I used to get annoyed when LWers misread my posts in ways that they wouldn’t have if they had been reading more carefully. I conceptualized such commenters as being undisciplined, and being unwilling to do the work necessary to maintain high epistemic standards. I now see that my reading was in many cases uncharitable, analogous to many of my teachers having misread my learning disability as reflecting laziness. Many of my readers have probably never had the opportunity to learn how to read really carefully.
This seems like you’re unnecessarily antagonising your audience.
But the general issue is that even as someone who has met you, and likes you and generally has an unusually high amount of trust on your opinions, this is not enough to move the weight of probability of why your posts were misunderstood—it is still likelier due to arrogance or lack of communication skill than due to whether one’s readers studied analysis subjects!
There’s no single reason why my posts were misunderstood. You can think in terms of there being an underlying statistical model of whether or not a post will be understood. I acknowledge that my lack of communication skills have played a major role. But it’s also true that people with very strong quantitative backgrounds (such as Paul Christiano) have understood my posts much more readily than most LWers have.
Depending on the post, there are other reasons that people who share your intellectual background may be better at understanding a post, other than the study making them smarter. It could be that they were smarter already, or that similar effects are apparent for people with shared non quantitative backgrounds as well.
In pure math, it’s not uncommon for the statement of a theorem, when unpackaged (with all of the definitions spelled out, relative to what the reader already knows), to span several pages. It’s often the case that if a mere word or two in the statement of a theorem were changed, the statement would be false. So you need to read every word carefully – it’s a sink or swim situation.
Programming has the same character too, but it contrasts with pure math in that it’s easy to place it in a different category from verbal communication in general. Some mathematical proof consists of symbolic manipulation, but the more theoretical areas involve a huge amount of verbal-type reasoning. So you would expect people with background in pure math to have this skill, even if they didn’t before they started learning.
I agree that mathematical thinking and communication has a special and interesting character. Communicating in a mathlike way is a skill, to be sure. But if meticulously careful communication was superior in a wide range of scenarios, I would have at least a weak reason to expect more people to use it, at least when talking to other math people. But it’s not clear to me that math people talk in mathlike ways to math people anymore than sociologists talk in sociologist-like ways to sociologists.
For success in writing, I imagine it’s more important to think in a writer-like way. For success in business, I imagine it’s again not mathlike thinking that is necessarily most crucial...
It could be that they were smarter already, or that similar effects are apparent for people with shared non quantitative backgrounds as well.
Yes, there are multiple possible causes. I’m just expressing my intuition (based on a huge amount of evidence that I can’t easily share) and I’m saying that there’s reason to make a Bayesian update in the direction of what I’m saying. Naturally, the size of the update depends on how compelling my perspective seems.
But the general issue is that even as someone who has met you, and likes you and generally has an unusually high amount of trust on your opinions, this is not enough to move the weight of probability of why your posts were misunderstood—it is still likelier due to arrogance or lack of communication skill than due to whether one’s readers studied analysis subjects!
There’s no single reason why my posts were misunderstood. You can think in terms of there being an underlying statistical model of whether or not a post will be understood. I acknowledge that my lack of communication skills have played a major role. But it’s also true that people with very strong quantitative backgrounds (such as Paul Christiano) have understood my posts much more readily than most LWers have.
Depending on the post, there are other reasons that people who share your intellectual background may be better at understanding a post, other than the study making them smarter. It could be that they were smarter already, or that similar effects are apparent for people with shared non quantitative backgrounds as well.
A bit more intuition:
In pure math, it’s not uncommon for the statement of a theorem, when unpackaged (with all of the definitions spelled out, relative to what the reader already knows), to span several pages. It’s often the case that if a mere word or two in the statement of a theorem were changed, the statement would be false. So you need to read every word carefully – it’s a sink or swim situation.
Programming has the same character too, but it contrasts with pure math in that it’s easy to place it in a different category from verbal communication in general. Some mathematical proof consists of symbolic manipulation, but the more theoretical areas involve a huge amount of verbal-type reasoning. So you would expect people with background in pure math to have this skill, even if they didn’t before they started learning.
I agree that mathematical thinking and communication has a special and interesting character. Communicating in a mathlike way is a skill, to be sure. But if meticulously careful communication was superior in a wide range of scenarios, I would have at least a weak reason to expect more people to use it, at least when talking to other math people. But it’s not clear to me that math people talk in mathlike ways to math people anymore than sociologists talk in sociologist-like ways to sociologists.
For success in writing, I imagine it’s more important to think in a writer-like way. For success in business, I imagine it’s again not mathlike thinking that is necessarily most crucial...
Yes, there are multiple possible causes. I’m just expressing my intuition (based on a huge amount of evidence that I can’t easily share) and I’m saying that there’s reason to make a Bayesian update in the direction of what I’m saying. Naturally, the size of the update depends on how compelling my perspective seems.