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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree. A person who loves to read pop sci physics will be much better at writing clear sentences about physics than a physicist, but the physicist will for sure have a better understanding of physics.

The world is very complex and almost nothing in it can accurately be summarised in a short piece of writing. Being able to making decent summaries is useful but it doesn't show mastery of the subject nor does being unable to do so show lack of mastery. Rather many masters feels that the summaries are woefully inaccurate and therefore be unable to write them while many amateurs will make very clear summaries of fields they understand nothing about.

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You're both wrong.

There, I have been both correct and concise. However, I have not been complete.

You are both wrong is still true, but it is not the whole truth and the whole truth depends on the audience and also your intent.

My intent is to make a tongue in cheek point (no offense meant to the parent and gp). The audience you have little control of but you can write with a particular one in mind.

And to elaborate slightly on why your both wrong. It's because you left out the third c - completeness. This will change depending on your audience and what kind of story your are telling.

This 10000% The guts of a matter can be found in the details and nuance and that’s really hard to boil down. The world is full of recursive rabbit holes wherever you look and we can’t function as humans without some mechanisms to be ok with skipping all the details. We convince ourselves we know something because the stories we tell ourselves about them are concise and make sense. This is no indication of veracity but sufficient for us to go on our merry way. This is an interesting dynamic as it surely is a useful heuristic for operating in a complex world but when we do dive into the details and embrace the nuance we experience a personal scale epistemic rupture and that is not easily communicated to anyone who has not experienced it.

Well, you also have to be /correct/.

There's some tension between correctness and clarity. Both come in degrees, and writing in the top right quadrant is rare. But holding correctness fixed, I think OP (and Feynman) are right that they go together -- ie Corr(correctness, clarity | correctness) is very high.

(In the general case, though, you may be right. Corr(correctness, clarity) is often negative. But one is a bit more important than the other... simple sentences are a dime a dozen. It's the true ones we care about; only then does clarity enter.)

Interestingly enough, the aforementioned quote was just an epigraph for a section whose penultimate point is that “mathematics is nature’s way of showing how sloppy your writing is”, followed by the ultimate point that “formal mathematics is nature’s way of showing you how sloppy your mathematics is”.

great points; we're constantly constrained by a certain cost-structure. Even if we aim to go beyond languages through the introduction of formalizations (mathematical, physics, etc), formal languages, axiomatic systems, theorem provers, etc, the same constraints are still there, just in more abstracted forms.

That begs the question, are consciousness and qualia constrainted by some forms of languages too? How can we go about describing these constraints? It is perhaps only when we are able to outline them that we'll discover greater truths about languages (e.g. as we conduct experiments to verify our models on consciousness).

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