The Internet has made defensive writers of us all

http://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-writing

by gourlaysama • 12 years ago

67 38 12 years ago

pchiusano.github.io

tcopeland• 12 years ago

I go back and forth with prefixing my own blog posts - especially the softer ones, like this one on preserving technical knowledge http://thomasleecopeland.com/2014/10/01/preserving-technical... - with disclaimers like "I think" and "from what I've seen", and so forth. Saying "I think" in a blog post that I wrote feels redundant; of course I think this otherwise I wouldn't have written it. But more frequently it's an accurate reflection of how I feel about a topic. In the post above, I'm not making a dogmatic statement that "diagrams are bad", but I'm saying that face to face interviews have been more effective for me.

hyperpape2• 12 years ago

That is hard, but you can be more specific: "In my experience," "I'm confident that", "sometimes it seems", "it is an absolute law that", "there are some circumstances where", "it's hard to balance these considerations, but I...", "I will fight you and your entire family if you disagree".

seventytwo• 12 years ago

That font is awful...

Stratoscope• 12 years ago

You're right, and I hope you don't get downvoted for saying it. I can imagine someone thinking "Why are you complaining about a side issue instead of commenting on the OP's message?"

But the font is the message, or part of it: this entire message is delivered through the font it's displayed in.

And if you can't read the message because of a bad font, what else about it matters?

I only viewed the page in Chrome, but I did try three different machines and OSes. It's a bit hard to read - thin and gray - on a MBP Retina. Very hard to read on a Galaxy Note 3. And a complete mess on a ThinkPad W520 (145DPI display) - extremely thin and gray with malformed characters - look at the lowercase "g" for example. The missing strokes get filled in if you zoom in closer, but even at 175% the font is still too thin and washed out.

Not enjoyable reading on any of these devices!

hyperpape2• 12 years ago

I don't buy this. First, instead of defensive writers, I see people--though I'm not talking about this author--whining that their unclear writing is being "misinterpreted" when it turns out they've implied something dumb.

Second, while I appreciate stylish and direct writing, I'll take bloated but well reasoned writing if I have to. The world is full of writers who "have no ideas, and the ability to express them", but that doesn't help us. Precision and careful thought often push us towards difficult and ugly writing.

Edit: the worst kind of hedge is the one that makes your opinion harder to understand. I'm guilty of adding that pointless "almost" and I've been struggling to overcome that habit for a long time.

tjradcliffe2• 12 years ago

My solution to this has been to learn to write like a Bayesian, which is a useful project because it helps me think like a Bayesian.

The first step in this is to recognize the goal: it is not to prove some proposition true or false, but to show that some proposition is more plausible, given the evidence, than the alternatives. The alternatives should always number more than one, because single-alternative arguments are recipes for false dichotomies and oppositional dynamics, neither of which are useful.

Science--which is the discipline of publicly applying Bayesian reasoning to the results of systematic observation and controlled experiment--is not about proof or truth or falsity. It is about plausibility. This fundamentally changes the goal of any intellectual enterprise.

I liken philosopher's quest for "certainty" to alchemist's search for the secret of turning base metals into gold: despite the many interesting things they learned along the way, the goal itself was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge, which is evidence-based and therefore inherently uncertain. A certain proposition is one that is immune to any further evidence, conceivable or inconceivable (because what we can conceive has nothing to do with what is real). The name for such propositions is "faith", and to a Bayesian this is an epistemic error.

Once we've abandoned the impossible and wrong-headed goal of turning base metals into gold... err... of achieving certainty... we're in a position of acknowledging our priors (which are explicitly represented in Bayesian reasoning: you can't do it without them) and adducing our evidence. Differences of opinion may come down to differences in priors: "I find your evidence for Israel's war crimes unconvincing because I believe anti-Zionists dominate the international news media." Such revelations at least make it clear what we should be arguing with the person about. If we differ radically in our priors, arguing about the posterior plausibility of a particular proposition is probably useless.

