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Comment by dj_mc_merlin | Hacker News Reader

Communication is about being understood. Not about crafting the perfect sentence. Even if you craft the perfect sentence, that will be the perfect sentence _for you_, and it might be completely lost on many people, some perhaps even more intelligent than you.

The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure, but the subtext of your comment is "I opened a thesaurus and tried to seem smart", which is why this conversation derailed here. You can't ignore the subtext to craft a mathematically perfect sentence..

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> Communication is about being understood.

> The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure

Indeed, relying on the implicit when the explicit is sufficient [0] does a disservice to one's readers, in whose ability and charity to comprehend my surface text, without presuming confounding subtextual meaning, I have every confidence.

[0] It is not always; some things can only be gestured at, not grasped.

Hear hear!

> Communication is about being understood.

This assertion is in error. Communication is about transmitting information. What happens to that information after the transmissions is beyond scope of communication.

Don't get me wrong -- we have communication companies and classes named "business communication" and fields of inquiry titled "communication." Yet, the common trend to each of these is wrapping the transmission of information up in additional services. Analogous to how OpenAI and Mistral wrap up LLMs that you and I and anyone can run on our own into well-defined managed services. We use the term for these companies "Generative AI" or "LLMs" when in reality they too are wrappers around a much simpler concept.

> This assertion is in error. Communication is about transmitting information.

It seems like you might possibly be leaving out the other 50% of communication (hint: it starts with an "r" and ends with "eceiving")

"Transmission" is per se bidirectional. The individual on the other end has received it, whether they understand it or can do anything useful with it is up to them.

> This assertion is in error. Communication is about transmitting information.

Even if you're correct you've just taken my words at their absolute meaning without trying to understand what I'm saying. If all you care when communicating is transmitting information you will not find much happiness in communication.

I suspect you might be arguing with either an LLM, or someone using LLM help to write their responses...

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