zlacker

I think the problem is that people, even smart people, lack critical thinking skills or don't apply them. It's not the scale that makes the nuanced communication not work, it's the scale that makes you notice it. You could have the same communications with smaller groups and you'd have the same results, you just wouldn't be as likely to get negative feedback indicating it.

It's also ironic to me that someone would try nuanced communication on Twitter, a platform whose very design discourages it. You can't do nuanced communication in 280 characters, but you can do vitriol just fine. So they do the tweet storm which turns off anyone who isn't incredibly interested in what you're saying.

>>mattma+(OP)
I think you're half-right about the critical thinking skills, but the other half is shared context. The bigger the group the less shared context they will have. This gap doesn't necessarily scale linearly, but it also doesn't scale for free unless you're in a cult.

>>mattma+(OP)
> I think the problem is that people, even smart people, lack critical thinking skills or don't apply them.

I agree, but I think it's more nuanced than this: smart people can regularly be observed being unable to think critically during conversations (particularly on certain topics), yet the same people can think critically writing code. Assuming this is true (it's certainly quite true), it seems to me that differences between these two contexts causes the mind to behave differently.

>>mattma+(OP)
This is my (actually quite scary) experience too. I think if we one day crack artificial general intelligence we’ll come to the sad and scary realization that most people are just really good at hiding their lack of understanding and reasoning ability.

>>mister+Ae
The major difference is the synchronicity in communication. When you write code you can sit and ponder. When someone asks you a question in a conversation, you cant just walk away, think about it, and come back 15 minutes later. It's like speed chess vs hours per side. If you have to respond instantly, you move may be good, but you might find a better one given more time.

>>alar44+1n
Agreed, but that is possible on forums, but people often can't do it there either. There is something else going on imho.

>>mister+Ae
Also there is a certain lack of training in clear thinking with words and ideas that are not emphasized in STEM curriculum but are emphasized in the humanities. I took a fair amount of history and literature in college, and while they lack the clarifying reality of equations and axiom systems, the practitioners of such fields are quite good at dissecting statements and pulling out the subtleties of human language based communication. A group of upper level literature students would I think pick up on more nuance than a group of CompSci students. They are also exposed to a lot more nuance in their regular reading and work.

>>lansti+2N
It was several years after I left university before I gained a real appreciation for a course that was made mandatory at the time: History of Science.

At the time I was forced to take the course, it felt pointless to me, but after reading Thomas Kuhn’s book (SoSR) several years later, I can look back and connect the dots.

Learning about the history of science was meant to punctuate a widely held myth, that our civilization has been progressing linearly and cumulatively. Kuhn found that the way textbooks are written create the illusion in the mind of the student that scientific advances have been linear and cumulative, rather than being interrupted by paradigm shifts, as old approaches are abandoned in favor of new ones.

Nuance comes down to being able to view an issue from multiple perspectives, that in a lot of situations, there is often more than one (correct) answer.

>>lansti+2N
> Also there is a certain lack of training in clear thinking with words and ideas that are not emphasized in STEM curriculum but are emphasized in the humanities. I took a fair amount of history and literature in college....

Or the most potent disciplines: epistemology and logic. I believe epistemology and logic when combined with decomposition (something programmers usually have excellent capabilities in) make it fairly easy to determine where the weakest links in any given argument lie. A big problem though (in addition to the fact that we don't teach this sort of thinking): the human mind seems to have evolved to have an extremely strong aversion to exercising these skills on certain topics (something barely taught at all in western curriculum of any kind, the closest being psychology, which doesn't get a lot of respect from most people).

>>ayewo+Tm1
I never took history of science, but read and enjoyed many many essays about the simple description of scientific discoveries, notably by Asimov F&SF essays and Stephen Jay Gould on deep time and geology and so on. Even the development of the gas law and the basics of atomic theory in chemistry is so fascinating.

>>mister+cR4
The whole depending on a proposition for your salary, yeah. And clear and precise arguing can certainly be put into service for obfuscating relatively simple truths. But the skill is useful.