Could you do me a favor and elaborate? One thing I know for sure is that the quicker I’m writing, the longer my sentences are (a terrible habit). But I don’t know if that’s what you’re talking about or if it’s something else.
No apology needed, I appreciate the feedback. My comments often come out looking longer or wordier than they seemed while I was composing them, and I’ll try to remember that tendency and keep a lid on it when possible.
I’m not being sarcastic. Sometimes writing in a way that’s easy for other people to understand is just hard. Speaking for myself, normally when my own comments aren’t clear it’s because I’ve spent as much time as I’m willing to spend on writing a comment trying to come up with clearer ways to convey my idea, not because it feels gross or because I’m not trying. (For example, I rewrote that last sentence at least 4 times and it’s still pretty clunky.) This seems to come as second nature to some people, the rest of us have to struggle a bit.
None of this is intended to detract from your point. Clearer writing is better.
Yeah, what saturn said, pretty much. And as comments from Desrtopa and pedanterrific in this thread suggest, not everyone finds my writing as opaque as you do. If I can make my writing 10% clearer by spending double the effort on it, I’m only occasionally going to think that’s a good tradeoff (particularly when the writing in question is blog comments and not, say, my professional work).
Forgive me, but this seems like a little bit of an overreaction. You’re the only one who’s called me out for writing style (although I have no trouble believing that others have thought the same thing and not said it). Frankly, I don’t comment much, but when I do, my comments tend to be reasonably highly rated.
The incomprehensible-to-outsiders thing strikes me as a reach. LW by all appearances is growing rapidly without noticeable worsening in the quality of discourse or community, which is a remarkable accomplishment. When outsiders do complain about LW being unapproachable, it’s not because of people like me writing long sentences. It’s because of jargon, a lot of shared background that takes time to catch up on, and the novelty of some of the ideas.
I’ve already said I will make a reasonable effort to do better. So, respectfully, with that promise, I think I’ve shouldered enough responsibility for improving colloquy around here for the time being.
(Because I don’t know how well in control of my tone I am, I want to clarify that I appreciate your feedback on my commenting style, and I very much do not want to come across as annoyed or snippy.)
It sounds like you’re implying that a typical comment/post on LW should be accessible, in terms of rhetoric and content, to everyone on the Internet. That idea, I dismiss out of hand.
The principle of charity moves me to look for an alternative reading. The best one I can come up with is that there’s some threshold of accessibility that you have in mind, which you assert a typical LW comment/post should and does not achieve.
So, OK. Can you be somewhat more concrete about what that threshold is? For example, can you point to some examples of writing you think just-meets that threshold?
In the summer between high school and college, I took a couple of courses at a parochial school. At some point some of the other students said something, not unkindly, about the way I talked. I asked them what they meant, specifically. They nearly fell over laughing. After a couple of repetitions of my question and laughter, one of them managed to get out that they wouldn’t ever have said “specifically”.
I explained that I could hear the words they used, but I didn’t know how I could tell what words they didn’t use.
I don’t remember what was mentioned (in a different conversation) as a respect-worthy SAT score, I just remember being shocked and horrified at how low it was and drawing on reserves of tact to (I hope) not show how I felt.
In retrospect, I now know that it’s possible to acquire a feeling for what vocabulary set people use. It was also the only school or summer camp environment I was in (it got better in college) where people didn’t harass me, and I wish I had observed enough to get some idea of what made the difference.
Ultimately, I don’t think actual plain talk (in other words, not just using shorter words and sentences, but really communicating to a wider audience) can be done without empirical knowledge. I’m willing to bet a small amount that “plain talk” is the wrong thing to call it.
(nods) Yeah, I sympathize. I am famous locally for the phrase “I have long since resigned myself to the fact that I’m the sort of person who, well, says things like ‘I have long since resigned myself to’.”
I’m willing to bet a small amount that “plain talk” is the wrong thing to call it.
Mostly I think it’s not an “it”; there are dozens of different “plaintalks”. Communicating successfully to any audience requires knowing a fair amount about that specific audience. When Gabriel (above) talks about plain talk, he means his particular formulation of it, which will be different from other people’s.
I don’t remember what was mentioned (in a different conversation) as a respect-worthy SAT score, I just remember being shocked and horrified at how low it was and drawing on reserves of tact to (I hope) not show how I felt.
