Epistemic status: casual observation written as first draft but published as-is because it was unlikely to ever actually get edited. There's a common failure mode I see among EAs and particularly rationalists where they fail to translate their thoughts back when communicating. This post is just explaining what I mean by this. Visual Summary Made with excalidraw Verbal thought Many people think verbally. Some people think pictorially or in some other fashion, but most people, most of the time, construct their thoughts as something-like an ongoing sentence made up of words. For most people, this is a really useful feature! When you want to share things with somebody, the level of 'translation' from your thoughts to language is very low. Everybody I know who struggles with verbal speech thinks in a non-verbal format (which could of course cut both ways causally). Less-verbal thought There are three key problems introduced by rationalism to the usual process above; jargon, the rationalist desire for intense precision, and thinking truly weird thoughts in general. This is less specific to rationalism/EA, but many people think in words which other people don't know. Even when they try to translate their jargon into something more understandable, they underestimate the inferential distance, or they map words poorly (where an equivalent doesn't exist in 'normal English') such that most of the meaning is lost. When this is combined with the rationalist desire for extreme precision in speech and thought, it contributes to unpleasant listening and bad communication. If people can get a 1-sentence summary which means 90% the same thing as what you're thinking, this is (usually!) better than people getting an hour-long lecture on your specific subdomain of AI alignment just to understand a peripheral point. It's ok if people don't know your precise epistemics for a passing comment. No really, I promise. This is worsened further by the fact that a key recommendati