First of all, I’m not a native speaker. Then I think this writing style is much more appealing and thought to warn those who can’t cope with it.
If people here are unable to interpret colloquial language, then they might want to learn it.
Interesting tension in that you seem to attribute your lack of clarity to being a non-native speaker, and then defend yourself as speaking colloquially. Other non-native speakers here do not seem to have these problems.
Perhaps we should start non-English versions of Less Wrong, so that people who are incapable of communicating clearly and effectively in English have somewhere else to post.
I haven’t seen the original argument since the comment has been deleted.
But I’ve decided to comment since I sympathize, I have had problems with English spelling in the past to the point of having people volunteer to proofread my posts before I post them. Language barriers are something I can relate to.
I would love to participate in a nonEnglish Less Wrong, however my native language is so small I would be a nonnative speaker anyway.
Perhaps German? I’m better at it than English, French could also be doable but any other languages are off the table for me.
Translating the main sequences into various world languages would be a good way to raise the global sanity water line a bit more. LW is very very Anglocentric (understandable considering the recent history of Compsci) in its demographics. Its also a way for people who don’t feel they know enough to write top level posts to contribute. I know we have the people here to translate all the articles into Russian, French, German and Spanish. I have no idea about Hindi but there are probably a few notable posters who are very fluent and have a large enough specialized vocabulary. Arab, Chinese and perhaps Japanese would be more tricky I think.
On second thought… Is anyone here interested in starting a learning group for Lojban?
Perhaps translating LW articles and occasionally debating in the language would be a good way to learn it, and perhaps (considering the nature of the language) it would help to have eventually all articles translated into Lojban, with Lojban being the “source code” version of the article and English the obligatory translation and default option. Unambiguity can be very useful.
I agree that translating LW articles into Lojban would be worthwhile, though i see its benefit more as promoting Lojban than promoting LW. Unlike other Lojban translation projects (i.e. Alice in Wonderland, The Legend of Zelda), the LW articles are likely to be subject to a lot of examiners getting helpfully nit-picky about the translation.
Also, longer term, it may help add to Lojban’s practical usage as a rational language to early on have a set of high-quality Lojban documents that are explicitly and thoroughly rational. It could provide something analagous to a set of “kata” for future users of the language, a target ideal and example form.
I’d guess that other non-native speaker are of high educational background. I failed secondary school and am classified as handicapped by the federal employment office of Germany. If I’m not good enough for this community, I’m not offended if someone wrote a post and comment rule disqualifying anyone under a certain educational background or IQ to post and comment here.
What I meant to say by colloquially is that I’m not intending to use math but natural language. A little bit of ambiguity and the use of idioms is a tool to transcribe something that is rather difuse and elusive. If it was that clear to me, I would make assertions and not ask questions.
As my last sentence said, I asked the Less Wrong community to help me understand where I am wrong. If this is the wrong thing to do in a community blog devoted to refining the art of rationality, I’m sorry.
And I don’t think your comment was helpful. If you had any questions about what I meant to say you could simply ask rather than telling me, “Hey, you can’t get things across, either make yourself intelligible to all in the first place or go to hell...”.
And I don’t think your comment was helpful. If you had any questions about what I meant to say you could simply ask
I was not trying to be helpful to you, nor did I care about the specifics of what you wrote.
I was expressing disapproval at the general strategy of posting things that are unclear and then asking the readers to do interpretation for you. Rather, you should do the work of making your writing clear instead of pushing that work onto the readers. For any sort of utilitarian, at least, the benefit should be obvious—the writer is doing the work rather than hundreds of readers doing analogous work.
Academic communication style is different in Europe than it is in the US/Aust/UK. My understanding of the situation is that there’s an expectation that it’s the reader’s responsibility to understand, not the writer’s to be clear. In practice this means that writers in Europe are penalised for being too clear. (I can provide citations if need be)
Which I guess means that there should be some writing guidelines for people from non-English backgrounds, emphasising the importance of clarity. Or that there should be a workshop area on the site where non-natives can get advice on how to make their article clearer before they post it.
