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alicey comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - Less Wrong
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Some people are just bad at explaining their ideas correctly (too hasty, didn't reread themselves, not a high enough verbal SAT, foreign mother tongue, inferential distance, etc.), others are just bad at reading and understanding other's ideas correctly (too hasty, didn't read the whole argument before replying, glossed over that one word which changed the whole meaning of a sentence, etc.).
I've seen many poorly explained arguments which I could understand as true or at least pointing in interesting directions, which were summarily ignored or shot down by uncharitable readers.
i tend to express ideas tersely, which counts as poorly-explained if my audience is expecting more verbiage, so they round me off to the nearest cliche and mostly downvote me
i have mostly stopped posting or commenting on lesswrong and stackexchange because of this
like, when i want to say something, i think "i can predict that people will misunderstand and downvote me, but i don't know what improvements i could make to this post to prevent this. sigh."
revisiting this on 2014-03-14, i consider that perhaps i am likely to discard parts of the frame message and possibly outer message - because, to me of course it's a message, and to me of course the meaning of (say) "belief" is roughly what http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Belief says it is
for example, i suspect that the use of more intuitively sensible grammar in this comment (mostly just a lack of capitalization) often discards the frame-message-bit of "i might be intelligent" (or ... something) that such people understand from messages (despite this being an incorrect thing to understand)
I have found great value in re-reading my posts looking for possible similar-sounding cliches, and re-writing to make the post deliberately inconsistent with those.
For example, the previous sentence could be rounded off to the cliche "Avoid cliches in your writing". I tried to avoid that possible interpretation by including "deliberately inconsistent".
I like it - do you know if it works in face-to-face conversations?
Well, you describe the problem as terseness.
If that's true, it suggests that one set of improvements might involve explaining your ideas more fully and providing more of your reasons for considering those ideas true and relevant and important.
Have you tried that?
If so, what has the result been?
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I understand this to mean that the only value you see to non-brevity is its higher success at manipulation.
Is that in fact what you meant?
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In other words, you prefer brevity to clarity and being understood? Something's a little skewed here.
It sounds like you and TheOtherDave have both identified the problem. Assuming you know what the problem is, why not fix it?
It may be that you are incorrect about the cause of the problem, but it's easy enough test your hypothesis. The cost is low and the value of the information gained would be high. Either you're right and brevity is your problem, in which case you should be more verbose when you wish to be understood. Or you're wrong and added verbosity would not make people less inclined to "round you off to the nearest cliche", in which case you could look for other changes to your writing that would help readers understand you better.
Well, I think that "be more verbose" is a little like "sell nonapples". A brief post can be expanded in many different directions, and it might not be obvious which directions would be helpful and which would be boring.
What does brevity offer you that makes it worthwhile, even when it impedes communication?
Predicting how communication will fail is generally Really Hard, but it's a good opportunity to refine your models of specific people and groups of people.
improving signal to noise, holding the signal constant, is brevity
when brevity impedes communication, but only with a subset of people, then the reduced signal is because they're not good at understanding brief things, so it is worth not being brief with them, but it's not fun
I suspect that the issue is not terseness, but rather not understanding and bridging the inferential distance between you and your audience. It's hard for me to say more without a specific example.
revisiting this, i consider that perhaps i am likely to discard parts of the frame message and possibly outer message - because, to me of course it's a message, and to me of course the meaning of (say) "belief" is roughly what http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Belief says it is