You Get About Five Words

You're massively underestimating the upper bound.

I've interacted a bunch recently with members of a group of about 2 million people who recite a 245-word creed twice daily, and assemble weekly to read from an 80,000 word text such that the whole text gets read annually. This is nowhere near a complete accounting of engagement with verbal canon within the group. Each of these practices is preceded and followed by an additional standardized text of substantial length, and many people study full-time a much larger canonical text claiming to interpret the core text.

They also engage in behavior patterns that, while they don't necessarily reflect detailed engagement by each person with the content of the core text, do reflect a lot of fine-grained responsiveness to the larger interpretive canon.

You might be closer for what can be done very quickly (within a single generation) under current conditions. But a political movement plenty of people are newly worried about which likely has thousands of members has a 14-word creed.

Walmart coordinates 2.2 million people directly and millions more indirectly.

Even the boy scouts coordinates 2.7 million.

Religions coordinate, to a greater or lesser extent, far more.

The key to coordination is to not consider yourself as an individual measuring out a ration of words you can force x number of people to read. Most people never read the bible.

I think this post, as promised in the epistemic status, errs on the side of simplistic poetry. I see its core contribution as saying that the more people you want to communicate to, the less you can communicate to them, because the marginal people aren't willing to put in work to understand you, and because it's harder to talk to marginal people who are far away and can't ask clarifying questions or see your facial expressions or hear your tone of voice. The numbers attached (e.g. 'five' and 'thousands of people') seem to not be super precise.

That being said: the numbers are the easiest thing to take away from this post. The title includes the words 'about five' but not the words 'simplifed poetry'. And I'm just not sure about the numbers. The best part of the post is the initial part, which does a calculation and links to a paper to support an order-of-magnitude calculation on how many words you can communicate to people. But as the paragraphs go on, the justifications get less airtight, until it's basically an assertion. I think I understand stylistically why this was done, but at the end of the day that's the trade-off that was made.

So a reader of this post has to ask themselves: Why is the number about five? Is this 'about' meaning that you have a factor of 2 wiggle-room? 10? 100? How do I know that this kicks in once I hit thousands of people, rather than hundreds or millions? If I want to communicate to billions of people, does that go down much? These questions are left unanswered in the post. That would be fine if they were answered somewhere else that was linked, but they aren't. As such, the discerning reader should only believe the conclusion (to the extent they can make it out) if they trust Ray Arnold, the author.

I think plausibly people should trust Ray on this, at least people who know him. But much of the readership of this post doesn't know him and has no reason to trust him on this one.

Overall: this post has a true and important core that can be explained and argued for. But the main surface claim isn't justified in the post or in places the post links to, so I don't think that this was one of the best posts of 2019, either by my standards or by the standards I think the LessWrong community should hold itself to.

I use this concept often, including explicitly thinking about what (about) five words I want to be the takeaway or that would deliver the payload, or that I expect to be the takeaway from something. I also think I've linked to it quite a few times.

I've also used it to remind people that what they are doing won't work because they're trying to communicate too much content through a medium that does not allow it. 

A central problem is how to create building blocks that have a lot more than five words, but where the five words in each block can do a reasonable substitute job when needed.

Hierarchies (which provide information-cheap mechanisms for coordination) and associative processes (which get people with shared information closer, so less information exchange is necessary) both would seem to expand the numbers greatly from those you suggest.

There are examples of fairly complicated cooperation across many millions. For example, all the expectations behind credit card usage take many pages of contracts, which implicitly depend on many volumes of law, which implicitly depend on uncountable bits of history and social norms.

So, I think I optimized this piece a bit too much as poetry at the expense of clarity. (I was trying to keep it brief overall, and have the sections sort of correspond in length to how much reading you could expect people to read at that scale).

Obviously people in the real world do successfully coordinate on things, and this piece doesn't address the various ways you might try to do so. The core claim here is just that if you haven't taken some kind of special effort to ensure your nuanced message will scale, it will probably not scale.

Hierarchies are a way to address the problem. Oral tradition that embeds itself in people's socializing process is a way to address the problem. Smaller groups is a way to address the problem. Social pressure to read a specific thing is a way to address the problem. But each of these address it only in particular ways and come with particular tradeoffs.

