Preface: I feel like I’m wearing the clown suit to a black tie event here. I’m new to LW and respect the high standards for discussion. So, I’ll treat this an experiment. I’d rather be wrong, downvoted, and (hopefully) enlightened & persuaded than have this lingering suspicion that the emperor has no clothes.
I should also say that I personally care a lot about the topic of communication and brevity, because I have a tendency to say too much at one time and/or use the wrong medium in doing so. If anyone needs to learn how to be brief, it is me, and I’ll write a few hundred words if necessary to persuade you of it.
Ok, that said, here are my top two concerns with the article: (1) This article strikes me as muddled and unclear. (i) I don’t understand what “get” five words even means. (ii) I don’t understand how coordination relates to the core claims or insight. My confusion leads to my second concern: (2) what can I take from this article?
Let’s start with the second part. Is the author saying if I’m a CEO of a company of thousands I only “get” five words?
A quick aside: to me, “get” is an example of muddled language. What does the author mean w.r.t. (a) time period; (b) … struggling for the right words here … meaning? As to (a), do I “get” five words per message? Or five words some (unspecified) time frame? As to (b), is “get” a proxy for how many words the recipient/audience will read? But reading isn’t enough for coordination, so I expect the author means something more. Does the author mean “read and understand” or “read and internalize” or “read and act on”?
Anyhow, due to the paragraph above, I don’t know how to convert “You only get five words” into a prediction. In this sense, to me, the claim it isn’t even wrong, because I don’t know how to put it into practice.
Normally I would stop here, put the article aside, and move on. However, this article is featured here on LW and has many up-votes which suggests that others get a lot of value out of it. So I’m curious: what am I missing? Is there some connection to EA that makes this particularly salient, perhaps?
I have a guess that fans of the article have some translation layer that I’m missing. Perhaps if I could translate what the author means by get and coordination I would have the ah-ha moment.
To that end, would someone be so kind as to (a) summarize the key point(s) as simply as possible; with (b) clear intended meanings for “coordinate” and “get” (as in you only “get” X words) -- including what timeframe we’re talking about—and (c) the logic and evidence for the claims.
It is also possible that I’m not “calibrated” with the stated Epistemic Status:
all numbers are made up and/or sketchily sourced. Post errs on the side of simplistic poetry – take seriously but not literally.”
Ok, but what does this mean for the reader? The standards of rationality still apply, right? There should still be some meaningful, clear, testable takeaway, right?
One thing it took me quite a while to understand is how few bits of information it’s possible to reliably convey to a large number of people. When I was at MS, I remember initially being surprised at how unnuanced their communication was, but it really makes sense in hindsight.
For example, when I joined Azure, I asked people what the biggest risk to Azure was and the dominant answer was that if we had more global outages, major customers would lose trust in us and we’d lose them forever, permanently crippling the business.
Meanwhile, the only message VPs communicated was the need for high velocity. When I asked why there was no communication about the thing considered the highest risk to the business, the answer was if they sent out a mixed message that included reliability, nothing would get done.
The fear was that if they said that they needed to ship fast and improve reliability, reliability would be used as an excuse to not ship quickly and needing to ship quickly would be used as an excuse for poor reliability and they’d achieve none of their goals.
When I first heard this, I thought it was odd, but having since paid attention to what happens when VPs and directors attempt to communicate information downwards, I have to concede that it seems like the MS VPs were right and nuanced communication usually doesn’t work at scale.
I’ve seen quite a few people in upper management attempt to convey a mixed/nuanced message since my time at MS and I have yet to observe a case of this working in a major org at a large company (I have seen this work at a startup, but that’s a very different environment).
I’ve noticed this problem with my blog as well. E.g., I have some posts saying BigCo $ is better than startup $ for p50 and maybe even p90 outcomes and that you should work at startups for reasons other than pay. People often read those posts as “you shouldn’t work at startups”.
I see this for every post, e.g., when I talked about how latency hadn’t improved, one of the most common responses I got was about how I don’t understand the good reasons for complexity. I literally said there are good reasons for complexity in the post!
As noted previously, most internet commenters can’t follow constructions as simple as an AND, and I don’t want to be in the business of trying to convey what I’d like to convey to people who won’t bother to understand an AND since I’d rather convey nuance
But that’s because, if I write a blog post and 5% of HN readers get it and 95% miss the point, I view that as a good outcome since was useful for 5% of people and, if you want to convey nuanced information to everyone, I think that’s impossible and I don’t want to lose the nuance
If people won’t read a simple AND, there’s no way to simplify a nuanced position, which will be much more complex, enough that people in general will follow it, so it’s a choice between conveying nuance to people who will read and avoiding nuance since most people don’t read
But it’s different if you run a large org. If you send out a nuanced message and 5% of people get it and 95% of people do contradictory things because they understood different parts of the message, that’s a disaster. I see this all the time when VPs try to convey nuance.
