Created: September 26, 2020
Modified: June 12, 2021
Modified: June 12, 2021
what to say
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- In the course of any person's life, you take in a vast amount of information. You have your own personal experiences, of course, and you also read books, talk to people and hear their thoughts and advice---compressed experiences of many lifetimes. You gain skills and useful habits. You have insights of your own.
- You take in far more than you can ever emit. You observe many sources, but you yourself are only one source. And language, spoken or written, is an exceedingly low-bandwidth channel.
- For what it's worth, your actions more broadly are a higher-bandwidth channel. You can say more through your actions than by words alone. This isn't purely because of bandwidth---actions are also more trustworthy, guided by incentives, and, because they are necessarily concrete, they are directly meaningful in a way that many linguistic thoughts aren't. most learning is by demonstration.
- So what things are worth saying? As an authority figure and a leader, what you say matters. A few strategies one could consider:
- The gradient: your statements are 'update vectors' relative to an existing consensus. This efficiently allocates bits to areas where progress is needed. But it:
- ignores the important work of passing on existing knowledge
- refuses to engage in the trust-building exercise of expressing points of agreement
- relies on your own model of where the consensus is, which will in general be wrong, and even if it's right in general might not be right for your current audience
- doesn't give you practice defending the points of the consensus with which you do agree from those who would attack them
- The entropy fighter:
- The iconoclast:
- The gradient: your statements are 'update vectors' relative to an existing consensus. This efficiently allocates bits to areas where progress is needed. But it:
- When is a taxonomy good? This taxonomy is interesting but maybe not great.