My friend had just gotten to college, and was half listening to his randomly assigned roommates talking about their SAT scores. He overhears: “Yeah, I got a 790”. “Holy shit!” my friend interjected. “That’s fantastic! Which section?”
I’m pretty sure it’s more like the 0.1%. I went to a fairly competitive private university (one that consistently makes the top 50 schools list in the US). Nevertheless, I was briefly anointed with my SAT score as a nickname freshman year, after mistakenly assuming that it wouldn’t stand out that much and being willing to tell people what it was.
At my high school, someone retook the SAT after he got a 1580 and not a 1600, someone who got a perfect score on the PSAT retook the SAT too. (I’m not sure what her original SAT score was. It’s more likely she bubbled incorrectly or something than bubbled correctly and got a score much below 1600, and there could have been a problem like that.)
I’m skeptical of this story. Even taking for granted that this was when the test was still normalized to 1600 as the max, if one looks at even a mediocre state school a total of 790 would be clearly in the very bottom. Note that in this data, the bottom 1 percent for both is slightly over a 400 for both sections. So someone scoring in that range is possible but extremely unlikely. This is around the 15th percentile for anyone taking the test, but the very bottom don’t generally go to real colleges at all.
The average SAT score for a men’s basketball player at that school is 916, for football it is 926, over 250 points lower than the average of non-athletes. Consider that there are about 100 football players per school, and not all excel at athletics enough that admission departments change their standards for them equally. If 50 of them average 1050 (about bottom 20th percentile), the other 50 would have to average 790 for the average for all of them to be as low as 920. If 90 average as high as 940 (about bottom 5th percentile), the other ten would have to average 790 for their collective average to be 925. A single student, who might or might not only be a marginal football player, who scored 1140 (not an outlandishly high score, 40th percentile at that school) would raise the football average about two points.
Considering that average football player SAT scores are tracked and schools desire their admissions standards to be perceived as high, both as part of the NCAA certification process and to justify their money-making programs, Goodhart’s law should probably be applied an additional time. Not only are SAT scores imperfect proxies for intelligence, average SAT scores for a sport are imperfect proxies of their admission standards, which are probably even lower than implied. This means it is very likely that some individuals have far less than the average program SAT score.
Lowest was 200 per section, and that was when it was out of 1600. So 400 was the lowest possible.
Perhaps someone considering a three section test said “600 is the lowest possible” to someone who applied that to what they considered a two section test, and concluded “300 is the lowest per section”, which you picked up.
Thank you for providing examples—that makes it much easier to understand what you’re proposing.
If those are examples of writing that just-meets the target threshold, then I agree with you completely that the writing on LW—especially in comments, like what you were replying to initially—completely fails to even approach that threshold.
I also estimate that most contributors here would have to devote between one and two orders of magnitude more time to even get in the same ballpark as the threshold.
Look for good examples of plain-enough talk on LW. 1b. If I can’t find any, lower my standard of “plain enough” and try again.
Upvote those examples.
Comment on those examples, praising their plain-talk-ness. Be as specific as I can about what makes them plain talk and why that’s good. Suggest ways to make them even more plain talk.
When I find enough examples, write a discussion post that praises them as exemplifying plain talk and demonstrates why that’s good.
When I find subsequent examples, upvote with an “upvoted for plain talk” comment and a link to that post.
When people ask for feedback on their writing, suggest specific ways to make it more plain talk; include a link to that post.
Perhaps also, find examples of otherwise good posts that are not plain talk and attempt to paraphrase in plain talk. We need some protocol to mitigate offense, though.
Yeah, that’s tricky. For example, I considered pointing out that a plainer-talk version of “Any suggestions as to how that work might be incentivized?” might be “How do I encourage people to do that?” but wasn’t sure how that would be taken.
In general, the sentiment we want to convey seems to be, “That was interesting, informative, and precise. Here’s an attempt to make it more approachable:”
Though one good thing about this approach is that if other people don’t consider my plaintalkified version of X to be superior to X, and I do, that can be very educational… I may discover, for example, that what I consider to be virtues of plain talk aren’t universal and I’ve been other-optimizing all along.
Could you do me a favor and elaborate? One thing I know for sure is that the quicker I’m writing, the longer my sentences are (a terrible habit). But I don’t know if that’s what you’re talking about or if it’s something else.
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No apology needed, I appreciate the feedback. My comments often come out looking longer or wordier than they seemed while I was composing them, and I’ll try to remember that tendency and keep a lid on it when possible.
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I assume there are also limits to the amount of cognitive effort anyone wants to spend writing comments.
