How to Seem (and Be) Deep | Hacker News Reader

How to Seem (and Be) Deep

lesswrong.com

88 pointsyarapavan21 comments

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

I agree, this was a good comment and a nice followup to the article.

The use of the 'disagreeing with a commonly agreed concept' pattern, whilst useful, can be overused leading to discussions that get railroaded by blockers that gain credibility through the perception of being deep, simply for sake questioning.

Climate change discussions jump to mind here. 'Skeptics' ride on their ability to question fundamental and long-agree d concepts from the ocean and atmospheric sciences. They seem 'deep' in that they have questioned base concepts but in the end their argument is always flawed. Others who perhaps haven't the background or understanding don't see any flawed argument, just a 'deep' questioning of these concepts and thus gain some level of credibility. This can cloud discussions and create mis-information in my opinion.

Another thing is that if this skill is called on too often it becomes a primary strength which is not where u want to be. Corporations are places which mould you to seem deep without necessaiting actuall deep thought.

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.

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.

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"Seem" deep?! YA OK.

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

You should really pay attention to the last two paragraphs.

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.

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

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.

>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.

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.

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.

I had to look this up to. Here is an interesting chunk:

EEG researchers are noticing extremely high brainwave frequencies above Gamma, at up to 100 Hz. Totally opposite speed brainwave frequencies - some at 100 Hz and others at less than 0.5 Hz - have exactly the same states of consciousness associated with them. These high-range brain frequency states are named HyperGamma. Later information showed new evidence of frequencies even higher than this, at almost 200 Hz.named: Lambda brainwave frequencies and states of consciousness.

http://www.bethcoleman.net/gamma.html

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

Stop caring about what other people think

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

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

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