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I think this post, as promised in the epistemic status, errs on the side of simplistic poetry. I see its core contribution as saying that the more people you want to communicate to, the less you can communicate to them, because the marginal people aren't willing to put in work to understand you, and because it's harder to talk to marginal people who are far away and can't ask clarifying questions or see your facial expressions or hear your tone of voice. The numbers attached (e.g. 'five' and 'thousands of people') seem to not be super precise.
That being said: the numbers are the easiest thing to take away from this post. The title includes the words 'about five' but not the words 'simplifed poetry'. And I'm just not sure about the numbers. The best part of the post is the initial part, which does a calculation and links to a paper to support an order-of-magnitude calculation on how many words you can communicate to people. But as the paragraphs go on, the justifications get less airtight, until it's basically an assertion. I think I understand stylistically why this was done, but at the end of the day that's the trade-off that was made.
So a reader of this post has to ask themselves: Why is the number about five? Is this 'about' meaning that you have a factor of 2 wiggle-room? 10? 100? How do I know that this kicks in once I hit thousands of people, rather than hundreds or millions? If I want to communicate to billions of people, does that go down much? These questions are left unanswered in the post. That would be fine if they were answered somewhere else that was linked, but they aren't. As such, the discerning reader should only believe the conclusion (to the extent they can make it out) if they trust Ray Arnold, the author.
I think plausibly people should trust Ray on this, at least people who know him. But much of the readership of this post doesn't know him and has no reason to trust him on this one.
Overall: this post has a true and important core that can be explained and argued for. But the main surface claim isn't justified in the post or in places the post links to, so I don't think that this was one of the best posts of 2019, either by my standards or by the standards I think the LessWrong community should hold itself to.
Not about Gendlin, but following the trail of relating chunks to other things: I wonder if propaganda or cult indoctrination can be described as a malicious chunking process.
I've weighed in against taking the numbers literally elsewhere, but following this thread I suddenly wondered if the work that using few words was doing isn't delivering the chunk, but rather screening out any alternative chunk. If what we are interested in is common knowledge, it isn't getting people to develop a chunk per se that is the challenge; rather everyone has to agree on exac... (read more)
Cross posted from the EA Forum.
Epistemic Status: all numbers are made up and/or sketchily sourced. Post errs on the side of simplistic poetry – take seriously but not literally.
If you want to coordinate with one person on a thing about something nuanced, you can spend as much time as you want talking to them – answering questions in realtime, addressing confusions as you notice them. You can trust them to go off and attempt complex tasks without as much oversight, and you can decide to change your collective plans quickly and nimbly.
You probably speak at around 100 words per minute. That's 6,000 words per hour. If you talk for 3 hours a day, every workday for a year, you can communicate 4.3 million words worth of nuance.
You can have a real conversation with up to 4 people.
(Last year the small organization I work at considered hiring a 5th person. It turned out to be very costly and we decided to wait, and I think the reasons were related to this phenomenon)
If you want to coordinate on something nuanced with, say, 10 people, you realistically can ask them to read a couple books worth of words. A book is maybe 50,000 words, so you have maybe 200,000 words worth of nuance.
Alternately, you can monologue at people, scaling a conversation past the point where people realistically can ask questions. Either way, you need to hope that your books or your monologues happen to address the particular confusions your 10 teammates have.
If you want to coordinate with 100 people, you can ask them to read a few books, but chances are they won't. They might all read a few books worth of stuff, but they won't all have read the same books. The information that they can be coordinated around is more like "several blogposts." If you're trying to coordinate nerds, maybe those blogposts add up to one book because nerds like to read.
If you want to coordinate 1,000 people... you realistically get one blogpost, or maybe one blogpost worth of jargon that's hopefully self-explanatory enough to be useful.
If you want to coordinate thousands of people...
You have about five words.
This has ramifications on how complicated a coordinated effort you can attempt.
What if you need all that nuance and to coordinate thousands of people? What would it look like if the world was filled with complicated problems that required lots of people to solve?
I guess it'd look like this one.