Is it really necessary all this verbosity to convey ideas? I feel like all this sugarcoat is just to excesively protect people's feelings, a tendency that is spreading everywhere lately.
To just convey ideas? Of course it's not necessary.
To convince someone to change their world view? This is nowhere near _enough_, just a small start.
They were not talking about couching every fact or snippet taught in physics class getting couched in all this extra "sugarcoating". They were talking about the kind of conversations that almost never go well at all - they're trying to improve the odds of an interaction convincing someone to change their polarized viewpoint from 0.01% to 0.03%.
For that use-case, obviously there's value in exploring different techniques, given the typical technique (scream at them and then block them) doesn't work well at all at actually changing their mind.
No matter how soft and gentle your touch is, when you are trying to change someone else's values, if they are not up to accept other point of views, it will go bad. All this sugarcoat could be interpreted as you trying to patronize them, seeing them as intelectually inferior or who knows what other negative connotation they can infer.
Agreed that patting someone on the head and telling them they're a good boy despite their nazi views isn't the right move, though that's pretty clearly a strawman of what's being suggested here.
Often, I see people arguing straw or steel with either their limited view of the oponents position or with the basic asumption that their oponent is an idiot or malicious.
I think a big part of this topic discussion is that there's a LOT of value in those- that many disagreements are simply down to having a different understanding about context and facts, and that giving the other person the benefit of the doubt can help people navigate those. It actually seems like one of the most relevant cases to me.
And agreed about the nature of many disagreements coming down to context and facts. My comment is aimed at people who seem to insist that other posters don't understand their context or have all the facts, when they actually do and yet continue to disagree.
Economics, sociology and psychology all tend to say very little with very many words to the extent that the message gets lost and people don't even know what they are discussing.
You see it to a lesser extent in software and math too though - just look at any mathematical article on wikipedia. The "dynamic programming" article is a good one for this.
I agree your premise in a limited context: non fiction books.
Non fiction books often pad out very little info into an entire tome simply because that’s one of the few ways you can make money from your idea.
But this doesn’t apply just to economics. The most egregious of this are books about programming languages and architecture if you ask me.
In philosophy and elsewhere, a good author might write a lot but still be concise. That’s just because they have a lot to say. Or they need more examples.
This article wasn’t even that verbose. I don’t see how what he said related to star man though, but that’s a different topic.
I don't know much about sociology and psychology, but I can say that I'm surprised by this characterization of economics. I'm sure you know what you're talking about, but it's my impression that economics is a subject with a lot of depth, and also tries to communicate its ideas to laypeople with concise approximations like "P=MC"
Sometimes, when discussing controversial or polarizing ideas, you do need extra signaling to convey that you're taking them seriously. It would be nice to live in a world wherein this could be taken for granted, and someday perhaps we will. Alas, not in these times.
By the lingo, I assume the author is at least tangentially associated with the online rationalism thing, Slate Star Codex and Yudkowsky and effective altruism and all that.
