Introduction
What if there was a magic superpower that simultaneously enabled you to:
- Demolish bad arguments
- Judge startup ideas
- Make scientific breakthroughs
- Solve climate change
- Understand “God”
- Be emotionally mature
- Teach concepts better
- Draw better
- Be creative
- Make small talk
- Improve discourse
- Be invisible
Amazingly, your brain does have a superpower that gives you all these powers. It’s called…
To activate the power of specificity, all you have to do is ask yourself the question, “What’s an example of that?” Or more bluntly, “Can I be more specific?” And then you unleash a ton of power in a surprisingly broad variety of domains.
It's an open secret in the rationality community how powerful this skill is of being specific. Eliezer captured the essence of it in his 2012 post, Be Specific. In it, he comments on the difficulty of teaching people specificity skills for the first time:
When I’m talking to anyone outside the local LessWrong community, I find that a very large amount of my conversation involves repeatedly asking them to be more specific.
He also describes how CFAR's Applied Rationality Workshops teach the power of specificity by osmosis. I can vouch that my personal experience as a workshop attendee fits this description:
Attendees picked [specificity] up from all the instructors having to repeatedly ask the attendees to be more specific, and then having to ask them again, while being specific themselves, until the attendees picked up the rhythm by example and feedback.
I hope you're curious to unpack my list of claims about what specificity lets you do, because I’m dead serious about all of it! Except being invisible; I was kidding about that one.
So without further ado, let’s get into the specifics.
Next post: The Power to Demolish Bad Arguments
Thanks! Nice to hear that you were also craving some specificity content.
Hmm, I think it would be interesting if you could be on the lookout for an example of it being weirdly difficult to come up with an example! Most of the time I'd describe it as "noticeably difficult/annoying" to come up with an example, but not weirdly difficult... unless of course the claim is problematic.
On the flip side, I realize that whenever I'm making the mental effort to come up with a specific example, I'm probably wielding a lot of power to shape the discussion. Everyone else (including myself going forward) is going to be too lazy to generate their own new specifics, so they'll be discussing my chosen specific example for a long time.
I agree. On a related note, I think LW would benefit from more visuals in general because I believe it makes reading on the web easier and more pleasurable for most people. It's the same justification as for the now-accepted practice of breaking text into small paragraphs.