I can't tell if this post is trying to discuss communicating about anything related to AI or alignment or is trying to more specifically discuss communication aimed at general audiences. I'll assume it's discussing arbitrary communication on AI or alignment.

I feel like this post doesn't engage sufficiently with the costs associated with high effort writting and the alteratives to targeting arbitrary lesswrong users interested in alignment.

For instance, when communicating research it's cheaper to instead just communicate to people who are operating within the same rough paradigm and ignore people who aren't sold on the rough premises of this paradigm. If this results in other people having trouble engaging, this seems like a reasonable cost in many cases.

An even narrower approach is to only communicate beliefs in person to people who you frequently talk to.

Agreed—thanks for writing this. I have the sense that there's somewhat of a norm that goes like 'it's better to publish something that not, even if it's unpolished' and while this is not wrong, exactly, I think those who are doing this professionally, or seek to do this professionally, ought to put in the extra effort to polish their work.

I am often reminded of this Jacob Steinhardt comment [LW(p) · GW(p)]. 

Researchers are, in a very substantial sense, professional writers. It does no good to do groundbreaking research if you are unable to communicate what you have done and why it matters to your field. I hope that the work done by the AI existential safety will attract the attention of the broader ML community; I don't think we can do this alone. But for that to happen, there needs to be good work and it must be communicated well.

I've gotta say, I think you're right about the problem, but more wrong than right about the solution. Writing more detailed pieces is rarely the way to communicate clearly outside of the community, because few readers will carefully read all of it. Writing better is often writing more concisely, and using intuition pumps and general arguments that are likely to resonate with your particular target audience. It's also anticipating their emotional hangups with the issue and addressing them.

Not everyone is as logical as LW members, and even rationalists don't read in detail when they feel that the topic is probably silly.

If you're smart, you probably skip some steps when solving problems. That's fine, but don't skip writing them down! A skipped step will confuse somebody. Maybe that "somebody" needed to hear your idea.

Am reminded of those odious papers or physics textbooks that will jump three/four steps between two equations with some handwaving "it's trivial" "obviously" or "left as an exercise to the reader". As the reader, the exercise has sometimes wasted hours or days of my research time that could have been spent doing actual new research rather than trying to divine what the Hell were the original authors thinking or assuming that they didn't write down explicitly.

Be ready and willing to talk and listen, on levels so basic that without context they would seem condescending. "I know the basics, stop talking down to me" is a bad excuse when the basics are still not known.

The number of defenses people have against this sort of thing is pretty obvious in other difficult areas like phenomenology.

"Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you."
― Karl Popper

A person can rationalize the existence of causal pathways where people end up not understanding things that you think are literally impossible to misunderstand, and then very convincingly pretend that that was the causal pathway which led them to where they are, 

and there is also the possibility that someone will follow such a causal pathway towards actually sincerely misunderstanding you and you will falsely accuse them of pretending to misunderstand.

Bah, writing simply and clearly is low status, obscure scripto est summus status.

(...is the instinct you need to overcome.)

This post made me start wondering - have the shard theorists written posts about what they think is the most dangerous realistic alignment failure?

if this was most inspired by my post being super confusing and vague - yeah, it was, and I set out knowing that; more details in a comment I added on my post. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XgEytvLc6xLK2ZeSy/does-anyone-know-how-to-explain-to-yudkowsky-why-he-needs-to?commentId=hdoyZDQNLkSj96DJJ [LW(p) · GW(p)]

but of course agreed on the object level. the post was not intended to be "I know what he's doing wrong, here's what it is". it was a request for comments - that perhaps could have been clearer. It was very much "yeah, so, I don't know what I'm trying to say, help?" not a coherent argument.

I feel like a substantial amount of disagreement between alignment researchers are not object-level but semantic disagreements, and I remember seeing instances where person X writes a post about how he/she disagrees with a point that person Y made, with person Y responding about how that wasn't even the point at all. In many cases, it appears that simply saying what you don't mean [LW · GW] could have solved a lot of the unnecessary misunderstandings.

Everyone, everyone, literally everyone in AI alignment is severely wrong about at least one core thing, and disagreements still persist on seemingly-obviously-foolish things.

If by 'severely wrong about at least one core thing' you just mean 'systemically severely miscalibrated on some very important topic ', then my guess is that many people operating in the rough prosaic alignment prosaic alignment paradigm probably don't suffer from this issue. It's just not that hard to be roughly calibrated. This is perhaps a random technical point.

Apparently clarity is hard. Because although I agree that it's essential to communicate clearly, it took significant wrapping my head around it to digest this post, to identify its thrust. I thought I had it eventually, but looking at comments it seems I wasn't the only one not sure.

I am not saying this to be snarky. I find this to be one of the clearer posts on LessWrong; I am usually lost in jargon I don't know. (Inferential gaps? General intelligence factor g?) But despite its relative clarity, it's still a slog.

I still admire the effort, and hope everyone will listen.

