Remember to translate your thoughts back again

[-]johnswentworth3y1610

Precise, but lengthy: Benzodiazepines are [unlikely to cause physiological withdrawal symptoms if stopped appropriately, compared to other drugs] but probably [cause people to narrow the level of anxiety they find tolerable] and [cause them to become less accustomed to using other coping mechanisms, such that people are practically worse off for a period after stopping benzodiazepines], and this is [likely a major contributor to the creation of guidelines which encourage doctors to limit the length of a course of benzodiazepines].
Less precise, but easier to read: Benzodiazepines are not very physiologically addictive (withdrawal symptoms are rare), but may be psychologically addictive (people get used to how they feel), and this is why doctors don't like to prescribe benzodiazepines.
Imprecise and very brief: Benzodiazepines are not very physiologically addictive, but may be psychologically addictive, so doctors try to limit their use.

Personally, if someone told me exactly that precise but lengthy thing, I would consider it one of the highest value-per-word things I had ever heard about a drug. It has so many useful gears in it!

On the other hand, if someone told me that a drug is "psychologically but not physiologically addictive" I'd assume that the claim is either total horseshit, or oversimplification to the point of uselessness. It gives me no useful gears, and tells me so little about what the actual gears-level model even is that I'm left unsure whether there's any underlying gears in the model at all.

Also, there's signal value: I generally expect that most people say the "less precise" things most of the time, not for communications' sake, but because they do not have the gears of the more precise thing in their own head. If someone has enough gears in their model to say the precise thing, then that is extremely important information for me to know; I'll update very differently on claims with a lot of gears attached.

Insofar as this example is representative, I would strongly prefer that people just do the precise but lengthy thing, the vast majority of the time.

[-]brook3y100

I strongly agree with the Johnswentworth's point! I think my most productive discussions have come from a gears-level/first-example style of communication.

What I'm arguing in this post is very much not that this communication style is bad. I'm arguing that many people will stop listening if you jump straight to this, and you should explicitly track this variable in your head when communicating.

Obviously 'know your audience and adjust complexity appropriately' is quite a trivial point, but to me thinking about it with a 'thought-like-ness' frame helps me to actually implement tis by asking "how much translating do I need to do for this audience?"

Maybe I should rewrite the post as "Gears in Conversation" or so.

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke3y41

I guess brook took some time to write down the content if the square brackets even if the thoughts themselves are clear (because they have a lot of gears that do not map on to one to words). If you tried to say the square bracket parts in a spoken conversation it might not be unlikely that you'd stumble and struggle fir words and the result would in practice be worse than option two. At least I notice this problem when I try to do option one on complex topics.

[-]DirectedEvolution3y42

Sometimes, we can include both the expanded and compressed versions - as in this post. In a talk, we can provide digital handouts that expand or compress topics (well-constructed powerpoints do this, although they're often badly made). And in print, we can link to websites, perhaps via QR code, to make it more convenient to go deeper or shallower. These options seem massively underused compared to what would be optimal for efficient learning.

When I take notes, I like to make a multirow table with two columns. On the left, I put 1-2 word bolded summaries of each topic. On the right, I put detailed mechanistic information. I think there's a lot of room for improvement in using the flexibility computers offer in managing text to present summaries at varied levels of detail, permitting users to toggle between them as necessary.

In particular, I'd love to have a "3D text editor." This would give you more options for how to manage text. Some examples would include making it convenient to add various formats of hovertext, "click to expand/summarize" features that let you increase or decrease the complexity of the information presented, and more options for annotations (such as multimedia annotations that can be flexibly linked to individual multiscale chunks of text, but also to things like word groups any time they appear int he text).

[-]brook3y10

This is good for some formats; I think in verbal communication I like to track this because the key variable I'm optimising on is listener attention/time; giving both loses a lot. I find it can be useful to save the gears-level stuff for the cruxes and try to keep the rest brief.

[-]AprilSR3y32

I mostly think the phrase "psychologically addictive" is way less clear than necessary to communicate to me.

I think I would write the paragraph as something vaguely like:

"The physiological withdrawal symptoms of Benzodiazepines can be avoided—but often people have a bad time coming of Benzodiazepines because they start relying on them over other coping mechanisms. So doctors try to avoid them."

It seems possible to come up with something that is both succinct and actually communicates the gears.

[-]Aiyen3y51

What exactly is "speech of appropriate thought-like-ness"? It sound from the rest of the article like moderate precision speech, or something along those lines, but not quite. Perhaps fittingly, there seems to be an inferential gap here. Also seconding johnswentworth here: your precise but lengthy take on benzodiazepines is easy to understand and extremely valuable, at least to someone curious about the subject.

[-]brook3y10

I think "speech of appropriate thought-like-ness" is, unfortunately, wildly contextual. I would have predicted that the precise lengthy take would go down well on LW and especially with ACX readers. This specific causal gears-level type of explanation is common and accepted here, but for audiences that aren't expecting it, it can be jarring and derail a discussion.

Similarly, many audiences are not curious about the subject! Appropriate is the operative word. Sometimes it will be appropriate to gloss over details either because the person is not likely to be interested (and will tune out lengthy sentences about causal models of how doctors behave), or because it's non-central to the discussion at hand.

For instance, if I was chatting to a friend with a medical (but non-rationalist) background about marijuana legalisation, the lengthy take is probably unwise; benzodiazepines are only peripherally relevant to the discussion, and the gears-level take easily leads us into one of several rabbit holes (Are they actually unlikely to cause withdrawal symptoms? What do you mean by unlikely? Does psychological addiction mean precisely that? Is that why those guidelines exist? why are you modelling doctors in this way at all, is that useful? should I be using gears-level models?).

Any of these questions can lead to a fruitful discussion (especially the last few!), but if you have specific reason to keep discussions on track I would save your gears-explanations for cruxes and similar.

[-]Aiyen3y10

I mean, what is the concept “speech of appropriate thoughtness”? Perhaps which speech fits that concept is highly contextual, but what is the concept that you are checking that speech against? Your last comment makes it sound like appropriate level of detail; are you simply using thoughtness here as a synonym for detail (perhaps to indicate the fact that nonverbal thoughts are often extremely highly detailed?), or is there an additional subtlety here? If I say “alright, I’ll try to use appropriate levels of detail when communicating”, is your response “good, you understand my point” or “that’s a start, but you’d do better still if you considered X”?

[-]Richard_Kennaway3y44

Even more brief: "Benzodiazepenes work. That's why doctors don't like to prescribe them."

[-]Richard_Kennaway3y20

To make a "precise but lengthy" statement shorter, make it "precise and brief", not "vague and brief". It is like making a line drawing from a photograph, conveying the essentials with pinpoint clarity, rather than just blurring it out.

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

25

Remember to translate your thoughts back again

25

25

Visual Summary

Verbal thought

Less-verbal thought

Remember to interpret

Conclusion