This is a linkpost for https://dkl9.net/essays/unpredictably.html
Please speak unpredictably
37aphyer
10duck_master
3lsusr
3James Camacho
5lsusr
3dkl9
4lsusr
2dkl9
7aphyer
23Razied
7dkl9
5SarahNibs
14thebigmuscle
9lc
7dkl9
4gilch
2Yitz
2KNakamura
1itaibn0
New Comment
Rendering 19/20 comments, sorted by (show more) Click to highlight new comments since:
This text shows another key point: not only should your posts be a surprise, but the kind of surprise that causes good actions.
Clever, but
to the point that I can't predict it
not further. If you increase redundancy, still unpredictable, as here, you probably went too far.
Actually, I feel like even this was pretty predictable: the text was entirely valid English words. If a text-prediction engine were reading through this character-by-character trying to predict the upcoming character, they would have failed on the first few characters of each word, but would still have been able to predict quite a lot: there aren't many words that begin with 'malar'.
I posted it like this anyway rather than aiming for actually unpredictable text because I thought that this text was funnier than a string of entirely random characters.
There are a whole bunch of ways that trying to optimise for unpredictability is not a good idea:
- Most often technical discussions are not just exposition dumps, they're a part of the creative process itself. Me telling you an idea is an essential part of my coming up with the idea. I essentially don't know where I'm going before I get there, so it's impossible for me to optimise for unpredictability on your end.
- This ignores a whoooole bunch of status-effects and other goals of human conversation. The point of conversation is not solely to transmit information. In real life information-transfer is a minuscule part of most conversations: try telling your girlfriend to "speak unpredictably" when she gets home and wants to vent to you about her boss.
- People often don't say what they mean. The process of translating a mental idea into words on-the-fly often results in sequences of words that are very bad at communicating the idea. The only solution to this is to be redundant, repeat the idea multiple times in different ways until you hit one that your interlocutor understands.
Humans are not Vulcans, and we shouldn't try to optimise human communication the way we'd optimise a network protocol.
1 and 2 are absolutely correct, but for specific subsets. Outside such subsets, this optimisation still applies.
3 is correct sometimes as reversed advice. I see your point in 3 often (usually implicit). My post reverses that in response to it sometimes going too far.
It seems I went too far. Hence the expanded original:
Adjust how much to omit based on the concentration and domain-intelligence of the listener. Your starting point should probably err more on the side of "omit more redundancy" than it currently does.
Efficiency trades off with robustness.
If you, the listener/reader, fully understood what I tried to say, it is very very likely that you (specifically you) could have fully understood had I compressed my communication in some ways tailored to you.
It's really bad to leave things out and falsely assume there is shared understanding compared to the alternative.
- Grammar and style aid reading.
- Most predict the usual caveats, the rest need to hear them.
- It's hard to predict where hard communication tasks fail. Being comprehensive helps.
- Optimization is hard. Longer is easier.
- I tried it -- fun and evocative!