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Please speak unpredictably
23rd Jul 2023
25aphyer
3lsusr
3James Camacho
5lsusr
3dkl9
4lsusr
2duck_master
1dkl9
5aphyer
14Razied
6dkl9
3GuySrinivasan
6thebigmuscle
2lc
1dkl9
1KNakamura
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16 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 5:35 AM
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.
Your predictable speech displeases both of us. I finish your sentences and am bothered by inefficiency. Thus, speak/write efficiently, to the point that I can't predict it.
Others may also dislike it as I do, but infer the rest at different levels.
Large audiences lower inference standards.
(I figure LessWrong can handle the compressed version)
This contradicts common advice. There is an optimum; do not go arbitrarily far. Perhaps reverse this.