If you do all this right (I'm still learning, always learning) it won't come across as hedging, but as reasoning. This is the joy of abandoning the alchemy of certainty.

idlewords• 12 years ago

"I’ve also taken to toning down any rhetorical flourishes that could be interpreted uncharitably in a way that annoys some people. The result: boring writing stripped of a lot of my own personal style"

I read this as "I've become a better writer". 99.99% of the time, what you consider your unique, personal style is just bad writing.

bkirwi• 12 years ago

-- All good writers are alike; all bad writers are bad in their own way.

I'm not too sure about this... there are many ways to be a terrible writer, but most good writers still seem to have a distinctive style. (Is it just that 99.99% of writing is bad writing? Oh, probably.)

jeorgun• 12 years ago

I think this relates very directly to one of PG's essays¹:

    At an art school where I once studied, the students wanted
    most of all to develop a personal style. But if you just try
    to make good things, you'll inevitably do it in a distinctive
    way, just as each person walks in a distinctive way.
    Michelangelo was not trying to paint like Michelangelo. He was
    just trying to paint well; he couldn't help painting like
    Michelangelo.

It's much easier to be distinctive than to be good, so if you're trying to optimize for the former you'll have a much harder time achieving the latter.

¹ http://paulgraham.com/taste.html

BariumBlue• 12 years ago

I think being aware and conscious of what you write isn't necessarily a bad thing.

More ever, internet-writing encourages short, clear and concise sentences and argument points which is a very useful and necessary skill in any social context.

swayvil5• 12 years ago

I see it every day.

For many people communication in online forums is an ego sport. They are here to snipe and crush. If they can interpret your words in a way that makes you look foolish, then that is the interpretation that they will speak to. If they can find a literal inconsistency, then they will take the literal approach. If you speak in contradiction of the conventional view then they will stand atop castle conventionality and pour flaming oil on your head, laughing. If all else fails they will point out grammatic errors.

I see people reacting to this environment. They are hesitant to let their strange opinions dangle free. It definitely inhibits free communication.

I have faith that we will, as a society, pass through this fire and emerge educated. We will all learn to just say "fuck it" and let our special sauce flow.

jseliger• 12 years ago

For many people communication in online forums an ego sport. They are here to snipe and crush

Great comment. For an example of this in action, check out this exchange, from yesterday: http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/2ip045/what_happ... .

The problem also recurs periodically on Hacker News: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/commenting-communit... .

tjradcliffe2• 12 years ago

One would hope we'll get over this, although it's been around as long as online communication has. USENet was the prototype for the modern Web, and it had all the problems we see today, at least in places. Trolls, harassment, the Two-Minutes Hate... they all spread around the world via NNTP.

RA Lafferty wrote a story about how communication between humans in fact involved telepathy. Speech was just an epiphenomenon. No one believed the researchers, and so they developed a device that would suppress telepathic communication between people, and the result was chaos because even though people were still speaking the words, no one was understanding what was said. It's a fun little piece, and I recommend it if you can find it. I remember sometime in the early '90's thinking, "That's whats' going on with newsgroups!"

People see the words and think they're communicating, but they aren't. If you've ever tried to reproduce an experiment based on a description in a scientific paper you'll realize how little information the words contain. Or learn how to do something from a manual. There was a George O Smith story about an ancient Martian device that was found with a manual the engineers were able to translate, but they found the manual contained just enough information to get them into trouble. Without the context of the engineering culture where the device was used it didn't contain nearly enough information. Smith was an electrical engineer, and knew what of he spoke.

These two factors: poverty of information and cultural context make communication hard, even face to face. It is likely we'll get better at it over time, and that will come mostly from appreciating each other's differences and not assuming ignorance and idiocy every time anyone disagrees with us (an attitude I struggle with still...)

walterbell3• 12 years ago

Any chance you recall the name of the Lafferty story, or other details about it? He wrote ~200.

robomartin• 12 years ago

I could not have said it better.

As someone who is older and with a lot more life experience I am often not aligned with HN 20-something culture. I have experienced the flaming oil on my head and other atrocities of mob rule here.

