Music Video maker and self professed "Fashion Victim" who is hoping to apply Rationality to problems and decisions in my life and career probably by reevaluating and likely building a new set of beliefs that underpins them.
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Examples of how not to write a paragraph are surprisingly rare
Epistemic Status: one person's attempt to find counter-examples blew apart their own ( subjective) expectations
I try to assemble as many examples of how not to do something as 'gold standard' or best practice examples of how the same task should be done. The principle is similar to what Plutarch wrote: Medicine to produce health must examine disease, and music to create harmony must investigate discord.
However when I tried to examine how not to write, in particular examples of poorly written paragraphs -- I was surprised by how rare they were. There are a great many okay paragraphs on the internet and in books, but very few that were so unclear or confusing that they were examples of 'bad' paragraphs.
In my categorization paragraphs can be great - okay - bad.
Okay paragraphs are the most numerous, they observe the rule of thumb - keep one idea to one paragraph. To be an 'okay' paragraph and rise above 'bad' all a paragraph needs to do is to successfully convey at least one idea. Most paragraphs I found do that.
What elevates great paragraphs above okay paragraphs is they do an especially excellent job of conveying at least one idea. There are many qualities they may exhibit, including persuasiveness, the appearance of insight, brevity and simplicity in conveying an otherwise impenetrable or 'hard to grasp' idea.
In some isolated cases a great paragraph may actually clearly and convincingly communicate disinformation or a falsehood. I believe there is much more to learn about the forms paragraphs take from a paragraph that conveys a falsehood convincingly than a paragraph that clearly conveys what is generally accepted as true.
What was surprising is how hard it is to find examples that invert the principle - a paragraph that is intended to convey an idea that is truthful but is hard to understand would be a bad paragraph in my categorization. Yet, despite actively looking for examples of 'bad paragraphs' I struggled to find some that were truly confusing or hopeless at conveying one single idea. This experience is especially surprising to me because it challenges a few assumptions or expectations that I had:
- Assumption 1 - people who have mistaken or fringey beliefs are disproportionately incapable of expressing those beliefs in a clear and intelligible form. I expected that looking for the least popular comments on Reddit, I would find many stream of consciousness rants that failed to convey ideas. This was far less common than rants that at least conveyed intent and meaning intelligibly.
- Assumption 2 - that as a whole, people need to learn to communicate better. I must reconsider, it appears on the transmission side, they already communicate better than I expected (counter-counterpoint: 1% rule)
- Assumption 3 - the adage that good writing = good thinking. Perhaps not, it would seem that you can write clearly enough to be understood yet that doesn't mean your underlying arguments are strong or your thinking is more 'intelligent'.
- Assumption 4 - That I'm a merely a below average communicator. It appears that if everyone is better than I expected, than I'm much further below average than I expected.
I have no take-out or conclusion on this highly subjective observation, hence why it is a quick-take and not a post. But I will add my current speculation:
My current theory for why is "I wasn't looking in the right places". For example, I ignored much academic or research literature because the ability of the writers to convey an idea is often difficult to assess without relevant domain knowledge as they are seldom made for popular consumption. Likewise I'm sure there's many tea-spilling image boards where more stream-of-consciousness rants of greater impenetrability might be found.
My second theory is pareidolia: perhaps I highly overrate my comprehension and reading skills because I'm a 'lazy reader' who fills in intention and meaning that is not there?
1Could you please elaborate on what you mean by "highly memetic" and "internal memetic selection pressures"? I'm probably not the right audience for this piece, but that particular word (memetic) is making it difficult for me to get to grips with the post as a whole. I'm confused if you mean there is a high degree of uncritical mimicry, or if you're making some analogy to 'genetic' (and what that analogy is...)
1AIs are good at explaining simple things, and not very good at thinking about how large concepts fit together.
For me there was a good example of this in the provided demonstration section, the phrase "Bayesian reinforcement learning" generated the following hilariously redundant explanation:
A learning approach that combines Bayesian inference with reinforcement learning to handle uncertainty in decision-making. It's mentioned here as part of the 'standard model' of ideal agency, alongside AIXI.
I am well aware that this is simply a demonstration for illustrative purposes and not meant to be representative of what the actual generated explanations will be like.
This is an exciting feature! Although these generated explanations remind me an awful lot of the frustration and lost productivity I experience trying to comprehend STEM terms and the long Wikipedia hopping from a term to another term to explain it; I think with better explanations it could solve part of that frustration and lost productivity. I often find STEM jargon impenetrable and find myself looking for ELI5 posts of a term used in a description of a term, used in the description of the thing I'm trying to directly learn about.
To use your example, if someone's speech patterns revolve around the topic of "bullying", it might mean that the person was bullied 50 years ago and still didn't get over it
Yes. Which is invaluable information about how they see the world currently. How is that not the 'right idea'? If that is how they continue to currently mentally represent events?
