Wanna save the world? Learn to write shorter essays with good summaries.
tldr:
The EA Hivemind is limited by communication skill, attention and time.
Brevity costs you time but saves other people time (saves net time for everyone)
you’ll get faster at brevity as you practice
More people having a complete knowledge of the EA blogosphere helps us move forward
My current process:
Write essay.
Write a summary listing all the insights. Essay will probably then be redundant.
Give myself permission to stop if I’m time-constrained
Consider rewriting essay, optimizing for:
Persuasiveness
Subtle nuances
Sharing your thought process to help others use it to generate their own insights
Sharing details if applicable (so others can critique your work)
More brevity
(If the above all made sense to you, you can stop here and go read something else. If not, continue reading my ironically long essay)
Epistemic Effort: I tried to practice what I’m preaching, so I could experience pitfalls myself and adapt the content to reflect it. Spent 5 minutes of pure thinking about unforeseen consequences
I. Why brevity?
This week, there was some juicy drama/controversy in the EA community about intellectual honesty. I spent a lot of time discussing it. Then, when I was done discussing the juicy drama, I thought “I should actually get up-to-speed on recent developments across the EA blogosphere, instead of just participating in juicy drama, and proactively participate in the ‘improve EA intellectual integrity’ project”.
I made a cursory attempt to do so. Then I remembered: there’s a lot of content, and the most rigorous content is long, and then I felt overwhelmed and gave up.
I suspect I am not alone in this sort of thing.
Having more people up to speed on the latest developments is crucial, so we don’t keep rehashing the same arguments. We need people checking each other’s work (because even the most prestigious people and orgs make lots of mistakes and are much more uncertain than people realize). We need creative ideas for solving problems. We need more people understanding the problem-space so they can pick concrete things to work on.
To get there, I think we need better communication.
There’s a lot of axes to communication (such as being rigorous, being attention-grabby and persuasive enough for people to actually read, etc). But one simple axis is “brevity.”
II. Is the rest of your essay necessary?
Will people understand and be persuaded your summary? If not, why?
1). Do they understand why the idea is important?
If not, consider making the case in more detail, or telling a story (that can easily connect with via past emotions to make the case more salient). Depending on how complicated your idea is, you may need to approach this from multiple angles.
2) Do they understand the details of the idea well enough to execute on it?
Maybe, if you’re teaching a complicated skill or concept, you really need a full essay to explain it at all. In that case, use the summary to explain what you hope they’ll get out of the full text, so they can decide if they want that now.
I often find long-form writing that is not brief is valuable for giving the reader time to digest ideas before you throw the next one at them. At least when I’m reading I like to have some filler between the ideas to give me time to digest a thought and get to the next one. If you take away the transitions, stories, and evidence that resides between compact insights you eliminate the opportunity to think while reading. This is why I’m often disappointed my own writing feels as dense as it does and I often try to work on making it less dense so the reader has more space to think before I throw the next context-laden sentence at them.
This both fascinating and strange to me.
If you mean examples, elaboration, and explanation, then, yes, I get what you mean.
OTOH, if you mean “give the reader a mental break”, that invites other alternatives. For example, if you want to encourage people to pause after some text, it might be worthwhile to make it harder to mindlessly jump ahead. Break the flow. This can be done in many ways: vertical space, interactive elements, splitting across pages, and more.
This is a fun design space. So much about reading has evolved over time, with the medium imposing constraints on the process. We have more feasible options now!
Yes, yes, yes. I’ve recently realized these things too. Very much agree.
A few more thoughts on issue 1 besides the group vs. individual benefits.
Brief and well-written articles are still easier and faster to read than worse-written articles even if you’re speed-reading. Insofar as people are concerned about group dilution, brevity is much better.
Potential issues (the results of my 5 minutes of thought)
1) Opportunity cost. Should people practice being brief, over other things (like maybe speedreading, or improving their ability to quickly read academic papers or statistics?)
1a) i.e. Academia isn’t going to change, and if we want scientifically literate ideas, we will need to be better at understanding opaque, jargon-filled academic-ese, or mathy stats stuff. So maybe that’s a better use of time?
1b) On the flipside, 1a is HARD to do for many people, whereas anyone can start practicing being brief without much startup costs
2) People have a limited time to write. Being brief costs time, and so does taking time to think through your ideas in more detail. (Even giving myself 5 minutes to JUST THINK feels kind of aversive to me).
Hmm. I still think brevity is a higher priority that these other things, because it will make all the other things flow faster (both for you, and for everyone around you)
A concrete idea: what if every LessWrong article prominently linked to a summary? Or a small number of highly-ranked summaries? This could reduce the burden on the original author, at the risk of having the second author’s POV differ somewhat.
What if LW went so far as to make summaries the preferred entry ways? Instead of a reader seeing a wall of text, they see a digestible chunk first?
I have been wanting this for a very long time. It isn’t easy nor obvious nor without hard trade-offs. In any case, I don’t know of many online forums nor information sources that really explore the potential here.
Related: why not also include metadata for retractions, corrections, and the like? TurnTrout’s new web site, for example, sometimes uses “info boxes” to say things like “I no longer stand by this line of research”.