Unlike you, I am not sure this will ever change. To this day I can post comments yet cannot start threads due to a ban from probably three or four years ago that I am absolutely convinced had to do with moderator's political views being opposite mine. I imaging a petulant "I'll show him. Click" event.

Mobs win online because cowards are able to self-identify as part of the "culture" and participate in isolation. They easily derive enjoyment out of, to use your wonderfully descriptive image, standing atop the castle. In real life these people would sit there and hardly participate in face to face conversations.

Anonymity empowers a certain type. I have not seen this kind of thing happen in, for example, LinkedIn, and, within my limited experience, Facebook. I have given full day seminars to groups of hundreds of people at a time in many parts of the world, maybe even a couple of thousand in one occasion. People are polite in person. People are different in person. People spew out less hatred and nonsense in person because they are always afraid of the consequences and they have something to lose. Not here. Not online. And definitely not on HN.

optimiz3• 12 years ago

Often times you can judge the sophistication of an author by the aspects they do and do not take for granted.

...and sometimes you have to call critics the pedantic nitwits that they are.

swayvil5• 12 years ago

That's ad hom and anarchistic. All bile must be veiled. That's an unspoken rule I think. Or maybe just the limits of convenient moderation.

chenelson• 12 years ago

Or perhaps you're simply hiding...and we'd all be better off with your full and honest input.

"This is Culture!"

melvinmt• 12 years ago

It's not just comments, it's also the permanent nature of the internet that will keep haunting your Google results for years if you don't choose your words carefully.

r0s• 12 years ago

What we see here is the death of broadcast communication.

Print, Radio and Television are granted a monopoly of audience attention. (If you can pay the gatekeepers.)

Now the loudest voices face a real crowd, people who will return the volley.

Does this hold us to a higher standard? Is the end of one-way broadcast the real death of journalism as we know it? I hope so.

Mz• 12 years ago

But I wish we’d reflect honestly on whether this level of precision is really warranted in all cases and whether such precision always needs to be completely nailed down up front. Maybe we could all try to exercise a little “ordinary charity” and have a simple conversation sometimes.

For some subjects, the precision is absolutely warranted. Good communication requires people to be on the same page. One of the issues with the Internet is that you can have an extremely diverse audience, and this creates communication challenges that you don't have (or rarely will have) in meatspace. One of the things I have been working on is audience development and how to get my message to the people ready to hear it or who have the background or whatever. This is a challenging thing to do online. Figuring out a means to segment out your audience will help reintroduce the ability to "just have a conversation."

Sadly, I don’t have any concrete proposals and am unsure what to do about all this, but… er, I welcome your comments.

Aside from segmenting out your audience and engaging in audience development/education, which is kind of a different thing, you can model respectful communication and social formality. Social formality is useful in situations where we know little about another person. Given the high diversity you run into online, this is one of the antidotes to the problem.

(Though, really, I am torn about posting this comment for other reasons, one of them being that I often feel like I give away my best ideas and can't figure out how to get money out of what I do. SIGH. Money is a chronic source of stress in my life. :-/ )

tkiley• 12 years ago

This tendency toward defensive communication is a problem for me both online and offline. Although to be honest, I see the exact opposite extreme as a problem as well: hustler-type startup people tend to adopt an "offensive" hyperbolic communication style that can be just as disruptive.

Over the years I have come to appreciate pg's essays as an example of the happy medium: he doesn't pull punches, but he doesn't generalize to the point of hyperbole either, and I find his writing style to be more effective because of this balance.

beloch• 12 years ago

Writing serves many purposes. Often we read to be entertained. Other times we wish to be informed. Personal flair is fine and good when we are writing to entertain, but precision and honesty are even better when we write to inform.

One significant thing the internet has done is to allow scientists and engineers to communicate directly with general audiences without journalists, etc. acting as mediators. Where a journalist might make a false claim because it feels stronger or more compelling, a scientist or engineer will usually add honest qualifications so as not to deceive. Perhaps it is from this new, direct dialogue with non-journalists that the general public has learned to write in this style.

