Yes, but it’s important to note that if you haven’t purposefully built that hierarchy, you can’t rely on it existing. (And, it’s still a fairly common problem within an org for communication to break down as it scales – I’d argue that most companies don’t end up successfully solving this problem)
The motivating example for this post at-the-time-of-writing was that in the EA sphere, there’s a nuanced claim made about “EA being talent constrained”, which large numbers of people misinterpreted to mean “we need people who are pretty talented” and not “we need highly specific talents, and the reason EA is talent constrained is that the median EA does not have these talents.”
There were nuanced blogposts discussing it, but in the EAsphere, the shared information is capped at roughly “1 book worth of content and jargon, which needs to cover a diverse array of concepts, so any given concept won’t necessarily have much nuance”, and in this case it appeared to hit the literal four word limit.
It might be worth a second post examining the reasons that the standard and well-known coordination mechanisms (force, social pressure, hierarchy, broadcast/mass media, etc.) aren’t available for the kind of coordination you think is needed, and what you’re considering as replacements (or just accepting that a loosely-committed voluntary group with no direct rewards or sanctions has a cap on effectiveness).
(note: I’m not particularly EA-focused; this is a trap) Or perhaps a description of how “the EA community” can have needs that require such coordination, as opposed to actual projects that clearly need aggregated effort to have impact.
I do think that’d be a valuable post (and that sort of thing is going on on the EA forum right now, with people proposing various ways to solve a particular scaling problem). I don’t know that I have particularly good ideas there, although I do have some. The point of this post was just “don’t be surprised when your messages loses nuance if you haven’t made special efforts to prevent it from doing so” (or, if it gets out-competed by a less nuanced message that was designed to be scalable and/or viral)
I wrote this post in part so that I could more easily reference later at some point when I had either concrete ideas about what to do, or when I think someone is mistaken in their strategy because they’re missing this insight.
Fair enough. Interestingly, if I replace “coordinate with” with “communicate a nuanced belief to”, my reaction changes radically, in favor of numbers shaped like yours. I’ll have to think more about why those concepts are so different.
Nod. The claim here is specifically about how much nuance can be relevant to your coordination, not how many people you can coordinate with. (If this failed to come across, that also says something about communicating nuance being hard)
I think I was taking “coordination” in the narrow sense of incenting people to do actions toward a relatively straightforward goal that they may or may not share. In that view, nuance is the enemy of coordination, and most of the work is simplifying the instructions so that it’s OK that there’s not much information transmitted. If the goal is communication, rather than near-term action, you can’t avoid the necessity of detail.
The whole point is that coordination looks different at different scales.
So, I think I was looking at this through a nonstandard frame (Maybe more nonstandard than I thought). There are two different sets of numbers in this post:
— 4.3 million words worth of nuance
— 200,000 words of nuance
— 50,000 words
— 1 blogpost (1-2k words)
— 4 words
And separately:
— 1-4 people
— 10 people
— 100 people
— 1000 people
— 10,000 people+
While I’m not very confident about any of the numbers, I am more confident in the first set of numbers than the second set.
If I look out into the world, I see clear failures (and successes) of communication strategies that cluster around different strata of communication bandwidth. And in particular, there is clearly some point at which the bandwidth collapses to 3-6 words.
Yes, but it’s important to note that if you haven’t purposefully built that hierarchy, you can’t rely on it existing. (And, it’s still a fairly common problem within an org for communication to break down as it scales – I’d argue that most companies don’t end up successfully solving this problem)
The motivating example for this post at-the-time-of-writing was that in the EA sphere, there’s a nuanced claim made about “EA being talent constrained”, which large numbers of people misinterpreted to mean “we need people who are pretty talented” and not “we need highly specific talents, and the reason EA is talent constrained is that the median EA does not have these talents.”
There were nuanced blogposts discussing it, but in the EAsphere, the shared information is capped at roughly “1 book worth of content and jargon, which needs to cover a diverse array of concepts, so any given concept won’t necessarily have much nuance”, and in this case it appeared to hit the literal four word limit.
It might be worth a second post examining the reasons that the standard and well-known coordination mechanisms (force, social pressure, hierarchy, broadcast/mass media, etc.) aren’t available for the kind of coordination you think is needed, and what you’re considering as replacements (or just accepting that a loosely-committed voluntary group with no direct rewards or sanctions has a cap on effectiveness).
(note: I’m not particularly EA-focused; this is a trap) Or perhaps a description of how “the EA community” can have needs that require such coordination, as opposed to actual projects that clearly need aggregated effort to have impact.
I do think that’d be a valuable post (and that sort of thing is going on on the EA forum right now, with people proposing various ways to solve a particular scaling problem). I don’t know that I have particularly good ideas there, although I do have some. The point of this post was just “don’t be surprised when your messages loses nuance if you haven’t made special efforts to prevent it from doing so” (or, if it gets out-competed by a less nuanced message that was designed to be scalable and/or viral)
I wrote this post in part so that I could more easily reference later at some point when I had either concrete ideas about what to do, or when I think someone is mistaken in their strategy because they’re missing this insight.
Fair enough. Interestingly, if I replace “coordinate with” with “communicate a nuanced belief to”, my reaction changes radically, in favor of numbers shaped like yours. I’ll have to think more about why those concepts are so different.
Nod. The claim here is specifically about how much nuance can be relevant to your coordination, not how many people you can coordinate with. (If this failed to come across, that also says something about communicating nuance being hard)
I think I was taking “coordination” in the narrow sense of incenting people to do actions toward a relatively straightforward goal that they may or may not share. In that view, nuance is the enemy of coordination, and most of the work is simplifying the instructions so that it’s OK that there’s not much information transmitted. If the goal is communication, rather than near-term action, you can’t avoid the necessity of detail.
The whole point is that coordination looks different at different scales.
So, I think I was looking at this through a nonstandard frame (Maybe more nonstandard than I thought). There are two different sets of numbers in this post:
— 4.3 million words worth of nuance
— 200,000 words of nuance
— 50,000 words
— 1 blogpost (1-2k words)
— 4 words
And separately:
— 1-4 people
— 10 people
— 100 people
— 1000 people
— 10,000 people+
While I’m not very confident about any of the numbers, I am more confident in the first set of numbers than the second set.
If I look out into the world, I see clear failures (and successes) of communication strategies that cluster around different strata of communication bandwidth. And in particular, there is clearly some point at which the bandwidth collapses to 3-6 words.