Partial Self Review:

There's an obvious set of followup work to be done here, which is to ask "Okay, this post was vague poetry meant to roughly illustrate a point. But, how many words do you actually precisely have?" What are the in-depth models that let you predict precisely how much nuance you have to work with?

Less obvious to me is whether this post should become a longer, more rigorous post, or whether it should stay it's short, poetic self, and have those questions get explored in a different post with different goals. 

Also less obvious to me is how the LessWrong Review should relate to short, poetic posts. I think it's quite important that this post be clearly labeled as poetry, and also, that we consider the work "unfinished" until there is a some kind of post that delves more deeply into these questions. But, for example, I think Babble last year was more like poetry than like a clear model, and it was nonetheless valuable and good to be part of the Best Of book.

So, I'm thinking about this post from two lenses. 

1. What are simple net-improvements I can make to this post, without sacrificing it's overall aim of being short/accessible/poetic?
2. Sketch out the research/theory agenda I'd want to see for the more detailed version.

I did just look over the post, and notice that the poetry... wasn't especially good. There is mild cleverness in having the sections get shorter as they discuss larger coordination-groups. But I think I probably could write a post that was differently poetic. Or, find ways of making a short/accessible version that doesn't bother being poetic but is is nonetheless clear.

I'm worried about every post having to be a rigorous, fully caveated explanation. That might be the right standard for the review, but not obviously.

Some points that should be made somewhere, whether editing the OP or in a followup:

1. Yes, you can invest in processes that help you reach more people, more reliably. But those tools are effortful to build. Those tools are also limited in their capability. You have to figure out how to incentive people to use the tools.

The point of this post is about the default world where you haven't built those tools. And if you're reading this, you almost certainly haven't. (I think the LessWrong team has made some effort to build such tools, but nonetheless, even here, most people haven't actually read the sequences. Most people forget that "Politics is the Mind Killer" actually is making a nuanced claim about "don't use unnecessarily political examples.")

This post is not about "what is the upper bound". But it is about what constraints you (yes, you, personally) are probably working under.

2. Unless you have built a system that preserves perfect nuance, as you add more people, you will gradually lose nuance, until that nuance approaches some minimum. 

What is that minimum?

Well, if you're measuring in wordcount, the lowest conceivable bound is... 1 word. That probably doesn't make much sense. 1 word memes are pretty rare.

I think "2-7 words, but the context is missing" is a typical unit of meme transfer.

 "2-7 words with missing nuance" seems like the eventual minimum. This is also consistent with the "working memory hypothesis", where this bound is specifically based on "how many existing concepts a human can hold together at once." But, that's a bit more theoretical and I'm not sure I'd endorse it after thinking about it more.

It occurs to me that you can end up with negative wordcount/nuance, once people start actively garbling your message. 

This is actually one of my motivations for the OP, now that I think about it. One way or another, your message will eventually distill down to 2-7 words. If you designed the message to distill gracefully, then you get to pick a message that is at least reasonably aligned with your original intent. If you tried to convey a massive nuanced message, there is a good chance it collapses into something you didn't intend, as people attempt to distill it for themselves. (Or, adversaries deliberately misrepresent it)

Oh, speaking of which:

3. Adversaries

Some people will actively misrepresent your idea.

4. More people == less competent people

One gear not spelled out in the OP is that as you coordinate with more people, you're probably coordinating with less competent people. People who are less smart. People with less background knowledge. If you're running a company, people who aren't as skilled but maybe juuust skilled enough to be worth hiring anyway. If you're running a political or religious movement, you're probably taking on a lot of average joes.

This isn't necessarily true. You can run a company with 100,000 elite skilled craftsfolk (though it's hard to find/hire them all without creating a moral maze), or you could have just started with average joes from the beginning so there isn't actually anywhere less sophisticated to go.

But, this is an additional reason that your nuance will be lost as the coordination effort grows.

5. People just... don't read, not reliably, not most of the time. 

This was meant to be an implied basic background fact, but, some rationalists are surprised by this. People have a ton of things competing for their attention, and they don't actually sit and read most things. People skim. They read headlines.

