If you’re informing me of something I prefer bullets. If you’re persuading me of something I prefer paragraphs. I find that bullet points lose out on the ability to include story type data that my system 1 responds to. My ideal world would be each article started with bullets for if it’s something I already mostly agreed with and ended with stories about it for if it was something I’d need convincing of.
I find that bullet points lose out on the ability to include story type data that my system 1 responds to.
That’s an advantage, in my opinion. I have a habit of turning articles into bullet point summaries, and I’ve found that the more difficult something is to turn into a bullet-point summary, the less actual content there is in the article. Ease of transformation into bullet points is a quick, yet remarkably effective heuristic to distinguish insight from insight porn.
In the LW2.0 context, where mods draw a distinction between “explaining” and “persuading”, I think it’s worth noting that a good explanation can still rely on story-type-data to illustrate concepts, even if it’s trying to let you ultimately make up your own mind about it.
This is tangental, but since you brought it up, I find the distinction you try to make between “explaining” and “persuading” weird, because what is “explaining” but persuading the reader to believe something, and the extent to which you’ve successfully explained something is the extent to which you’ve persuaded them to take up the same belief you have that the evidence and conclusions you draw from it are as you presented them. That is, all writing is persuasive writing.
The same is true if we try to reverse the situation, because what is persuading other than explaining something so well that the reader agrees with you, even if your “explanation” is unconventional in terms of what we often think of as explication.
Now there is some difference of intent of the author between what you might call a persuading-mode and an explaining-mode, I see you put “explaining” and “persuading” in quotes to denote your perhaps non-standard use, and perhaps you do this to imply you mean something more like what I’m suggesting in terms of authorial intent, but I suspect we can find more specific terms of the kinds of things that are in and out.
I bring this up because although I’ve never been called out for writing “persuasively” in the LW 2.0 era, I literally think of everything I write as a kind of persuasion—an attempt to say words that will cause the reader to have beliefs of roughly a certain kind after reading my words. And while I can safely ignore what you say about “explaining” and “persuading” and continue to contribute to the community because I have a rich model of what is and is not acceptable to the community, it likely pushes newer folks away from writing things that, on the margin, would be better if they were a little more persuasive because then they would be writing to get me to believe something rather than trying to actively avoid thinking about how the reader might respond to what’s written and writing in response to what that model of the reader suggests needs to be written to get them to update.
I don’t have a proposal for what words to use to describe the category of thing that is out, though; I’ve only gotten as far as noticing the dissonance but not sublimating it.
An explanation communicates an idea without insisting on its relevance to reality (or some other topic). It’s modular. You can then explain its relevance to reality, as another idea that reifies the relevance. Persuasion is doing both at the same time without making it clear. For example, you can explain how to think about a hypothesis to see what observations it predicts, without persuading that the hypothesis is likely.
The important difference to me is that there is no inherent relationship between a description of reality and what you should do with it. I feel like perhaps the difference between the way you and the mods are using these terms comes down to thinking of them primarily as adjectives or as verbs.
Trying to restate your perspective of writing, it seems you always ask whether something is a persuasive description of reality.
That makes sense to me, in an of itself. But if my restatement is correct, notice that the objective of the writing is to describe reality. To make the adjective/verb contrast more clear, consider the difference between these two instances:
* persuasive explanation
* explanatory persuasion
In the first instance, I might be looking for things like: whether the thinking is clear; whether the explanation agrees with my other knowledge; whether it seems to apply to other test cases. In the second instance I would be looking much more at whether they had identified what I want correctly, what they are saying to do about it, and whether the explanations provided suggest that it makes sense. The purposes of writing are different; one is explaining, which is to say describing reality; the other is persuading, which is to say changing beliefs or behavior.
To fix the distinction in other familiar terms: the reader has a map of the territory. Explaining is about the relationship between the map and the territory. Persuading is about where the reader should go on the map.
If you’re informing me of something I prefer bullets. If you’re persuading me of something I prefer paragraphs. I find that bullet points lose out on the ability to include story type data that my system 1 responds to. My ideal world would be each article started with bullets for if it’s something I already mostly agreed with and ended with stories about it for if it was something I’d need convincing of.
That’s an advantage, in my opinion. I have a habit of turning articles into bullet point summaries, and I’ve found that the more difficult something is to turn into a bullet-point summary, the less actual content there is in the article. Ease of transformation into bullet points is a quick, yet remarkably effective heuristic to distinguish insight from insight porn.
This is an interesting point.
In the LW2.0 context, where mods draw a distinction between “explaining” and “persuading”, I think it’s worth noting that a good explanation can still rely on story-type-data to illustrate concepts, even if it’s trying to let you ultimately make up your own mind about it.
This is tangental, but since you brought it up, I find the distinction you try to make between “explaining” and “persuading” weird, because what is “explaining” but persuading the reader to believe something, and the extent to which you’ve successfully explained something is the extent to which you’ve persuaded them to take up the same belief you have that the evidence and conclusions you draw from it are as you presented them. That is, all writing is persuasive writing.
The same is true if we try to reverse the situation, because what is persuading other than explaining something so well that the reader agrees with you, even if your “explanation” is unconventional in terms of what we often think of as explication.
Now there is some difference of intent of the author between what you might call a persuading-mode and an explaining-mode, I see you put “explaining” and “persuading” in quotes to denote your perhaps non-standard use, and perhaps you do this to imply you mean something more like what I’m suggesting in terms of authorial intent, but I suspect we can find more specific terms of the kinds of things that are in and out.
I bring this up because although I’ve never been called out for writing “persuasively” in the LW 2.0 era, I literally think of everything I write as a kind of persuasion—an attempt to say words that will cause the reader to have beliefs of roughly a certain kind after reading my words. And while I can safely ignore what you say about “explaining” and “persuading” and continue to contribute to the community because I have a rich model of what is and is not acceptable to the community, it likely pushes newer folks away from writing things that, on the margin, would be better if they were a little more persuasive because then they would be writing to get me to believe something rather than trying to actively avoid thinking about how the reader might respond to what’s written and writing in response to what that model of the reader suggests needs to be written to get them to update.
I don’t have a proposal for what words to use to describe the category of thing that is out, though; I’ve only gotten as far as noticing the dissonance but not sublimating it.
An explanation communicates an idea without insisting on its relevance to reality (or some other topic). It’s modular. You can then explain its relevance to reality, as another idea that reifies the relevance. Persuasion is doing both at the same time without making it clear. For example, you can explain how to think about a hypothesis to see what observations it predicts, without persuading that the hypothesis is likely.
The important difference to me is that there is no inherent relationship between a description of reality and what you should do with it. I feel like perhaps the difference between the way you and the mods are using these terms comes down to thinking of them primarily as adjectives or as verbs.
Trying to restate your perspective of writing, it seems you always ask whether something is a persuasive description of reality.
That makes sense to me, in an of itself. But if my restatement is correct, notice that the objective of the writing is to describe reality. To make the adjective/verb contrast more clear, consider the difference between these two instances:
* persuasive explanation
* explanatory persuasion
In the first instance, I might be looking for things like: whether the thinking is clear; whether the explanation agrees with my other knowledge; whether it seems to apply to other test cases. In the second instance I would be looking much more at whether they had identified what I want correctly, what they are saying to do about it, and whether the explanations provided suggest that it makes sense. The purposes of writing are different; one is explaining, which is to say describing reality; the other is persuading, which is to say changing beliefs or behavior.
To fix the distinction in other familiar terms: the reader has a map of the territory. Explaining is about the relationship between the map and the territory. Persuading is about where the reader should go on the map.