I suspect that this varies more by discipline than by physical area. In math for example not making things reasonably easy to understand is considered bad although there is a tension with a desire for succinctness. Even then, ambiguity that requires a reader to use context to resolve is considered very poor writing.
the writer is doing the work rather than hundreds of readers doing analogous work
I agree, but sometimes a person does the best they can and it’s just not enough. I think it’s appropriate to downvote for poor writing, unless the content is compelling. The incompetent writer should ask for help pre-posting if they really care about being understood.
Long version: Writing quality can be meaningfully compared along many axes. There are mechanical axes, like correct grammar usage, clarity of expression, precision, succinctness, and readability, all of which I found to be problems (to varying degrees) with this post. These are all (relatively) easy to improve by proof-reading, making multiple drafts, and/or asking others for editing help. Wei Dai’s post performs well by all of those measurements.
There are also content axes, like originality, rigor, cleverness, evidentiary support, and usefulness. Hacking the CEV for Fun and Profit does pretty well by these measures, too. This post is a little better with content than it is with mechanics, but poor mechanics obscure content and dilute its weight, so I suspect that the points you were trying to make were underevalued, though not drastically so. Fixing up content is harder than fixing up mechanics; for some ideas, it is impossible. After all, some ideas are just wrong or useless (though this is usually far from obvious).
One writing technique I like and don’t use enough: come up with lots of ideas and only explore the most promising ones. Or, as it is written in the Book of Yudkowsky, hold off on proposing solutions.
Err… 33 now. But that is because the content is very compelling. Posts pointing out why CEV is quite possibly a bad thing would have to be quite poor to get a downvote from me. It is a subject that is obvious but avoided.
I see that too (upvoted it before), yet the argument was that my post was poorly written. Further the argument was that my post lacked references and detail. Also, my post mentions CEV. Further, an AI based on a extrapolated volition of humanity might, very well, conclude that given the better part of the future is unable to sustain our volition, it will abandon humanity. If CEV tries to optimize volition, which includes suffering, negative utilitarianism might well be a factor to lean the result towards non-existence. This idea is widely explored in Stephen Baxter’ Manifold trilogy where the far future decides to destroy the universe acausally. This is fictional evidence, but do you want to argue superhuman AI and CEV isn’t? It’s the exploration of an idea.
Again, how I get downvoted this drastically in comparison to three paragraphs which basically say that a superhuman AI (premise) uses CEV (idea based on premise) would base its extrapolation on uploaded copies (idea based on an idea based on a shaky premise). Compare this to my post which is based on evidence from economic and physics.
I voted up your post even in its earlier revisions.
However, Wei Da’s is far more novel and entertaining. I would have voted it up 3 times if I could :)
These are all questions I (and most thinking people, have considered before): “Would it be better not to exist at all, if existence is mostly suffering?” (“To be, or not to be?”). “If a deist-type god (not intervening after creation) created this universe and all its rules that imply the suffering we observe, was that a moral act?” “How much pleasure (and for how long) does it take to make it worth some amount of suffering?”
If there was much beyond that in your post, I may have missed it.
Ok, let’s be honest. Have you seriously considered that the disclaimer was anything but a mock? I’ve been clear enough in the post. If you show me what you don’t understand, I’ll try to clarify.
I was not trying to be helpful to you, nor did I care about the specifics of what you wrote.
I never said that you were trying to be helpful. I stated that your comment wasn’t helpful. This lack of basic understanding, or deliberate misintepretation is what I denounce.
Interesting tension in that you seem to attribute your lack of clarity to being a non-native speaker, and then defend yourself as speaking colloquially. Other non-native speakers here do not seem to have these problems.
Perhaps we should start non-English versions of Less Wrong, so that people who are incapable of communicating clearly and effectively in English have somewhere else to post.
