I’m excited to read and follow this sequence! Eliezer’s Be Specific post is one of my favorites. And I just find myself thinking about specificity all the time. Yesterday I was at a poker meetup and my friend was giving a presentation. I was trying to take notes and come up with useful feedback. The big thing that kept coming up was, you guessed it—be specific! Same with if I’m ever giving someone feedback on writing or something.
My initial thoughts are that the two big difficulties with specificity are:
1) Often times if can be weirdly difficult to come up with examples. Me personally, there are many times where I want to communicate some good examples, and I feel like it should be reasonably easy to come up with some, but my brain just draws blanks and doesn’t cooperate. And I feel like I see this in others as well.
2) Illusion of transparency. We think our non-specific statement was good enough, and don’t realize that the other person is really wanting some specific examples. I feel like this usually doesn’t happen at the conscious level. We don’t actually think: “Hm, did I explain that well enough? Should I stop and try to get more specific? Nah, I don’t think so, I think it was fine. Let’s move on then.” We just… sort of… keep… going.
Another thought:
3) I’m a huge fan of providing some sort of visual along with text. Picture, video, animation, whatever. I think a big reason for this is because the visual helps with specificity.
Thanks! Nice to hear that you were also craving some specificity content.
1) Often times if can be weirdly difficult to come up with examples. Me personally, there are many times where I want to communicate some good examples, and I feel like it should be reasonably easy to come up with some, but my brain just draws blanks and doesn’t cooperate. And I feel like I see this in others as well.
Hmm, I think it would be interesting if you could be on the lookout for an example of it being weirdly difficult to come up with an example! Most of the time I’d describe it as “noticeably difficult/annoying” to come up with an example, but not weirdly difficult… unless of course the claim is problematic.
On the flip side, I realize that whenever I’m making the mental effort to come up with a specific example, I’m probably wielding a lot of power to shape the discussion. Everyone else (including myself going forward) is going to be too lazy to generate their own new specifics, so they’ll be discussing my chosen specific example for a long time.
3) I’m a huge fan of providing some sort of visual along with text. Picture, video, animation, whatever. I think a big reason for this is because the visual helps with specificity.
I agree. On a related note, I think LW would benefit from more visuals in general because I believe it makes reading on the web easier and more pleasurable for most people. It’s the same justification as for the now-accepted practice of breaking text into small paragraphs.
I’m excited to read and follow this sequence! Eliezer’s Be Specific post is one of my favorites. And I just find myself thinking about specificity all the time. Yesterday I was at a poker meetup and my friend was giving a presentation. I was trying to take notes and come up with useful feedback. The big thing that kept coming up was, you guessed it—be specific! Same with if I’m ever giving someone feedback on writing or something.
My initial thoughts are that the two big difficulties with specificity are:
1) Often times if can be weirdly difficult to come up with examples. Me personally, there are many times where I want to communicate some good examples, and I feel like it should be reasonably easy to come up with some, but my brain just draws blanks and doesn’t cooperate. And I feel like I see this in others as well.
2) Illusion of transparency. We think our non-specific statement was good enough, and don’t realize that the other person is really wanting some specific examples. I feel like this usually doesn’t happen at the conscious level. We don’t actually think: “Hm, did I explain that well enough? Should I stop and try to get more specific? Nah, I don’t think so, I think it was fine. Let’s move on then.” We just… sort of… keep… going.
Another thought:
3) I’m a huge fan of providing some sort of visual along with text. Picture, video, animation, whatever. I think a big reason for this is because the visual helps with specificity.
Thanks! Nice to hear that you were also craving some specificity content.
Hmm, I think it would be interesting if you could be on the lookout for an example of it being weirdly difficult to come up with an example! Most of the time I’d describe it as “noticeably difficult/annoying” to come up with an example, but not weirdly difficult… unless of course the claim is problematic.
On the flip side, I realize that whenever I’m making the mental effort to come up with a specific example, I’m probably wielding a lot of power to shape the discussion. Everyone else (including myself going forward) is going to be too lazy to generate their own new specifics, so they’ll be discussing my chosen specific example for a long time.
I agree. On a related note, I think LW would benefit from more visuals in general because I believe it makes reading on the web easier and more pleasurable for most people. It’s the same justification as for the now-accepted practice of breaking text into small paragraphs.