Comment by randusername | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randusername | Hacker News Reader

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> I tend to be very exacting in my word choice. If I used a specific word, I meant it.

You aren't alone. My professional written communication is meticulous. I think carefully about my audience and optimize word choice for very low probability of accidental collision or misinterpretation.

I don't think everyone should communicate this way all the time, but I do think everyone should recognize that loose communication in mixed company can waste a lot of time. My job involves inter-team and inter-department collaboration and I take the time to do it well.

> I feel like people using AI to both read and interpret language is the death of rigorous language.

I agree AI is eroding diction. I don't like the idea of such a heavy inertial force on the evolution and usage of language. Or the idea that it might be grinding off variation in word choice and self-expression.

I think there are bigger negative impacts here than most people realize. For example, it reminds me of the part in Snowcrash about how language variation is important to mitigate the spread and criticality of mind viruses and danger memes. I think you could totally look at modern authoritarianism through this lens, for example.

> think carefully about my audience

Consider that you may not be doing this very well. Or that it is even possible to even know what your audience is (going to be). I have found the less I assume about my audience, and thus the more verbose and elaborate I am, the better the reception of my communication tends to be, on the whole. I'll save the terse and meticulous for people who I know and level with in terms of that preference.

Communication is all about adaptation. It is a dance, in that what you think is precise and clear is never going to be shared among every person you are trying to communicate with. Clearly if your manager passes your doc through an LLM, you made an error in judgement. If this upsets you (and I don't have unlimited energy for this either), you should find more likeminded, or at least sufficient numbers of likeminded people so that it doesn't take all of your time and energy away. There is after all a reason why you get along better with some than others, and communicative preference is one reasons why I think.

Sometimes I thoroughly enjoy having to stretch my mind though. I'd hate to work with only people like me (I have!).

"Clearly if your manager passes your doc through an LLM, you made an error in judgment" It could also be the PM, passing everything through an LLM to make it "more understandable". Clearly, they didn't care enough to check the result.

Agreed, but that's outside my direct sphere of influence. If anyone passes my text through a spell checker, I would use it to adjust my process too.

> I have found the less I assume about my audience, and thus the more verbose and elaborate I am, the better the reception of my communication tends to be, on the whole.

I think knowing your audience is key. Am I creating something meant to be read in 90 seconds by high level leadership to reinforce the importance of the project, or to another team meant to help inform them what is needed on their end, or as an enduring detailed document record meant to show due diligence and proper protocol? I could write a document that contained all of those things and more, and no one read it.

You rarely have no idea who your audience is likely to be. Your town’s local paper, national paper, and financial paper are all written differently for different audiences and different assumptions on shared information, priorities, etc. A local paper is going to focus on impacts to Smalltown USA, where a financial paper is going to focus on market effects and will likely assume its audience has a higher baseline understanding of financial concepts than a local paper would.

People that can tell a good joke is another version of this. If it is the wrong audience or the wrong situation, that joke will fall flat. You have to be able to “read the room” to get people to laugh with you.

> I think knowing your audience is key.

> You rarely have no idea who your audience is likely to be.

Let's agree that it's a sliding scale, especially in corporate settings. Who's your audience when you write documentation?

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