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I’m not being sarcastic. Sometimes writing in a way that’s easy for other people to understand is just hard. Speaking for myself, normally when my own comments aren’t clear it’s because I’ve spent as much time as I’m willing to spend on writing a comment trying to come up with clearer ways to convey my idea, not because it feels gross or because I’m not trying. (For example, I rewrote that last sentence at least 4 times and it’s still pretty clunky.) This seems to come as second nature to some people, the rest of us have to struggle a bit.
None of this is intended to detract from your point. Clearer writing is better.
Yeah, what saturn said, pretty much. And as comments from Desrtopa and pedanterrific in this thread suggest, not everyone finds my writing as opaque as you do. If I can make my writing 10% clearer by spending double the effort on it, I’m only occasionally going to think that’s a good tradeoff (particularly when the writing in question is blog comments and not, say, my professional work).
.
Forgive me, but this seems like a little bit of an overreaction. You’re the only one who’s called me out for writing style (although I have no trouble believing that others have thought the same thing and not said it). Frankly, I don’t comment much, but when I do, my comments tend to be reasonably highly rated.
The incomprehensible-to-outsiders thing strikes me as a reach. LW by all appearances is growing rapidly without noticeable worsening in the quality of discourse or community, which is a remarkable accomplishment. When outsiders do complain about LW being unapproachable, it’s not because of people like me writing long sentences. It’s because of jargon, a lot of shared background that takes time to catch up on, and the novelty of some of the ideas.
I’ve already said I will make a reasonable effort to do better. So, respectfully, with that promise, I think I’ve shouldered enough responsibility for improving colloquy around here for the time being.
(Because I don’t know how well in control of my tone I am, I want to clarify that I appreciate your feedback on my commenting style, and I very much do not want to come across as annoyed or snippy.)
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It sounds like you’re implying that a typical comment/post on LW should be accessible, in terms of rhetoric and content, to everyone on the Internet. That idea, I dismiss out of hand.
The principle of charity moves me to look for an alternative reading. The best one I can come up with is that there’s some threshold of accessibility that you have in mind, which you assert a typical LW comment/post should and does not achieve.
So, OK. Can you be somewhat more concrete about what that threshold is? For example, can you point to some examples of writing you think just-meets that threshold?
A sad story about plain talk.....
In the summer between high school and college, I took a couple of courses at a parochial school. At some point some of the other students said something, not unkindly, about the way I talked. I asked them what they meant, specifically. They nearly fell over laughing. After a couple of repetitions of my question and laughter, one of them managed to get out that they wouldn’t ever have said “specifically”.
I explained that I could hear the words they used, but I didn’t know how I could tell what words they didn’t use.
I don’t remember what was mentioned (in a different conversation) as a respect-worthy SAT score, I just remember being shocked and horrified at how low it was and drawing on reserves of tact to (I hope) not show how I felt.
In retrospect, I now know that it’s possible to acquire a feeling for what vocabulary set people use. It was also the only school or summer camp environment I was in (it got better in college) where people didn’t harass me, and I wish I had observed enough to get some idea of what made the difference.
Ultimately, I don’t think actual plain talk (in other words, not just using shorter words and sentences, but really communicating to a wider audience) can be done without empirical knowledge. I’m willing to bet a small amount that “plain talk” is the wrong thing to call it.
(nods) Yeah, I sympathize. I am famous locally for the phrase “I have long since resigned myself to the fact that I’m the sort of person who, well, says things like ‘I have long since resigned myself to’.”
Mostly I think it’s not an “it”; there are dozens of different “plaintalks”. Communicating successfully to any audience requires knowing a fair amount about that specific audience. When Gabriel (above) talks about plain talk, he means his particular formulation of it, which will be different from other people’s.
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Picking a register appropriate to my audience will move that audience.
You gots to talk to people in their language.
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I wouldn’t, no. If I want to preach to the unconverted pagans, I do best to learn their language first.
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My friend had just gotten to college, and was half listening to his randomly assigned roommates talking about their SAT scores. He overhears: “Yeah, I got a 790”. “Holy shit!” my friend interjected. “That’s fantastic! Which section?”
“What do you mean which section?”
It’s things like that which make me mentally apply the ‘We Are The 1%’ slogan… to IQ.
