= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
dbaupp comments on SotW: Be Specific - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (306)
Exercise - refining descriptions.
Get three or four people sitting together. Place a large group of different items (30-50 small cheap plastic toys of the sort readily available in bulk from Oriental Trading Company, for instance) in the center of the group.
The exercise is to narrow down to a single toy by adding one detail at a time to a description. The description begins with the word "thingy," "toy," or a similarly vague word. Players take turns adding a single detail to the description, repeating it each time. (A detail is usually a single word, but a short phrase such as "with wheels" or "with spots" counts as one detail. However, "with yellow spots" would be two details — spots and yellow.) As an additional restriction, superlatives such as "biggest" or "greenest" are not allowed, because these implicitly compare each item to each other item.
Example:
A: Give me the thingy.
B. Give me the red thingy.
C: Give me the red thingy with wheels.
A: Give me the red and yellow thingy with wheels.
B: Give me the big red and yellow thingy with wheels.
A variation: Again, a large group of different items (I was thinking abstract images of colors and shapes, but toys is a good idea too) is visible to the group. One of the objects is selected and then each person writes a description that selects that object alone out of the set. The goal is to write the shortest description that can pick that particular object. Once everyone is done, answers are compared, and violations are sought: if one of the other objects fulfills all the requirements of someone's description, they are disqualified. Whoever has the shortest description that describes the chosen object and only the chosen object wins a point, and the game is repeated with another object.
(I like the idea, but I think the last few paragraphs could do with some editing: your meaning has been obscured :( )
Good grief, what happened to my post? Thanks for the heads up.