I mean there will literally be more words in each comment. The signal-to-noise ratio will decrease because we have the same signal with slightly more noise (polite words).
I agree with the general position that excessive politeness can harm the quality of communication. But I strongly disagree that the harm is due to there simply being more words. The harm is due to the presence of actual (“white”) lies.
The prescription that seems to flow from your analysis—“Don’t waste words”—strikes me as a bad direction to go. I fear that our comments and criticisms are often already too cryptic and confusing due to their terseness. I would advise people to use more words: provide a second example to clarify, quote the passage you are critiquing, explain the point of a link. As the saying goes, words are cheap. Trying to be frugal in their use is false economy.
My advice: aim for maximum clarity. If you are considering adding some polite words simply to soften your criticism … don’t. It damages clarity. On the other hand, if you are considering whether to prefix your criticism with “I liked the first part, but …” then go ahead. It clarifies the scope of your criticism. Even though it “costs” some words.
You just assumed your conclusion: that polite words are not part of the signal.
Opposite plausible assumption: If the communication is deprecated or even ignored because of the absence of polite words, then the polite words are important to the communication and should be considered part of it.
As I said, to make assertions like this one needs actual numbers. If you don’t have any, that’s fine, I don’t either ;-) But I can recognise that we’ve reached the stage of opposed but plausible statements, which means we have something falsifiable, and maybe should have a go at doing so. If no-one has already.
Exercise for the reader: Which words in this comment are noise?
If you don’t have any, that’s fine, I don’t either ;-)
and
If no-one has already.
That is, at least, my view on noise. Sure, it’s no major problem; I parsed your comment just as easily, it took barely any extra effort on my part, it didn’t obscure anything—it wasn’t actively bad at all. But it wasn’t good either, it was just grease. I don’t see a need to counsel people towards more grease on LessWrong specifically. In almost all cases, yes, smart people need a lot more grease than they use. But part of the LessWrong aesthetic is a sort of soft Crocker’s rules.
What I am mostly concerned about:
about halfway down the comment, when AlanCrowe talks about the budget meeting example: that ‘upgrading’ of an idea is not desirable on LessWrong. To illustrate the point, if we upgraded Ben Goertzel’s ideas on AGI from ‘flawed’ to ‘great idea, have you thought about friendliness?’, we would be making an error.
The answer is, of course: none of it was “grease.” It was superfluous to you, but would not have been superfluous to others. A public comment intended to be read by many people on a blog expressly aimed at effectiveness in all regards, including communication, requires comments to be constructed robustly and with an eye to alleviating misinterpretation. Failure to do so is failure.
If you don’t agree, then do please consider there are other people than you reading it and that you may be incorrect.
Exercise: Was this sufficiently unvarnished or could it have been unvarnished further? Would the unvarnishing have contributed an element to the communication that advanced the quality of LessWrong or put it back?
But I share your intuition, both that this is probably well-covered in the sociolinguistics literature, and that politeness markers can increase the effectiveness of a communication.
It’s also worth noting that what counts as “noise” (in the sense we’re using it here, which includes redundant signal) depends on my audience. If I know who is reading my words and I know what their priors are, I can communicate way more efficiently—I only have to provide evidence for the places where our priors differ. (Case in point: in pretty much any other community, I would have needed to use more words to express that thought, rather than rely on a shared understanding of “evidence” and “priors”.)
Anyway, I don’t feel like actually, you know, doing research, but I’ll ask around among the appropriate cohort of my friends and see what comes up.
ETA: Heh. Your most recent comment said essentially the same thing. Ah well.
You just assumed your conclusion: that polite words are not part of the signal.
I think the word signal is being overloaded here. The signal here can be seperated into the core signal and the social signal. The social signal is also a signal and is necessary for the interaction to succeed but in the context of a signal-to-noise ratio it counts as noise because our goal is to extract the core signal; the social signal/noise should be there to the extent it is necessary to allow the core’s extraction without unwanted side effects.
I don’t consider anything in your comment to be the bad kind of noise and there’s nothing I would cut, but the third paragraph contains far more words than it would have to if it could be pure core signal.
I mean there will literally be more words in each comment. The signal-to-noise ratio will decrease because we have the same signal with slightly more noise (polite words).
