
How to Seem (and Be) Deep   - yarapavan
http://lesswrong.com/lw/k8/how_to_seem_and_be_deep/
======
gojomo
_If you want to sound deep, you can never say anything that is more than a
single step of inferential distance away from your listener's current mental
state._

This is important for more than just sounding deep. Many communications
require calibration to the audience to be effective. An advocate who neglects
this appears to be a crank, speaking mostly to indulge himself rather than
convince others. A teacher who neglects this confuses and eventually loses his
students.

And yet, on the net, where any communication can be excerpted out-of-context
and forwarded to new audiences, every calibration will be 'wrong' for some
readers. Opponents of a viewpoint or teaching will, in fact, be motivated to
forward low-context excerpts to alternate unintended audiences, to discredit
rival speakers.

I don't know an easy solution. Maybe audiences will wise up about this cheap
forward-out-of-context maneuver, and demand better of their
aggregators/forwarders/filters. Or maybe persuaders will be pushed to
specialize in certain narrow ranges of the inferential chains, and avoid
saying anything to other audiences that could possibly be redeployed to
alienate their usual audience. (For example, mass majority politicians.)

~~~
izaidi
There's a third possibility: technology could begin to easily (or
automatically) provide context, without audiences first wising up to the
particular problem you describe. There are plenty of incentives for developing
this sort of thing -- e.g., you'd revolutionize the news industry.

------
jonnathanson
I remember more than a few all-nighters, back in my college days, on big
papers due the next day. Nevermind that I'd neglected to start them earlier;
the problem at hand was coming up with a thesis that was provocative enough to
be engaging on two fronts. First, it had to engage me in order to keep me
writing. Second, the product of my writing had to engage my professor in order
to stand out from the pack. Being "deep" was an easy trick to accomplish both
degrees of engagement.

I didn't have a conscious method at the time, but when I look back at my
madness, I see a few oft-used patterns. The first was to pick a statement in a
text -- preferably one held as common knowledge about the subject -- and
disagree with it. Another technique was to take that same statement, and graft
on some out-of-left-field, tangential implication from it (my college pal Mary
Jane was great at helping me with this kind of thinking). Yet another trick
was to take two authors or arguments believed to be in opposition to one
another, and claim that both were more closely aligned than commonly assumed.
There were endless variations on all of these methods, but all of them shared
the same logical scaffolding outlined in this article.

All of them were problematic.

You see, when you start with the explicit _goal_ of "being deep" or "making a
provocative argument," you run a huge risk of bullshitting for bullshit's
sake. And if you're a great speaker, or a deft wordsmith, your bullshit will
sound clear and striking enough to convince anyone who hears it. Even
yourself. Soon enough, you become the sort of person who can start with pretty
much any claim, no matter how superficially absurd, and then bend sources, and
arguments, and logic, and everything shy of thermodynamics, to prove it out.
This is intellectually lazy, because the entire point of writing a paper, or
proposing a theory, or researching a topic, is to do the up-front legwork of
hypothesis-test-refinement. Deliberate provocation skips the "test" portion of
that pattern, opting instead for style over substance. It predetermines a
conclusion, then makes the conclusion so shiny and pretty that everyone
assumes a great deal of thought went into reaching it.

All of this is, of course, tangential to the author's point. It's also based
on personal experience -- though I have been around enough wise-ass buddies in
my day to know that I'm not the only world class bullshitter ever to hammer
out a college paper. But my point is that I find the idea of setting out to be
"deep" a bit troublesome. Deep _thinking_ is fantastic. But "deep"
presentation is easy to achieve without deep thinking, and it passes muster
99% of the time. It's like Frodo's ring: very powerful, very easy to slip on,
and very hard to take off.

~~~
zyfo
The article didn't do much for me, but this comment did. What you write about
rings very true in my experience of writing papers and having arguments
without a clear goal. One of the better HN comments I've read for a while.

~~~
jonnathanson
Thank you.

The big moral challenge for me was not that I could bullshit my way, quickly
and successfully, through any single paper. Rather, the problem was that this
type of work became _very_ easy and, eventually, routine. I found myself
applying the principles of "deep" bullshit to my actual problem-solving in
real life, and they led me astray more than once. I had to take conscious
stock of what had become a subconscious pattern, excise it painfully, and
learn to rebuild my thought process.

So I guess my overall point is that "How to Seem Deep" and "How to Be Deep"
can be two very different things. The trick is recognizing when one is seeming
deep, and when one is being deep, and not letting the ease of the former
replace the hard work of the latter.

------
sskates
It's funny, because this seems like it gets you a lot of upvotes on Hacker
News as well. The top comment on an article will often be a coherent and
(seemingly) original rebuttal of the articles main points. And then the top
response to the comment will be a coherent and original rebuttal of the
comment.

------
namank
What? This article should be titled how to sound sophisticated (possibly
pretentious) but not "deep".

You want to talk deep? Think things through. Go for the WHY of everything -
from technical systems to relationships to art to everything else you can see,
touch, feel, and comprehend. After some time, you will develop basic
foundations of why and how systems (technical and people) work. Then you will
want to generalize everything into rules and laws. After that into natural
laws. Pretty soon you'll be seeking the first principles in everything. Only
then can you be deep.

Once you have _some_ understanding of the world around you, you'll want to
apply it, test it out. See what works and what doesn't. DO THIS! In fact, this
is arguably the basis of an entrepreneurial mindset.

\-----

"Seem" deep?! YA OK.

 _Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself._ -Doris
Lessing

~~~
ugh
You should really pay attention to the last two paragraphs.

~~~
namank
I did read the last paragraph. IMHO, Its too cyclic (link wise) and ambiguous
to be of much use. But if it really was what the authors main agenda was, then
props to them...except why in the very last paragraph? What is everything
before it? What is this 'seem' business?

You shouldn't write down every answer in the book and hope the reader will
pick the right one. Thats a multiple choice test, not an informed article.

------
brackin
If you want to seem deep attempt to learn to speak E-Prime fluently, you'll
have to use a lot more vocabulary to get your point access.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime>

~~~
JoshTriplett
Seconded. Take it with copious grains of salt, but I've found that it improved
the quality of my writing significantly. I no longer reach for the laziest
verbs. More importantly, I reduce the number of unsupported assertions, and I
find myself writing better justifications and evidence.

------
klausa
>Human brains only run at 100Hz and I responded in realtime, so most of the
work must have been precomputed.

Is the 100Hz some metaphor I'm not getting? Or is it something that's actually
a fact? If it's the latter, does anyone have more informations about this,
because it sounds really fascinating and I'd love to learn more about it.

~~~
niklasl
It is roughly correct, different neurons propagate signals at different speeds
but it is in the ballpark. However, the brain is massively parallel so the
slow clock is not evidence for it precomputing stuff.

~~~
gizmo
We can evaluate a lot of things that are one inferential step away, because of
the parallelism. But we're very bad at bridging more than a few inferential
steps because parallelism is almost of no use there. It's very difficult for a
human brain to think a few chess moves ahead, but incredibly easy to dismiss a
thousand obviously stupid moves in a fraction of a second. The human brain has
to precompute almost everything in order to function.

------
thom
Pretty sure Eliezer missed the #humblebrag tag off that post.

------
srsly
Stop caring about what other people think

~~~
derleth
I will once I'm Warren Buffet rich and can move to my own island.

~~~
suivix
I hope your island has nice healthcare, fiber, and 3G towers.

