections. So someone scoring in that range is possible but extremely unlikely. This is around the 15th percentile for anyone taking the test, but the very bottom don't generally go to real colleges at all.
Is it even possible to get a 790 total? I thought the lower bound was 900!
(nods) Yeah, I sympathize. I am famous locally for the phrase "I have long since resigned myself to the fact that I'm the sort of person who, well, says things like 'I have long since resigned myself to'."
Mostly I think it's not an "it"; there are dozens of different "plaintalks". Communicating successfully to any audience requires knowing a fair amount about that specific audience. When Gabriel (above) talks about plain talk, he means his particular formulation of it, which will be different from other people's.
Sure, LW has its own brand of plain talk (two words I'm already sick of reading, and I bet I'm not the only one). And I've spent my entire life dealing with exactly the same kinds of reactions that NancyLebovitz describes. It feels bad to part of a teased minority, but it also feels good to be in that minority because of a particular kind of excellence.
Still, whether empirical knowledge is required or not, speaking/writing more simply will move more people.
I wouldn't know how to write for everybody on the internet. I'm asserting that a typical LW comment/post should be like contagious doubt. It should be worded in a way that particles of doubt avoid the average mental security system and get deposited in places where irrationality and akrasia rule, to fester and spread until it's too late. This seems more likely to happen if it doesn't use much abstract language, and avoids most math.
Examples:
EDIT: Also, The Sun's "Reader's Write" column.
Thank you for providing examples -- that makes it much easier to understand what you're proposing.
If those are examples of writing that just-meets the target threshold, then I agree with you completely that the writing on LW -- especially in comments, like what you were replying to initially -- completely fails to even approach that threshold.
I also estimate that most contributors here would have to devote between one and two orders of magnitude more time to even get in the same ballpark as the threshold.
Any suggestions as to how that work might be incentivized? How does plain talk become high-status on LW?