This has some really insightful content. I agree with the sentiment that good communication is on you, the reader and future writer. On me as a writer.

But it's missing a huge factor. You're assuming that someone will read your prose. That is not a given. In fact, whether someone reads at all, and if they do, with a hostile or friendly mindset, are the most important things.

Bookmarking for reference. We need to write better. How to do that is not si.ple, but it is worthy of thought and discussion.

Use italics, as well as commas (and parentheticals!), to reduce the ambiguity in how somebody should parse a sentence when reading it. Decouple your emotional reaction to what you're reading, and then still write with that in mind.

When it comes to italics, it's worth thinking about the associations. Style-guides like The Chicago Manual of Style don't recommend adding italics to words like "decouple" and "still". 

The genre of texts that puts italics around words like that is sleazy online sale websites. I remember someone writing on LessWrong a while ago that using italics like that is a tell for crackpot writing. 

If you want a piece of writing to be taken seriously, overusing italics can be harmful. 

if you’re smart, you probably skip some steps when solving problems. That’s fine, but don’t skip writing them down! A skipped step will confuse somebody. Maybe that “somebody” needed to hear your idea.

This is something I've noticed over and over, to the extent that I've never seen a distillation that's both short and complete.

Most recently , here.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FDnLNvNqDifsviJyW/a-concise-sum-up-of-the-basic-argument-for-ai-doom?commentId=krHAdQMhGnLtxkt7C [LW(p) · GW(p)]

The odd thing is that many people here are coders, and the skill of making everything explicit in writing is similar to the skill of defining variables before you use them.

Make it obvious which (groupings of words) within (the sentences that you write) belong together. This helps people "parse" your

You're missing some words here.

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

Whilst perhaps introducing some issues related to oversimplification, I feel like GPT could be used to somewhat help with this problem. An initial idea would be to embed all posts to make catching up on the literature / filling knowledge gaps easier. But I'm sure there are other more creative solutions that could be used too.

AI safety/alignment is pre-paradigmatic. Every [LW · GW] word in this [? · GW] sentence [LW · GW] is [LW · GW] a [LW · GW] hyperlink [LW · GW] to [LW · GW] an [LW · GW] AI [LW · GW] safety [LW · GW] approach [LW · GW]. Many of them overlap. ...

Yes. But it doesn't matter because all (well, I guess, most) of the authors agree that AI Alignment is needed and understand deeply so because they have read the Sequences.

Many of these people have even read the same Sequences.

Maybe not all of them, and maybe a part is just trusting the community. But the community shares parts that are not pre-paradigmatic. Sure, the solution is open, unfortunately, very much so. And on that I agree. But when people outside of the community complain, that is very much like creationists coming to a biology class - except they can't be kicked out so easily, because alignment is a niche science that suddenly made it into the spotlight.

The rest of this will be about how the community here does do the things you demand. Yudkowsky specifically. Beating the same points as you.

Write super clearly and super specifically.

See: The Sequences [? · GW]. The original ones. Those published as a book [? · GW]. Nicely ordered and curated. There are reading groups about it [? · GW]. 

Be ready and willing to talk and listen, on levels so basic that without context they would seem condescending. "I know the basics, stop talking down to me" is a bad excuse when the basics are still not known.

Yes, that was the case when the Sequences were written and discussed ten years back. 

Draw diagrams. Draw cartoons. Draw flowcharts with boxes and arrows. The cheesier, the more "obvious", the better.

You mean like (from here [LW · GW])

or  (from here [? · GW])

or this (from here [LW · GW]), oh, that's not cheesy enough, how about (from here [LW · GW])

or (from here [LW · GW], or The Cartoon Guide to Löb's Theorem [LW · GW])

Or many other [? · GW].

If you're smart, you probably skip some steps when solving problems. That's fine, but don't skip writing them down! A skipped step will confuse somebody. Maybe that "somebody" needed to hear your idea.

You mean Inferential Distance [? · GW] (list of 50 posts)?

Read The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. You can skip chapter 6 and the appendices, but read the rest. Know the rules of "good writing". Then make different tradeoffs, sacrificing beauty for clarity. Even when the result is "overwritten" or "repetitive".

You mean Human's Guide to Words [? · GW] (a 25 post sequence from 2008)?

Link (pages that contain your baseline assumptions) liberally. When you see one linked, read it at least once.

You mean, as in the Sequence?

Use cheesy "A therefore B" formal-logic syllogisms, even if you're not at "that low a level of abstraction". Believe me, it still makes everything clearer.

You mean as on Arbital? Like the Introduction to Bayes' Rule?

Repeat your main points. Summarize your main points. Use section headers and bullet points and numbered lists. Color-highlight and number-subscript the same word when it's used in different contexts ("apple1 is not apple2").

Dito.

Do all of this to the point of self-parody. Then maybe, just maybe, someone will understand you.

Except all of that was done, and some people understood, but unfortunately, those people complaining now didn't.