Another possible source of this style is politics. The U.S. is far from the only country where partisan politics have taken root. Parties opposed to one another often have very similar platforms and policies because they know very well what appeals to the majority. With few major differences in policy to distinguish themselves from their opponents, they must instead rely on personality. With that comes the practice of pouncing on an opponents tiniest slip of the tongue (or pen) to chip away at their credibility. Thus, politicians must be as careful as scientists to leave no room for deliberate misinterpretation of their words. We no doubt emulate the defensive communication style of our leaders to at least some degree.

However defensive writing has slipped into the mainstream, it combines with the anonymity of the internet to allow anyone to appear credible beyond their qualifications, provided they are careful. The spirit of scientific peer review, the example of our leaders' incessant jockeying for credibility, and awareness of the fallibility of writers have all encouraged the general public to read with a skeptical eye. The written word is no longer above suspicion. If something we read contains even just one error, can we trust the rest of it? People don't just write defensively now, they read defensively too, and for good reason!

Content now rules over style in most spheres of writing. I find myself nitpicking even fiction these days. It sometimes takes conscious effort to suspend disbelief and simply enjoy a good story in spite of the writer's inability to simulate reality without error. Perhaps we have lost something. However, we have also gained much. Writers are becoming more accountable to the truth and readers are less likely to be duped by lies than ever. Perhaps all that is missing is for honest mistakes to become more acceptable so that writers may be free to take worthy risks without paralyzing fear.

danso2• 12 years ago

I have to agree with the other commenters that what this OP thinks of as "defensive" writing is sometimes just better, more nuanced writing.

For me, it just boils down to a tradeoff. Oh, you want instant access and the ability to influence the billions of people who are on the Internet, and to do it for free? Then don't expect the insulation you get when your writing was previously restricted to a published journal or local newspaper column.

Tangentially related: In the academic world, people have been abuzz about Steven Salatia, a professor who was nearly in the door as a tenured professor at University of Illinois until the board of trustees, made aware of his stream of inflammatory tweets about Israel and Palestine, nixed the offer, leaving Salatia without a job:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/09/10/steven-salait...

Besides espousing the value of academic freedom, Salatia's defense has been: If you had only read my entire tweet stream, you would've seen that I don't hate Israel, and that my seemingly violent sentiments were just rhetorical flourishes when viewed in context.

Sure, I see his argument and I empathize with him. But he's being naive and Pollyanish about communication. The world doesn't have time to explore your mind-palace...each of us are already preoccupied with our own lives and thoughts. If you wanted to make catchy soundbites over a complicated issue so that you could catch our attention amidst the global debate, well, the other side of catchy soundbites is that sometimes they catch you.

Frankly, I don't think the world loses much if, when it comes to complex nuanced issues, we put down the Twitter client and put our thoughts in a medium (no pun intended with Medium) intended for expansive discussion. Does it slow you down? Sure. And that's a good thing.

emotionalcode2• 12 years ago

The world doesn't have time to explore your mind-palace...

But they have time to search social media sites?

If someone wants to twist an argument around to attain the goal they desire, you can take anything out of context and spin it in another direction. Informal language is informal because of this - it never conveys a true objectivity that can not be mutated with the slight of hand - and that includes things that have been invented and things that have not been yet.

There are no real rules to communication, only guidelines that are often informally adjusted via precedent. Politics is often a very tricky tightrope to walk.

Frankly, I don't think the world loses much if, when it comes to complex nuanced issues, we put down the Twitter client and put our thoughts in a medium (no pun intended with Medium) intended for expansive discussion. Does it slow you down? Sure. And that's a good thing.

I do. I think it makes people visually aware of how a collective sentiment can build over small iterations of many dialogues. Maybe that would make people more empathetic to people who have such seemingly inflammatory opinions, and also not feel so alone in having fairly quirky ideas.

danso2• 12 years ago

But they have time to search social media sites?

