quila's Shortform — LessWrong

(Personal) On writing and (not) speaking

I often struggle to find words and sentences that match what I intend to communicate.

Here are some problems this can cause:

Wordings that are odd or unintuitive to the reader, but that are at least literally correct.^[1]
Not being able express what I mean, and having to choose between not writing it, or risking miscommunication by trying anyways. I tend to choose the former unless I'm writing to a close friend. Unfortunately this means I am unable to express some key insights to a general audience.
Writing taking lots of time: I usually have to iterate many times on words/sentences until I find one which my mind parses as referring to what I intend. In the slowest cases, I might finalize only 2-10 words per minute. Even after iterating, my words are still sometimes interpreted in ways I failed to foresee.

These apply to speaking, too. If I speak what would be the 'first iteration' of a sentence, there's a good chance it won't create an interpretation matching what I intend to communicate. In spoken language I have no chance to constantly 'rewrite' my output before sending it. This is one reason, but not the only reason, that I've had a policy of trying to avoid voice-based communication.

I'm not fully sure what caused this relationship to language. It could be that it's just a byproduct of being autistic. It could also be a byproduct of out-of-distribution childhood abuse.^[2]

^{^}
E.g., once I couldn't find the word 'clusters,' and wrote a complex sentence referring to 'sets of similar' value functions each corresponding to a common alignment failure mode / ASI takeoff training story. (I later found a way to make it much easier to read)
^{^}
(Content warning)
My primary parent was highly abusive, and would punish me for using language in the intuitive 'direct' way about particular instances of that. My early response was to try to euphemize and say-differently in a way that contradicted less the power dynamic / social reality she enforced.
Eventually I learned to model her as a deterministic system and stay silent / fawn.

[anonymous]2y*104

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Emrik2y20

Ah, most relevant: Paul Graham has a recording-of-sorts of himself writing a blog post "Startups in 13 sentences".

1[anonymous]2y

I think I've become better at writing clearly, relative to before. Part of it is just practice. A lesson that also feels relevant: Write very precisely, meaning there is no non-trivial space of possible interpretations that you don't intend. Unless you do this, people may not respond to what you really mean, even if you consider it obvious.

Maybe someone has advice for finalizing-writing faster (not at the expense of clarity)? I think I can usually end up with something that's clear, at least if it's just a basic point that's compatible with the reader's ontology, but it still takes a long time.