Yes, this is even true of rationalists. (I've had to tell someone who printed out a lovely Solstice Program that included instructions about Solstice that most people will not read it and they have to include the instructions verbally at the event itself if they want anyone to be able to act on the instructions)

6. Games of Telephone

Most larger-scale coordination effort requires multiple chains of "Alice tells Bob tells Charlie." Alice tells Bob a reasonably faithful but incomplete version of the thing. Bob tells Charlie a slightly more garbled version. Charlie only bothers repeating the headline to Donna, and when Donna asks for clarifications Charlie only has Bob's half-remembered explanation, which he garbles further.

Edward only ever hears the headline, and only ever repeats that.

6. People don't remember that much

People remember stuff when they actually think deeply about it repeatedly (especially if they actually use the concept regularly). 

They also remember stuff when they tell their friends about it. They remember stuff when other people remind them.

The Game of Telephone isn't just relevant for how the message gets distorted. It's also relevant for how the message gets repeated. If Alice read the entire blogpost and tries to repeat it faithfully.... but then later mostly hears Donna and Edward and Francine repeating the headline, Alice might end up forgetting most of the details and eventually not even remembering that Politics is the Mindkiller [LW · GW] was largely about Avoiding Unnecessarily Political Examples [LW · GW].

7. Coordination vs "What concepts most people end up interacting with"

A slightly different take from "how many people you're coordinating with" is "given how memes spread, most people who interact with your concept will be interacting with a dumbed down version of it, and the people people who know the concept the more likely it is that most of them know the minimal 2-7 word version."

I'm not sure whether this has implications or not, beyond "be ready for most people to only understand an oversimplified version of your meme."

8. Human Adversaries and Memetic Adversaries

Sometimes humans actively misrepresent your thing on purpose. Also, sometimes humans accidentally repurpose your thing because they had some more commonly-felt-need, and your square-peg concept was the nearest thing they could shove into a round hole. (See: "Avoiding Jargon Confusion [LW · GW].")

There's at least one concept I haven't written up, because I couldn't think of a title that wouldn't automatically get repurposed into a net-harmful bastardization of itself.

Also, people sometimes want your coordination concept to be something that is more convenient for them. (See: "Talent Gaps", which actually means "EA needs a few highly talented people with very specific qualities" but people re-imagined to mean "I'm pretty talented! EA needs me!" and then later were disappointed about)

9. I have very little idea how the scaling effect actually kicks in. I'm much more confident the eventual limit is 2-7 words than under which circumstances that limit kicks in at.

Future Work

What is the actual upper bound for large groups, if you're trying? How hard is it to try that hard?

If you make people dedicate their lives to memorizing an extremely detailed Tome, you can probably get a pretty large amount of shared context. The problem comes if you ever need to change the shared context. (See: people memorizing the Bible, but 2000 years later it turns out a lot of the Bible is false or philosophically antiquated)

What's the most live nuance, that you can have the power to shift over time?

I think this is easiest to get if you have an actual company where people are paid to pay attention. But even then people are pretty busy and lazy. You can start with instilling strong memes about "yes it's actually really god damn important that we all be aligned and read the memo every morning", but I think that requires a pretty significant cultural onboarding.

Scott Alexander's Ars Longa Vita Brevis seems relevant: you can get pretty far if you dedicate a culture to not only figuring out the new concepts to coordinate on, but also learning how to distill new concepts down, address common misconceptions, etc. 

Isn't LessWrong a disproof of this?  Aren't we thousands of people?  If you picked two active LWers at random, do you think the average overlap in their reading material would be 5 words?  More like 100,000, I'd think.

A productive thing to do here would be to try to reconcile the claim that a large number of people can't reasonably be expected to read more than a few words, and the claim that something like EA or Rationalism is possible at anything like the current scale. These are in obvious tension.

Another claim to reconcile with yours would be a claim that there's anything like law going on, or really anything other than gang warfare.

I think this post is excellent, and judging by the comments I diverge from other readers in what I liked about it.

In the first, I endorse the seriously-but-not-literally standard for posting concepts. The community - rightly in my view - is under continuous pressure to provide high quality posts, but when the standard gets too high we start to lose introduction of ideas and instead they just languish in the drafts folder, sometimes for years. In order to preserve the start of the intellectual pipeline, posts of this level must continue to be produced.

In the second, I have long thought that communication was a neglected topic here, particularly when it comes to groups. This post did an excellent job of pointing out how the problems of nuance and scale are in tension, and this has implications for coordination. Putting more emphasis on communication for coordination is going to be important in my view if we want the other ideas developed here to escape here. Even a more rigorous version of the concept would be a huge contribution.