I’m pretty sure it’s more like the 0.1%. I went to a fairly competitive private university (one that consistently makes the top 50 schools list in the US). Nevertheless, I was briefly anointed with my SAT score as a nickname freshman year, after mistakenly assuming that it wouldn’t stand out that much and being willing to tell people what it was.
At my high school, someone retook the SAT after he got a 1580 and not a 1600, someone who got a perfect score on the PSAT retook the SAT too. (I’m not sure what her original SAT score was. It’s more likely she bubbled incorrectly or something than bubbled correctly and got a score much below 1600, and there could have been a problem like that.)
That’s also a quote from “Perks of Being A Wallflower”, incidentally. Which doesn’t mean it’s not a true story.
I’m skeptical of this story. Even taking for granted that this was when the test was still normalized to 1600 as the max, if one looks at even a mediocre state school a total of 790 would be clearly in the very bottom. Note that in this data, the bottom 1 percent for both is slightly over a 400 for both sections. So someone scoring in that range is possible but extremely unlikely. This is around the 15th percentile for anyone taking the test, but the very bottom don’t generally go to real colleges at all.
The average SAT score for a men’s basketball player at that school is 916, for football it is 926, over 250 points lower than the average of non-athletes. Consider that there are about 100 football players per school, and not all excel at athletics enough that admission departments change their standards for them equally. If 50 of them average 1050 (about bottom 20th percentile), the other 50 would have to average 790 for the average for all of them to be as low as 920. If 90 average as high as 940 (about bottom 5th percentile), the other ten would have to average 790 for their collective average to be 925. A single student, who might or might not only be a marginal football player, who scored 1140 (not an outlandishly high score, 40th percentile at that school) would raise the football average about two points.
Considering that average football player SAT scores are tracked and schools desire their admissions standards to be perceived as high, both as part of the NCAA certification process and to justify their money-making programs, Goodhart’s law should probably be applied an additional time. Not only are SAT scores imperfect proxies for intelligence, average SAT scores for a sport are imperfect proxies of their admission standards, which are probably even lower than implied. This means it is very likely that some individuals have far less than the average program SAT score.
That’s an excellent set of points. I clearly underestimated the chance of such an event occurring.
Is it even possible to get a 790 total? I thought the lower bound was 900!
Lowest was 200 per section, and that was when it was out of 1600. So 400 was the lowest possible.
Perhaps someone considering a three section test said “600 is the lowest possible” to someone who applied that to what they considered a two section test, and concluded “300 is the lowest per section”, which you picked up.
Oh, okay. (I’m looking it up on the wiki now; I actually wasn’t aware it used to be a 1600 point scale.)
Nevermind then. So 790 would be… 13th percentile. Ouch.
(Wikipedia gives 890 as the lowest point on the chart here, though it is for the new system.)
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Thank you for providing examples—that makes it much easier to understand what you’re proposing.
If those are examples of writing that just-meets the target threshold, then I agree with you completely that the writing on LW—especially in comments, like what you were replying to initially—completely fails to even approach that threshold.
I also estimate that most contributors here would have to devote between one and two orders of magnitude more time to even get in the same ballpark as the threshold.
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Sure.
Look for good examples of plain-enough talk on LW.
1b. If I can’t find any, lower my standard of “plain enough” and try again.
Upvote those examples.
Comment on those examples, praising their plain-talk-ness. Be as specific as I can about what makes them plain talk and why that’s good. Suggest ways to make them even more plain talk.
When I find enough examples, write a discussion post that praises them as exemplifying plain talk and demonstrates why that’s good.
When I find subsequent examples, upvote with an “upvoted for plain talk” comment and a link to that post.
When people ask for feedback on their writing, suggest specific ways to make it more plain talk; include a link to that post.
Perhaps also, find examples of otherwise good posts that are not plain talk and attempt to paraphrase in plain talk. We need some protocol to mitigate offense, though.
Yeah, that’s tricky. For example, I considered pointing out that a plainer-talk version of “Any suggestions as to how that work might be incentivized?” might be “How do I encourage people to do that?” but wasn’t sure how that would be taken.
In general, the sentiment we want to convey seems to be, “That was interesting, informative, and precise. Here’s an attempt to make it more approachable:”
.
Though one good thing about this approach is that if other people don’t consider my plaintalkified version of X to be superior to X, and I do, that can be very educational… I may discover, for example, that what I consider to be virtues of plain talk aren’t universal and I’ve been other-optimizing all along.
I don’t suppose you’ve considered becoming a bad-ass Iron-Age hoplite?
Considered.