I agree with the general position that excessive politeness can harm the quality of communication. But I strongly disagree that the harm is due to there simply being more words. The harm is due to the presence of actual (“white”) lies.
The prescription that seems to flow from your analysis—“Don’t waste words”—strikes me as a bad direction to go. I fear that our comments and criticisms are often already too cryptic and confusing due to their terseness. I would advise people to use more words: provide a second example to clarify, quote the passage you are critiquing, explain the point of a link. As the saying goes, words are cheap. Trying to be frugal in their use is false economy.
My advice: aim for maximum clarity. If you are considering adding some polite words simply to soften your criticism … don’t. It damages clarity. On the other hand, if you are considering whether to prefix your criticism with “I liked the first part, but …” then go ahead. It clarifies the scope of your criticism. Even though it “costs” some words.
You just assumed your conclusion: that polite words are not part of the signal.
Opposite plausible assumption: If the communication is deprecated or even ignored because of the absence of polite words, then the polite words are important to the communication and should be considered part of it.
As I said, to make assertions like this one needs actual numbers. If you don’t have any, that’s fine, I don’t either ;-) But I can recognise that we’ve reached the stage of opposed but plausible statements, which means we have something falsifiable, and maybe should have a go at doing so. If no-one has already.
Exercise for the reader: Which words in this comment are noise?
Which words in that comment are noise?
and
That is, at least, my view on noise. Sure, it’s no major problem; I parsed your comment just as easily, it took barely any extra effort on my part, it didn’t obscure anything—it wasn’t actively bad at all. But it wasn’t good either, it was just grease. I don’t see a need to counsel people towards more grease on LessWrong specifically. In almost all cases, yes, smart people need a lot more grease than they use. But part of the LessWrong aesthetic is a sort of soft Crocker’s rules.
What I am mostly concerned about: about halfway down the comment, when AlanCrowe talks about the budget meeting example: that ‘upgrading’ of an idea is not desirable on LessWrong. To illustrate the point, if we upgraded Ben Goertzel’s ideas on AGI from ‘flawed’ to ‘great idea, have you thought about friendliness?’, we would be making an error.
The answer is, of course: none of it was “grease.” It was superfluous to you, but would not have been superfluous to others. A public comment intended to be read by many people on a blog expressly aimed at effectiveness in all regards, including communication, requires comments to be constructed robustly and with an eye to alleviating misinterpretation. Failure to do so is failure.
If you don’t agree, then do please consider there are other people than you reading it and that you may be incorrect.
Exercise: Was this sufficiently unvarnished or could it have been unvarnished further? Would the unvarnishing have contributed an element to the communication that advanced the quality of LessWrong or put it back?
We could, I suppose, experiment.
But I share your intuition, both that this is probably well-covered in the sociolinguistics literature, and that politeness markers can increase the effectiveness of a communication.
It’s also worth noting that what counts as “noise” (in the sense we’re using it here, which includes redundant signal) depends on my audience. If I know who is reading my words and I know what their priors are, I can communicate way more efficiently—I only have to provide evidence for the places where our priors differ. (Case in point: in pretty much any other community, I would have needed to use more words to express that thought, rather than rely on a shared understanding of “evidence” and “priors”.)
Anyway, I don’t feel like actually, you know, doing research, but I’ll ask around among the appropriate cohort of my friends and see what comes up.
ETA: Heh. Your most recent comment said essentially the same thing. Ah well.
I think the word signal is being overloaded here. The signal here can be seperated into the core signal and the social signal. The social signal is also a signal and is necessary for the interaction to succeed but in the context of a signal-to-noise ratio it counts as noise because our goal is to extract the core signal; the social signal/noise should be there to the extent it is necessary to allow the core’s extraction without unwanted side effects.
I don’t consider anything in your comment to be the bad kind of noise and there’s nothing I would cut, but the third paragraph contains far more words than it would have to if it could be pure core signal.
Yes, the maximally concise polite post likely uses more words to express the same number of thoughts than the maximally concise non-polite post.
That said, a typical LW post is far from maximally concise.
The question is, does a typically concise polite post use more words per thought communicated?
I agree with David_Gerard here: if the answer matters, I’d like to see some actual measurements.
Conversely, if we don’t care about the measurements, maybe the answer doesn’t actually matter.