There’s some fermi-estimation happening, but the fermi is obviously wrong. As Benquo points out, certain religions have EVERYONE read their book, memorize it, chant it, discuss it every Sunday (or Saturday).
I feel like the post is saying “there are lots of bandwidth problems. the solution to all of them is ‘5’.” and I don’t get why 5.
So I read Ray’s comment on Daniel Filan’s review, where he says:
...at some maximum scale, your coordination-complexity is bottlenecked on a single working-memory-cluster, which (AFAICT based on experience and working memory research) amounts to 3-7 chunks of concepts that people already are familiar with.
So, I am fairly confident that in the limit it is actually about 5 words +/- 2, because Working Memory Science and some observations about what slogans propagate.
Now THAT is a great point. If you CANNOT assume shared context beyong this idea, and you want to be able to have common knowledge of the idea whilst continuing to make further points… sounds like you get about 5 words.
That does change my mind significantly about the idea. That said I would want a basic version of that worked into the post. I think it can be done, even if it’s not the ‘rigorous’ version Ray wants.
Before reading that, I was going to downvote the post in the review. Now I’m kinda neutral. If Ray says he’ll very likely incorporate it in, should it pass review, then I’m moving toward like voting with strength 1-3 on it.
P.S. Zvi suggests “You GET about five words” and I also like that. Would encourage Ray to seriously think about the alternative then pick which one seems best to him.
P.S. Zvi suggests “You GET about five words” and I also like that. Would encourage Ray to seriously think about the alternative then pick which one seems best to him.
I currently am neutral between “have” and “get”, but prefer “have” just because changing a post title on a whim makes it harder to find. If most people preferred “get” I’d be happy to change.
If it were easy to make elicit things, I’d post one here for people to give a probability that “You get about five words” is better than “You have about five words”. Would appreciate someone doing that.
I prefer “get”. It implies more strongly that if someone actually needs to convince others of their argument, they need to make sure their message is as concise and optimized as possible, before trying to convince anyone. As the original post says:
What if you need all that nuance and to coordinate thousands of people?
I’m also interested in someone else (e.g. Kaj, Zvi, Orthonormal, etc) who managed to get this stuff from the post, trying to make me less confused about how people are getting things from this post.
Okay, whenever I read this post, I don’t get it.
There’s some fermi-estimation happening, but the fermi is obviously wrong. As Benquo points out, certain religions have EVERYONE read their book, memorize it, chant it, discuss it every Sunday (or Saturday).
I feel like the post is saying “there are lots of bandwidth problems. the solution to all of them is ‘5’.” and I don’t get why 5.
So I read Ray’s comment on Daniel Filan’s review, where he says:
Now THAT is a great point. If you CANNOT assume shared context beyong this idea, and you want to be able to have common knowledge of the idea whilst continuing to make further points… sounds like you get about 5 words.
That does change my mind significantly about the idea. That said I would want a basic version of that worked into the post. I think it can be done, even if it’s not the ‘rigorous’ version Ray wants.
Before reading that, I was going to downvote the post in the review. Now I’m kinda neutral. If Ray says he’ll very likely incorporate it in, should it pass review, then I’m moving toward like voting with strength 1-3 on it.
P.S. Zvi suggests “You GET about five words” and I also like that. Would encourage Ray to seriously think about the alternative then pick which one seems best to him.
I currently am neutral between “have” and “get”, but prefer “have” just because changing a post title on a whim makes it harder to find. If most people preferred “get” I’d be happy to change.
If it were easy to make elicit things, I’d post one here for people to give a probability that “You get about five words” is better than “You have about five words”. Would appreciate someone doing that.
I prefer “get”. It implies more strongly that if someone actually needs to convince others of their argument, they need to make sure their message is as concise and optimized as possible, before trying to convince anyone. As the original post says:
You still only get five words.
I’m also interested in someone else (e.g. Kaj, Zvi, Orthonormal, etc) who managed to get this stuff from the post, trying to make me less confused about how people are getting things from this post.