I’ve since changed the title to “You have about Five Words” on LessWrong. I just changed it here to keep it consistent.
I didn’t really argue for why “about 5”. My actual guess for the number of words you have is “between 2 and 7.” IConcepts will, in the limit, end up getting compressed into a form that one person can easily/clumsily pass on to another person who’s only kinda paying attention or only reads the headline. It’ll hit some eventual limit, and I think that limit is determined by people’s working memory capacity (about 4-7 chunks)
If you don’t provide a deliberate way to compress the message down, it’ll get compressed for you by memetic selection, and might end up distorting your message.
I don’t actually have strong beliefs about when the 2-7-word limit kicks in. But I observed the EA movement running into problems where nuanced articles got condensed into slogans that EAs misinterpreted (i.e. “EA is Talent Constrained”), so I think it already applies at the level of organization of EA-2018.
I wrote a fairly detailed self-review of this post on the LessWrong 2019 Review last year. Here are some highlights:
I’ve since changed the title to “You have about Five Words” on LessWrong. I just changed it here to keep it consistent.
I didn’t really argue for why “about 5”. My actual guess for the number of words you have is “between 2 and 7.” IConcepts will, in the limit, end up getting compressed into a form that one person can easily/clumsily pass on to another person who’s only kinda paying attention or only reads the headline. It’ll hit some eventual limit, and I think that limit is determined by people’s working memory capacity (about 4-7 chunks)
If you don’t provide a deliberate way to compress the message down, it’ll get compressed for you by memetic selection, and might end up distorting your message.
I don’t actually have strong beliefs about when the 2-7-word limit kicks in. But I observed the EA movement running into problems where nuanced articles got condensed into slogans that EAs misinterpreted (i.e. “EA is Talent Constrained”), so I think it already applies at the level of organization of EA-2018.
See the rest of the review for more nuanced details.