Your 'people are scammers' example is irrelevant, what is important is if they constantly bring in tropes or examples or imply deception. They may never use the word 'scammer' 'mistrustful' or make a declaration like 'no one has integrity'. The pattern is what I'm talking about.
I am overwhelmingly confident that analysis of the kinds of narratives that a particular person spins, including what tropes they evoke - even if you're not familiar with the tropes previously - would reveal a lot about their worldview, their ethical structure, the assumptions and modelling they have about how people, institutions, and general patterns they believe underlay the world.
A oversimplified example is a person who clearly has a "victim "mentality" and an obsession with the idea of attractiveness because they always use sentence structures (i.e. "they stopped me") and narratives where other people have inhibited, bullied, envied, or actively sought to stifle the person telling the story and these details disproportionately make reference to people's faces, figures, and use words like "ugly" "hot" "skinny" etc. It is not necessary to know what films, books, periodicals they read.
I'm so sorry but I haven't been able to think of any specific books, although the first case it seems like your problem could be a matter of the Availability Heuristic - your teacher answered a different question to the one you asked because quite simply it was easier for them to recall the knowledge about the evolution of the system than the relative stability of GTP to ATP.
I'm not sure if there is anything in Kahneman's Thinking Fast, Slow which might offer your practical techniques for priming listeners the right way. If anything you might be better served by the books of Robert Cialdini or even literature on sales - my thinking here is sales people often think about the structure (or in Aristotelian terms the Kairos) that they present different options which in effect 'primes' the customer to different Semantic and Mental frameworks.
Sorry that I can't point to any specific books. I could guess on some specific techniques that I think might aid your communication but I've been wracking my brain and can't think of any books that I know hit the mark.
Perhaps I misunderstand your use of the phrase "intentionally ignorant" but I believe many cases of people who are seen to have acted with "integrity" are people who have been hyperaware and well informed of what normal social conventions are in a given environment and made deliberate choice not to adhere to them, not ignoring said conventions out of a lack of interest.
I also am not sure what you mean by "weird". I assume you mean any behavior which is not the normal convention of any randomly selected cohesive group of people, from a family, to a local soccer club, to a informal but tight knit circle of friends, to a department of a large company. Have I got that right?
My idea of 'weird' tends to involve the stereotypical artists and creatives I associate with, which is, within those circles not weird at all but normal. But I'm meta-aware that might be a weird take.
Thank you for the reply.
What kind of questions, analogies, or models are your fellow students responding to your explanations with? Are there any patterns in the specific feedback you've noticed? Are there any particular aspects of Deep Learning or the metaphors or terminology you're using that seem to be the biggest bottlenecks?
My hunch is that maybe you instead look at beginner's introductions to Deep Learning and Neural Networks and see how they go about conveying these concepts. If someone else has done the hard work of figuring out an expedient way to convey the subject matter, why not borrow from them (giving credit, of course)?
Please do get back if you can think of specific examples of the second case and I'll think any books or resources I know of which might be suitable.
What specific kinds of ideas are making this problem noticeable?
Are you talking about conveying specialist knowledge to a lay-audience - for example, good luck trying to get me to understand what an Eigenvector is or the points system in Cricket - I've tried. Likewise, to explain to a friend what Sub-Surface scattering was, I first had to introduce him to the mechanics of Ray Tracing. Luckily he was a musician so I could just use analogies to the diffusion and travel of sound waves.
Or are you talking about more personal preferences and experiences, for example recently someone asked me "why do you prefer to be behind the camera rather than a performer in front of it?" - apparently they thought I was such a ham I should be a comedian not a director - I didn't know where to even begin.
Likewise many people who "kind of fell into doing this" for their current profession will stumble if you ask them how they "got into it" because there's often a meandering narrative and confused chronology because even to themselves it's not clear.
Another question I have is - are there any patterns in the assumptions, misunderstandings or tangents which people you're trying to explain exhibit in reaction to your explanations?
"Babbling Better" this is a work in progress -and still requires more thinking
In short - need a methodology or at least heuristics for identifying the "right problem" to solve, and noticing when one is solving the "wrong problem". Better problem framing leads to better and more focused answers to questions and hopefully eventual resolving of problems. I've come across two techniques: The Five Whys to understand problems better, and using adverbs of manner to babble more constructively.
So far:
It is easy to babble, babies do it. It is still quite easy to babble comprehensible but wrong sentences, such as LLM hallucinations. Your pruning is only as good as your babble.
