shokwave comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - Less Wrong

51 Post author: ChrisHallquist 01 March 2014 08:52AM

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Comment author: alicey 01 March 2014 04:28:32PM *  4 points [-]

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)

Comment author: shokwave 03 March 2014 05:16:35AM 5 points [-]

so they round me off to the nearest cliche

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".

Comment author: RobinZ 23 April 2014 03:34:23PM 0 points [-]

I like it - do you know if it works in face-to-face conversations?