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there are some people i talk to where any disagreement rapidly leads to establishing a common ground and then converging to some crux. there are other people where the more questions i ask, the more it feels like i’m unraveling a huge tangled ball of yarn where every claim i dig into uncovers even more bizarre claims
I have some experience being, "the huge tangled ball of yarn where every claim you dig into seems to uncover even more bizarre claims."
My experience is that you (the digger, not leogao in particular) are making invalid assumptions, usually crude heuristics/intuitions, I point out those invalid assumptions with very precise language, and you completely ignore the precision and come up with a crude heuristic for what I said.
For example, a recent conversation I had on LessWrong:
[...]
The first comment has two crude intuitions:
1. Winning in board games is zero sum -> interactions in board games are zero sum
2. The most prominent wars in my mind are negative sum -> war is negative sum
I immediately point out how these heuristics are not true:
1. Zero sum games with more than two players can contain subgames that are nonzero sum.
2. Evolution is akin to a war, and positive sum for the competitors. Proxy wars can be positive sum for the greater powers.
My best guess is they smoothed out my two claims to:
1. zero sum games are not always zero sum
2. wars, which we all know are negative sum, are positive sum
Then they walk away thinking, "man, I tried to dig into their confused epistemology, but it's such a tangled ball of yarn that every time I follow a thread it just reveals even more bizarre claims. Like come on, he's saying some obviously tautologically false things."
My best guess for the miscommunication is I learned to read/write (long form) from math/coding, and pretty much no one else did. So if I say something in a very particular, precise manner, they—unlike me—never learned to pay attention to the precision. The issue is not my sending channel capacity, but their receiving, and when a packet gets dropped they do not slow down and reread. No, they conclude that the bizarre object they reconstruct must be what was originally transmitted.
I think this also mostly explains your explanations: People who don't converge repeatedly (and from your pe
It's mostly an issue of, "how much effort is communication for each party?"
If you are writing an article that will be read by thousands of people, it makes sense to spend several hours to save each of them a couple minutes.
If you are teaching students who are new to the subject, and presumably have difficulty communicating where their confusion is, it makes sense to spend a lot of effort modelling them and their understanding, so your lecture builds intuitively on top of that instead of them having to contort their brains until it clicks.