With regards to problem solving, low quality babble doesn't contribute to resolving the problem. For example, let's say the problem is "camera autofocus doesn't focus on eyes" a low quality "babble" answer might be "Burn a stick of incense and pray to Dionysius". The acts themselves are feasible and the sentence is comprehensible. But any desired change in the camera's autofocus performance will be pure coincidence.
Yet, sometimes low quality babble appears to be high quality babble because we simply are not solving the right problem but it appears to be perfectly suited for the problem. Especially if incentives are involved.
My hunch is that to babble better not only do you need better methods of babbling, but you need to better understand what goals you are trying to babble towards. And that requires better understanding of why the problem is a problem.
5 Why's on yourself: Asking "why I think this is a problem?" to at least 5 levels
Not to be mistaken for the Burger joint. The "Five Whys" technique was apparently invented at the Toyota Corporation as a system for uncovering the root causes of production faults.
The choice of "why" falls into broader pattern which takes me back to documentary filmmaking and interviewing: you learn more through open ended questions, usually those where the key interrogative is "why" or "how" than through close ended questions. These, as Wittgenstein pointed out, basically seek to affirm or negative a proposition or conditional: "Do you like him?" "Is he still there?" "Would you call that green or turquoise?".
If I am a manager or investigator, trying to ascertain the cause of a fault on a production line, open ended questions make sense since I will not be in possession of all known or knowable facts.
This still holds if I am a novice or just someone enquiring to an expert for help in achieving some goal. If I ask an experienced cinematographer "how would that scene be light?" even if they don't know specifically, they have a large body of experience and knowledge that would mean they could probably make useful guesses on how to replicate the effect.
If i intend on asking for advice from an expert, I can't give them the responsibility of figuring out the kind of help I need. The better I can define the problem myself the better and more informative the question I can ask them. Be too vague about your problem and you can only hope to get generic responses like "be confident".
It seems ridiculous though, doesn't it? Socratic or even from Yes, Minister: Why should I ask myself open ended questions if I don't know what I don't know? While I may not understand the problem, what I can do is at least explain why it's a problem and how I see it. And one effective way to do that I've found is to use the Five Whys Technique.
It is often exceedingly difficult to know what the right problem to solve is, what we may have a better chance of defining is why we perceive it as a problem and why we expect it to cause conflict.
To - Do: add more techniques to my arsenal to better defined problems... the step before babbling
Adverbs and Creativity?
Strategically EfficaciouslyProductively BabblingI have recently come across a technique for higher-quality babble, at least for creative purposes. It is as simply as employing a Adverb of Manner to modify a verb. This is a minor variation on a technique used to allow mime artists to create a character - you take a situation or process like "make breakfast" and do it with an attitude: happy, hungover, lovelorn.
It is surprisingly easy to come up with scenarios and even stories with arcs - goals, conflict, and comedic pay-offs complete with a character who has distinct mannerisms - by just cycling through adverbs. Compare these three adverbs: grumpily, overzealously, nervously.
These scenarios appear to "write themselves" for the purposes of short pantomime bits. This is the exact type of technique I have spent years searching for.
To do - Does this technique of better babbling through adverbs of manner apply to non-creative applications? If not then develop methodology or at least heuristics for identifying the right problem, noticing a "wrong problem"
Update (October 2024)- it is interesting looking back on this 8 months later as I think I have just hit upon a means of "babbling better". I intend to revise and go into detail this means after a period of actually trying it out. It's certainly not original, it vaguely resembles the method at Amazon of writing Memos and speculative Press Releases for a new proposal and uses your 'internal simulator'.
in brief the way I employ this new method is taking the first kneejerk 'babble' or solution to the problem I come up with. Then I try to write a speculative narrative where this solution or action delivers a satisfactory or worthwhile result, being very methodical about the causation. This is not, I stress, a prediction or prognostication.
What I find is that by writing a speculative narrative, and making it as convincing as possible to myself, it forces me to explicate my framework and mental model around the problem, my hunches, suspicions, assumptions, belief, fears, hopes, observations, knowledge and reasoning. Much of which I may not be consciously aware of.
With the framework explicated, I can now go about babbling. But it will be much more targeted and optimized based on my expectations, knowledge, and the framework in general.
Some (not yet confirmed) secondary bonuses of this method:
- it fights analysis paralysis, instead of babbling for breadth, it forces thinking about causation and consequences
- it is inherently optimistic, as you're forcing yourself to write a structured argument why this could or would work
- having explicated your framework, you may be able to verify specific hunches or assumptions that hereto you weren't aware they were influencing your thinking
One caveat: why a satisfactory narrative, why not a best case scenario? I think a best case scenario will assume a lot of coincidence, serendipity and as a means for reflection and explication of your mental modelling or framework of the problem is less informative. For that reason, causative words and phrases like "because" "owing to" "knowing that.... it follows such..." "for this reason" should be abundant.
I will update after more real world employment.