In the third, a meta observation: I notice there is a pretty large segment of commenters who always interpret any numbers present as the thesis. The original title of this post was "You Have Four Words" and commentary focused enough on whether four words was correct that the title was changed to "You Have About Five Words" which is a strictly worse title in my opinion. Amusingly and I assume intentionally the change does illustrate the point. More interestingly the title change caused me to reflect on keeping numbers out of concept posts (and basically any other kind of post not focused on quantifying something), and it occurred to me it was pretty good advice in full generality rather than just in the case of LessWrong. It avoids all sorts of things: accidentally triggering analysis on the numbers, which are not the point; a particular number or statistic being mistakenly repeated as part of the claim, or worse replacing an actual core claim in the reader's memory; it also simply and easily preserves the understanding that rigorous quantification has not been done yet and is work that still needs doing. As a consequence in my head the conclusion is now Few Words, No Numbers.

I think the actual final limit is something like:

Coordinated actions can't take up more bandwidth than someone's working memory (which is something like 7 chunks, and if you're using all 7 chunks then they don't have any spare chunks to handle weird edge cases).

A lot of coordination (and communication) is about reducing the chunk-size of actions. This is why jargon is useful, habits and training are useful (as well as checklists and forms and bureaucracy), since that can condense an otherwise unworkably long instruction into something people can manage.

"Go to the store and get eggs" comes with a bunch of implicit knowledge about cars or bikes or where the store is and what eggs are, etc.

Relevant twitter thread.

I like this direction of thought, and I suspect it is true as a general rule, but ignores the incentive people have for correctly receiving the information, and the structure through which the information is disseminated. Both factors (and probably others I haven't thought of) would increase or decrease how much information could be transferred.

This puts me in mind of the mandatory reading of a narrative memo they use at Amazon, which appears to conform to the 'several blog posts' level of coordination. It is hierarchically enforced, and the people who use it are the senior leadership which has, I assume, a capability distribution heavily weighted towards the top of the scale.

Also relevant is the Things I Learned From Working With a Marketing Advisor [LW · GW] post.

This is a retroactively obvious concept that I'd never seen so clearly stated before, which makes it a fantastic contribution to our repertoire of ideas. I've even used it to sanity-check my statements on social media. Well, I've tried.

Recommended, obviously.

I see where Raemon is going with this, and for a simplified model, where number of words is the only factor, this is at least plausible. Super-simplified models can be useful not only insofar as they make accurate predictions, but because they suggest what a slightly more complex model might look like.

In this case, what other factors play into the number of people you can coordinate with about X words?

Motivation (payment, commitment to a cause, social ties, status) Repetition, word choice, presentation Intelligence of the audience Concreteness and familiarity of the message

Out of all the insights from the field of public communications, why is “you have about five words” the key insight for us to remember?

Maybe because it’s actionable and because our educational training asks us to write 10-page essays far more often than it asks us for five well-chosen words.

Okay, whenever I read this post, I don't get it.

There's some fermi-estimation happening, but the fermi is obviously wrong. As Benquo points out, certain religions have EVERYONE read their book, memorize it, chant it, discuss it every Sunday (or Saturday).

I feel like the post is saying "there are lots of bandwidth problems. the solution to all of them is '5'." and I don't get why 5.

So I read Ray's comment on Daniel Filan's review, where he says:

...at some maximum scale, your coordination-complexity is bottlenecked on a single working-memory-cluster, which (AFAICT based on experience and working memory research) amounts to 3-7 chunks of concepts that people already are familiar with. 

So, I am fairly confident that in the limit it is actually about 5 words +/- 2, because Working Memory Science and some observations about what slogans propagate.

Now THAT is a great point. If you CANNOT assume shared context beyong this idea, and you want to be able to have common knowledge of the idea whilst continuing to make further points... sounds like you get about 5 words.

That does change my mind significantly about the idea. That said I would want a basic version of that worked into the post. I think it can be done, even if it's not the 'rigorous' version Ray wants.

Before reading that, I was going to downvote the post in the review. Now I'm kinda neutral. If Ray says he'll very likely incorporate it in, should it pass review, then I'm moving toward like voting with strength 1-3 on it.