I have seriously considered posting to propose this.
I haven’t seen the original argument since the comment has been deleted.
But I’ve decided to comment since I sympathize, I have had problems with English spelling in the past to the point of having people volunteer to proofread my posts before I post them. Language barriers are something I can relate to.
I would love to participate in a nonEnglish Less Wrong, however my native language is so small I would be a nonnative speaker anyway.
Perhaps German? I’m better at it than English, French could also be doable but any other languages are off the table for me.
Translating the main sequences into various world languages would be a good way to raise the global sanity water line a bit more. LW is very very Anglocentric (understandable considering the recent history of Compsci) in its demographics. Its also a way for people who don’t feel they know enough to write top level posts to contribute. I know we have the people here to translate all the articles into Russian, French, German and Spanish. I have no idea about Hindi but there are probably a few notable posters who are very fluent and have a large enough specialized vocabulary. Arab, Chinese and perhaps Japanese would be more tricky I think.
On second thought… Is anyone here interested in starting a learning group for Lojban?
Perhaps translating LW articles and occasionally debating in the language would be a good way to learn it, and perhaps (considering the nature of the language) it would help to have eventually all articles translated into Lojban, with Lojban being the “source code” version of the article and English the obligatory translation and default option. Unambiguity can be very useful.
Kial ne lerni Esperanto?
komponisto and I both speak it. I figured Konkvistador did too, or was at least familiar with it, based on the username.
In fact, the last letter in my username is in Esperanto! (Seriously.)
komponisto kaj mi ambaŭ scipovas ĝin. Mi supozis, ke ankaŭ Konkvistador scipovas ĝin, aŭ almenaŭ konas ĝin, pro la uzulnomo.
Efektive la fina litero de mia uzulnomo estas en Esperanto! (Serioze.)
Ŝajnas ke estas jam rimarkebla minoritato :-)
i ie go’a i ji’a xu do se bangu la lojban
I agree that translating LW articles into Lojban would be worthwhile, though i see its benefit more as promoting Lojban than promoting LW. Unlike other Lojban translation projects (i.e. Alice in Wonderland, The Legend of Zelda), the LW articles are likely to be subject to a lot of examiners getting helpfully nit-picky about the translation.
Also, longer term, it may help add to Lojban’s practical usage as a rational language to early on have a set of high-quality Lojban documents that are explicitly and thoroughly rational. It could provide something analagous to a set of “kata” for future users of the language, a target ideal and example form.
I’d guess that other non-native speaker are of high educational background. I failed secondary school and am classified as handicapped by the federal employment office of Germany. If I’m not good enough for this community, I’m not offended if someone wrote a post and comment rule disqualifying anyone under a certain educational background or IQ to post and comment here.
What I meant to say by colloquially is that I’m not intending to use math but natural language. A little bit of ambiguity and the use of idioms is a tool to transcribe something that is rather difuse and elusive. If it was that clear to me, I would make assertions and not ask questions.
As my last sentence said, I asked the Less Wrong community to help me understand where I am wrong. If this is the wrong thing to do in a community blog devoted to refining the art of rationality, I’m sorry.
And I don’t think your comment was helpful. If you had any questions about what I meant to say you could simply ask rather than telling me, “Hey, you can’t get things across, either make yourself intelligible to all in the first place or go to hell...”.
I was not trying to be helpful to you, nor did I care about the specifics of what you wrote.
I was expressing disapproval at the general strategy of posting things that are unclear and then asking the readers to do interpretation for you. Rather, you should do the work of making your writing clear instead of pushing that work onto the readers. For any sort of utilitarian, at least, the benefit should be obvious—the writer is doing the work rather than hundreds of readers doing analogous work.