BTW, this is why, despite being widely mocked, “move fast & break things” can be a good value. It coneys which side of the trade-off people should choose. A number of companies I know of have put velocity & reliability/safety/etc. into their values and it’s failed every time.
MS leadership eventually changed the message from velocity to reliability First one message, then the next. Not both at once When I checked a while ago, measured by a 3rd party, Azure reliability was above GCP and close enough to AWS that it stopped being an existential threat
Azure has, of course, also lapped Google on enterprise features & sales and is a solid #2 in cloud despite starting with infrastructure that was a decade behind Google’s, technically. I can’t say that I enjoyed working for Azure, but I respect the leadership and learned a lot.
One motivating example at the time was seeing how the EA community organizers/leaders had lots of trouble communicating nuanced ideas. For example, “EA is talent constrained” was how a blogpost about “EA needs more extremely talented people in particular domains, more than it needs marginal money, right now”. But people heard it as “EA needs people who are talented… I’m talented!” and then felt frustrated when they tried to apply for jobs, but, actually, what the post originally meant was specific talent gaps.
Thanks for your quick answer—you answered before I was even done revising my question. :) I can personally relate to Dan Luu’s examples. / This immediately makes me want to find potential solutions, but I won’t jump to any right now. / For now, I’ll just mention the ways in which Jacob Collier can explain music harmony at many levels.
Preface: I feel like I’m wearing the clown suit to a black tie event here. I’m new to LW and respect the high standards for discussion. So, I’ll treat this an experiment. I’d rather be wrong, downvoted, and (hopefully) enlightened & persuaded than have this lingering suspicion that the emperor has no clothes.
I should also say that I personally care a lot about the topic of communication and brevity, because I have a tendency to say too much at one time and/or use the wrong medium in doing so. If anyone needs to learn how to be brief, it is me, and I’ll write a few hundred words if necessary to persuade you of it.
Ok, that said, here are my top two concerns with the article: (1) This article strikes me as muddled and unclear. (i) I don’t understand what “get” five words even means. (ii) I don’t understand how coordination relates to the core claims or insight. My confusion leads to my second concern: (2) what can I take from this article?
Let’s start with the second part. Is the author saying if I’m a CEO of a company of thousands I only “get” five words?
A quick aside: to me, “get” is an example of muddled language. What does the author mean w.r.t. (a) time period; (b) … struggling for the right words here … meaning? As to (a), do I “get” five words per message? Or five words some (unspecified) time frame? As to (b), is “get” a proxy for how many words the recipient/audience will read? But reading isn’t enough for coordination, so I expect the author means something more. Does the author mean “read and understand” or “read and internalize” or “read and act on”?
Anyhow, due to the paragraph above, I don’t know how to convert “You only get five words” into a prediction. In this sense, to me, the claim it isn’t even wrong, because I don’t know how to put it into practice.
Normally I would stop here, put the article aside, and move on. However, this article is featured here on LW and has many up-votes which suggests that others get a lot of value out of it. So I’m curious: what am I missing? Is there some connection to EA that makes this particularly salient, perhaps?
I have a guess that fans of the article have some translation layer that I’m missing. Perhaps if I could translate what the author means by get and coordination I would have the ah-ha moment.
To that end, would someone be so kind as to (a) summarize the key point(s) as simply as possible; with (b) clear intended meanings for “coordinate” and “get” (as in you only “get” X words) -- including what timeframe we’re talking about—and (c) the logic and evidence for the claims.
It is also possible that I’m not “calibrated” with the stated Epistemic Status:
Ok, but what does this mean for the reader? The standards of rationality still apply, right? There should still be some meaningful, clear, testable takeaway, right?
Thanks for the thoughts (no need to be nervous about arguing against a post – that’s kinda the whole point of the site)
For an example of what I mean, here’s another post on a pretty similar subject, by someone with experience seeing how it played out at different large companies (Dan Luu)
One motivating example at the time was seeing how the EA community organizers/leaders had lots of trouble communicating nuanced ideas. For example, “EA is talent constrained” was how a blogpost about “EA needs more extremely talented people in particular domains, more than it needs marginal money, right now”. But people heard it as “EA needs people who are talented… I’m talented!” and then felt frustrated when they tried to apply for jobs, but, actually, what the post originally meant was specific talent gaps.
Thanks for your quick answer—you answered before I was even done revising my question. :) I can personally relate to Dan Luu’s examples. / This immediately makes me want to find potential solutions, but I won’t jump to any right now. / For now, I’ll just mention the ways in which Jacob Collier can explain music harmony at many levels.