Technical Claims

post by Vladimir_Nesov · 2025-04-03T00:30:56.185Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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A blue plastic maple leaf. Detailed observations in words with clear meaning signal their truth, as it's hard to get them centrally wrong by mistake, on both sides of communication. There is no maple leaf, but only because the claim is intentionally false, not because of a mistake. Technical claims, through their form rather than context or meaning or arguments given for them, are either accurate or fabricated, not something in the middle.

A good bug report gives direct observations, not impressions or hypotheses, and it gives them in detail, even what's likely irrelevant. It shows that the bug is real and places it in a distinct spot on the map of all possible bugs. It's difficult to stumble on redundant details that corroborate an incorrect informal description of what's happening or why, even more so if the bug doesn't exist at all. Thus the details of a technical claim are a costly signal of its accuracy, an asymmetric weapon. They would entangle a true claim [LW · GW] with the other truths.

"The purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise."
— Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer

Details can make a claim robust to misinterpretation, or they can split the nuance of its meaning, making it difficult to discern. A rumor-fueled investigative analysis or a philosophical essay can be both detailed and downstream of some true underlying claim or fact, but still tend to admit a wide distribution of plausible interpretations. A sloppy but detailed report on the design of a washing machine can be rife with mistakes, but the general shape of its subject matter will remain clear. The character of details compounds, either grounding a claim more and more to a single spot, or fracturing and burdening its use with the need for interpretive labor and reasoning under uncertainty.

Arguments and not just their bottom line can be technical claims (a technical argument won't even benefit from having a bottom line written down). Details make it easier for an argument to be more technical than its conclusion, when the argument doesn't fall to nuance. This shift to a technical claim that is the argument can be more significant than the argument's relevance or even validity, in making its case. Technicality is a matter of form; the distinction can be applied locally to individual details to improve the overall line of thought, which is the right scale for skills [LW · GW], similarly to local validity [LW · GW]. It's a local constraint on form that's not about validity or truth – one I'm struggling to express with minimal nuance.

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