On Saying the Obvious

Imagine a substantive Less Wrong comment. It's insightful, polite, easy to understand, and otherwise good. Ideally, you upvote this comment. Now imagine the same comment, only with "obviously" in front. This shouldn't change much, but it does. This word seems to change the comment in multifarious bad ways that I'd rather not try to list.

Uncharitably, I might reduce this whole phenomenon to an example of a mind projection fallacy.

I have a different explanation: this is a status defense mechanism. If you say something that other people find obvious, in a way that suggests that you didn't find it obvious, you lose status-points for not being as smart as them. By adding the word "obviously", you in effect say "please do not infer that I think this remark is a great discovery of mine (and thus that I am ignorant relative to you) from the mere fact that I think it needs to be stated explicitly".

As an added benefit, if the remark turns out not to be obvious to your audience, yet demonstrably true, you gain status for having been smarter than them.

You might think, then, that there is no downside to simply prefacing every statement you think is true with "obviously". Obviously, however ( :-) ), you have to avoid making it transparent what you're doing, and thus restrict your usage of "obvious" to particularly plausible cases. Calibrating this sense of plausibility with your own epistemic powers is one of many mysterious (in the sense of not being spoken about or taught explicitly) techniques of human status negotiation. (And heaven help you if you label "obvious" something that is false...)

I wish I could remember where I read this (or even in what academic field). But some academic once wrote that his most acclaimed, most cited papers were always the ones he thought of as mere summaries of existing knowledge. This made a strong impression on me. In most cases when dealing with high-level ideas, very good restatements of previous research are not only valuable, but likely to make those ideas click for some non-trivial number of readers. A few other thoughts:

• This seems strongly related to the notion of inferential distance -- we tend to underestimate it.

• This is a good way to sum up the Lukeprog era of Less Wrong: There is plenty of low-hanging fruit in merely doing your research and saying the obvious.

• If people are disinclined to say the obvious, I wonder how many conversations on difficult topics consist mostly of talking past one another. Perhaps more than we'd otherwise think.

This is not (to paraphrase Eliezer) a thunderbolt of insight. [...]

This sentence seems exactly the same to me as saying, "This was obvious, but, [...]".

Sometimes, people assert obviousness as a self-deprecating maneuver or to preempt criticism, rather than because they believe that everyone would consider the statement in question obvious.

There a running joke in mathematics that saying that a statement is "obvious" means:

I know this "has to" be true, but don't feel like figuring out how to prove it.

This should be in Main.

Has anyone else had the experience of being afraid to post "obvious" things?

Excellent points, all of them. Well, researched, too. Belongs in Main?

I suppose if one really wants to communicate to the reader that a certain point does not appear very deep to the author, they can start with "It may already be obvious to you that..."

I can't really find any objections to this, and agree that maybe it should be a top level post. I like the comparison with probability. It suggests that we should probably talk more about obvious things, because those are the things we understand well enough to actually talk about.

I like this post, and I would support putting it in Main if you added some material on the signaling implications of calling things "obvious" and integrated them with the rest of the post. (I would be fine with putting it in Main anyway, but it would be better with the added content.)

I'm not sure if these are good ideas, but I think implementing them would decrease the volume of thoughts we cannot think and things we can't say.

Could you explain how you think that would work?

Then let me get something obvious off my chest. I could paraphrase this in terms of UDT to get upvoted, or I could do it the clarity way to craft the kind of LW I want. Here it is:

This is how you change:

Change a thing, change a process or reintrepret.

That's inspired by the of-for approach to policy analysis

I agree with most of this, though occasionally when

(someone says something is obvious) AND (it's not so to me) => I have a knowledge gap I should be looking at.

but yeah, if we have to decide on a norm I'd go with the non-obvious option

I think a better approach than doing away with the notion that obviousness is bad (because, to be honest, if something really is obvious to you, getting a detailed explanation of it can be very annoying), might simply be to explain concepts like inferential distances and mind projection to posters who don't seem to understand them. If people understand those problems of communication and others like them implicitly, they can more easily allow themselves to say something that might be obvious. At least it works that way for me. I won't explain seemingly obvious preconditions of a discussion unless called upon to do so, but I do my best not to assume that everything that might be obvious, is. There are usually plenty of clues. Even if it sometimes requires someone eventually saying "Uh, what does that mean?"

Maybe I'm being terribly optimistic. In my example of one, however, knowing that I have knowledge others might not share is usually enough to make me check if they understand me instead of making the supposition that they do.

According to a professor I once had, in mathematics, "obvious" means something like "something I think is true but don't have a convenient proof for."