Technically, the complaints were wrong. How could I “fix” the problem of not citing any papers when I had already cited dozens? That’s what I thought for months, during which people continued to read the post and have the same damned reaction. Eventually, I had to confront that even if they were “wrong”, something about my post was causing them to be wrong. Viewed that way, the problem was obvious: The idea that a humidifier could be bad for you is weird and disturbing, and weird and disturbing things are usually wrong so people are skeptical and tend to find ways to dismiss them.
Should they do that?
[Insert long boring polemic on Bayesian rationality]
It’s debatable—but it’s a fact that they do it. So I rewrote the post to be “gentle”. Previously my approach was to sort of tackle the reader and scream “HUMIDIFIERS → PARTICLES! [citation] [citation] [citation] [citation]” and “PARTICLES → DEATH! [citation] [citation] [citation]”. I changed it to start by conceding that ultrasonic humidifiers don’t always make particles and it’s not certain those particular particles cause harm, et cetera, but PEER-REVIEWED RESEARCH PAPERS says these things are possible, so it’s worth thinking about.
After making those changes, no one had the same reaction anymore.
Part of me feels like this is wrong, that it’s disingenuous to tune writing to make people have the reaction you want them to have. After all, I could be wrong, in which case it’s better if my wrongness is more obvious.
At least when I make my reasoning transparent and easy to falsify, I feel like I discard other qualities of writing, because I feel that should be enough. But to get an audience, it’s still important to try to sell it. Not by reverting to opaque reasoning, of course, but perhaps by demonstrating empathy with the reader, understanding of the inferential gap and… I don’t know what else.
Maybe it’s related to the concept in rhetoric of creating a “good audience”: encouraging them to be “attentus, docilis et benevolus”:
attentus (or “attentive”—because you cannot persuade if your audience is not paying attention)
docilis (or “teachable”—because you cannot persuade unless your audience can learn from you)
benevolus (or “benevolent”—because you cannot persuade unless you make a good impression on your audience).
Today, dynomight made an interesting nuance in Observations about writing and commenting on the internet. It seems that just optimizing epistemic legibility may cause people to fail to listen altogether:
At least when I make my reasoning transparent and easy to falsify, I feel like I discard other qualities of writing, because I feel that should be enough. But to get an audience, it’s still important to try to sell it. Not by reverting to opaque reasoning, of course, but perhaps by demonstrating empathy with the reader, understanding of the inferential gap and… I don’t know what else.
Maybe it’s related to the concept in rhetoric of creating a “good audience”: encouraging them to be “attentus, docilis et benevolus”:
attentus (or “attentive”—because you cannot persuade if your audience is not paying attention)
docilis (or “teachable”—because you cannot persuade unless your audience can learn from you)
benevolus (or “benevolent”—because you cannot persuade unless you make a good impression on your audience).