P.S. Zvi suggests "You GET about five words" and I also like that. Would encourage Ray to seriously think about the alternative then pick which one seems best to him.

I've found this valuable to keep in mind.

This immediately got me thinking about politics.

How many voters could tell you what Obama's platform was in 2008? But 70,000,000 of them agreed on "Hope and Change". How many could do the same for Trump? But they agreed on "Make America Great Again". McCain, Romney, and Hillary didn't have a four-words-or-less memorable slogan, and so...

So, an action coordination website [? · GW] should be able to phrase actions in four words?

This idea seems interesting, i'd love to see it somehow more formulated.

Do shorter kickstarter descriptions get funded more?

Do protest events on Facebook which have a shorter description get more attendees?

It probably also depends on personality - if you want to coordinate people who are high in contentiousness, you may need more words. for low contentiousness, less words. and if you want both, than you need to give a clear 4-word heading, and a bunch of nuance below.

Preface: I feel like I'm wearing the clown suit to a black tie event here. I'm new to LW and respect the high standards for discussion. So, I'll treat this an experiment. I'd rather be wrong, downvoted, and (hopefully) enlightened & persuaded than have this lingering suspicion that the emperor has no clothes.

I should also say that I personally care a lot about the topic of communication and brevity, because I have a tendency to say too much at one time and/or use the wrong medium in doing so. If anyone needs to learn how to be brief, it is me, and I'll write a few hundred words if necessary to persuade you of it.

Ok, that said, here are my top two concerns with the article: (1) This article strikes me as muddled and unclear. (i) I don't understand what "get" five words even means. (ii) I don't understand how coordination relates to the core claims or insight. My confusion leads to my second concern: (2) what can I take from this article?

Let's start with the second part. Is the author saying if I'm a CEO of a company of thousands I only "get" five words?

A quick aside: to me, "get" is an example of muddled language. What does the author mean w.r.t. (a) time period; (b) ... struggling for the right words here ... meaning? As to (a), do I "get" five words per message? Or five words some (unspecified) time frame? As to (b), is "get" a proxy for how many words the recipient/audience will read? But reading isn't enough for coordination, so I expect the author means something more. Does the author mean "read and understand" or "read and internalize" or "read and act on"?

Anyhow, due to the paragraph above, I don't know how to convert "You only get five words" into a prediction. In this sense, to me, the claim it isn't even wrong, because I don't know how to put it into practice.

Normally I would stop here, put the article aside, and move on. However, this article is featured here on LW and has many up-votes which suggests that others get a lot of value out of it. So I'm curious: what am I missing? Is there some connection to EA that makes this particularly salient, perhaps?

I have a guess that fans of the article have some translation layer that I'm missing. Perhaps if I could translate what the author means by get and coordination I would have the ah-ha moment.

To that end, would someone be so kind as to (a) summarize the key point(s) as simply as possible; with (b) clear intended meanings for "coordinate" and "get" (as in you only "get" X words) -- including what timeframe we're talking about -- and (c) the logic and evidence for the claims.

It is also possible that I'm not "calibrated" with the stated Epistemic Status:

all numbers are made up and/or sketchily sourced. Post errs on the side of simplistic poetry – take seriously but not literally."

Ok, but what does this mean for the reader? The standards of rationality still apply, right? There should still be some meaningful, clear, testable takeaway, right?

Might LLMs help with this? You could have a 4.3 million word conversation with an LLM (with longer context windows than what's currently available) which could then, in parallel, have similarly long conversations with arbitrarily many members of the organization, adequately addressing specific confusions individually, and perhaps escalating novel confusions to you for clarification. In practice, until the LLMs become entertaining enough, members of the organization may not engage for long enough, but perhaps this lack of seductiveness is temporary.

Seems like today the size of the phone screen defines how much of the text one is willing to read (an unselected someone). It's still unclear what people do with it later and how much they retain. But reading in itself seems not so tightly limited; five-words-at-most is what I expect from billboards. But I also expect them to be more like roadsigns/reminders, not original messages (and really I would be surprised if someone treated the words as something beyond advertisement.)

Also, repeated exposure is a thing, which is often the case when one coordinates many people. And the ability of factions to work together although their "core texts" are very different.