Academic communication style is different in Europe than it is in the US/Aust/UK. My understanding of the situation is that there’s an expectation that it’s the reader’s responsibility to understand, not the writer’s to be clear. In practice this means that writers in Europe are penalised for being too clear. (I can provide citations if need be)
Which I guess means that there should be some writing guidelines for people from non-English backgrounds, emphasising the importance of clarity. Or that there should be a workshop area on the site where non-natives can get advice on how to make their article clearer before they post it.
I don’t doubt you, but I would be interested in seeing specific examples of this.
I suspect that this varies more by discipline than by physical area. In math for example not making things reasonably easy to understand is considered bad although there is a tension with a desire for succinctness. Even then, ambiguity that requires a reader to use context to resolve is considered very poor writing.
I agree, but sometimes a person does the best they can and it’s just not enough. I think it’s appropriate to downvote for poor writing, unless the content is compelling. The incompetent writer should ask for help pre-posting if they really care about being understood.
This post got upvoted 32 times and mine downvoted 10 times. Is the difference that drastic? I don’t see that, but ok.
Short version: Yes.
Long version: Writing quality can be meaningfully compared along many axes. There are mechanical axes, like correct grammar usage, clarity of expression, precision, succinctness, and readability, all of which I found to be problems (to varying degrees) with this post. These are all (relatively) easy to improve by proof-reading, making multiple drafts, and/or asking others for editing help. Wei Dai’s post performs well by all of those measurements.
There are also content axes, like originality, rigor, cleverness, evidentiary support, and usefulness. Hacking the CEV for Fun and Profit does pretty well by these measures, too. This post is a little better with content than it is with mechanics, but poor mechanics obscure content and dilute its weight, so I suspect that the points you were trying to make were underevalued, though not drastically so. Fixing up content is harder than fixing up mechanics; for some ideas, it is impossible. After all, some ideas are just wrong or useless (though this is usually far from obvious).
One writing technique I like and don’t use enough: come up with lots of ideas and only explore the most promising ones. Or, as it is written in the Book of Yudkowsky, hold off on proposing solutions.
Err… 33 now. But that is because the content is very compelling. Posts pointing out why CEV is quite possibly a bad thing would have to be quite poor to get a downvote from me. It is a subject that is obvious but avoided.
I see that too (upvoted it before), yet the argument was that my post was poorly written. Further the argument was that my post lacked references and detail. Also, my post mentions CEV. Further, an AI based on a extrapolated volition of humanity might, very well, conclude that given the better part of the future is unable to sustain our volition, it will abandon humanity. If CEV tries to optimize volition, which includes suffering, negative utilitarianism might well be a factor to lean the result towards non-existence. This idea is widely explored in Stephen Baxter’ Manifold trilogy where the far future decides to destroy the universe acausally. This is fictional evidence, but do you want to argue superhuman AI and CEV isn’t? It’s the exploration of an idea.
Again, how I get downvoted this drastically in comparison to three paragraphs which basically say that a superhuman AI (premise) uses CEV (idea based on premise) would base its extrapolation on uploaded copies (idea based on an idea based on a shaky premise). Compare this to my post which is based on evidence from economic and physics.
I voted up your post even in its earlier revisions.
However, Wei Da’s is far more novel and entertaining. I would have voted it up 3 times if I could :)
These are all questions I (and most thinking people, have considered before): “Would it be better not to exist at all, if existence is mostly suffering?” (“To be, or not to be?”). “If a deist-type god (not intervening after creation) created this universe and all its rules that imply the suffering we observe, was that a moral act?” “How much pleasure (and for how long) does it take to make it worth some amount of suffering?”
If there was much beyond that in your post, I may have missed it.
Ok, let’s be honest. Have you seriously considered that the disclaimer was anything but a mock? I’ve been clear enough in the post. If you show me what you don’t understand, I’ll try to clarify.
I never said that you were trying to be helpful. I stated that your comment wasn’t helpful. This lack of basic understanding, or deliberate misintepretation is what I denounce.
I think I’m going to delete the dislclaimer now.
Deleted the disclaimer. It was just a mock. I attest the post is clear.