...er...yes? I mean, that's why social media sites are popular. To go beyond text communication, that's why Instagram is popular even though its photo editing capabilities are less expansive and sophisticated than your camera + GIMP. Social media sites demand little from the producer and the consumer, which is partially why we are so inclined to spend time there instead of writing full blog posts or letters to Mom.

Should society just acclimate itself to be less reactionary to social media quips? Sure, but that's a bit of begging the question there. Social media networks are so strong because they can cause such emotional reaction for such little energy input. I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I halfway assume that there's something physiologically appealing about the whole process, and that something would fight back against the ability for society to collectively take a deep breath and patiently consume the stream of social media.

You and I want both the same thing: patience and empathy in civic discourse. But you have more faith than I do that it can/should happen even when the scales are so lopsided: physically, it gets easier and easier to make and disseminate our thoughts, but our ability to physically process such information does not scale as well.

forrestthewoods• 12 years ago

Comments on the internet are the worst. The majority of comments on technical posts are internet dingleberries who are trying to prove they are smarter than the OP. The more advanced the post the more people come out of the woodwork.

For these reasons my goal for blog posts is high views, low comments. It means you talked about an interesting topic and covered it so thoroughly there was nothing left to be said on the matter.

swayvil5• 12 years ago

The technical forums are gardens compared to the religious forums.

arjie• 12 years ago

Internet comments, and HN is no exception, are often about proving how smart the writer of the comment is. But I feel like it's the opposite of what you describe: Discussions on complex technical subjects are sparse because only the well informed can participate.

Posts like this one spawn larger threads because everyone has an opinion that sounds plausible. It's sort of the same phenomenon that leads to a problem requiring great expertise to understand and solve having lower votes on Stack Overflow compared to something telling you to add a semicolon.

Still, optimizing for fewest comments while successfully describing the subject sounds like a great strategy.

andrewflnr• 12 years ago

There are a couple related issues at hand. I agree that hedging and weasel phrases are an issue. It's too easy to write content-free noise. The classic example in my mind is someone trying to sound "deep" who makes a statement like "Sometimes X..." without saying anything about how to identify such times out what to do about them. However, when this is a problem, it's one of not enough precision, not too much. The goal is to try to write a statement that fits all possible evidence, and so can't be proven wrong, ignoring that it's useless for the same reason.

Defensive writing, on the other hand, is generally a good thing. Precision and careful logic are essential in writing. We don't have the benefit of physical emotional cues. Common sense isn't common, and even if it was there are so many perspectives on the web that you at least need to be thinking about the potential for misunderstanding. You need to try to head off trivial or otherwise unproductive avenues of debate. These are all responsibilities of conscientious communicators. And if you find yourself using a lot of vague language, it's probably better not to say anything. Any other policy is willfully contributing to the proliferation of BS on the web.

Reality is messy so sometimes you have to use imprecise language to describe it. In that case, it may be helpful to try to precisely specify how imprecise you mean to be, or use some other more specific phrase than "sometimes X" or "sort of Y". If it needs to be said, you can usually find a way to add more information.

bmh100• 12 years ago

A more in depth analysis is really needed. What the author does not adequately address is the origin of these behaviors. Writing online is public and global. Holding an unpopular view or offending the wrong group can cost a job or end a career.

DrDimension• 12 years ago

"Find the insight, not the error."

Unfortunately, people on the internet seem to do the opposite.

For a given domain, some people want to learn new things, while others just want to defend their current level of knowledge. Ultimately where a comment adds value depends on whether it is motivated by the former or the latter.

cousin_it• 12 years ago

Damn internet! Always cramping my style!

Blog posts are inherently short-form writing, optimized for getting to the top of Reddit. You have to make bold claims to attract readers, and avoid detailed arguments so they don't fall asleep. See Joel Spolsky's description of the Internet Pundit style of writing here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/backIssues-2010-03.html

If you want your writing to have value beyond the popularity game, and contribute to the state of the art somehow, I think careful reasoning is indispensable for that.

The Internet has made defensive writers of us all

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