Communication Breakdown
Friday 16 February 2024
It is much easier to miscommunicate than to communicate effectively; communicating effectively is a continuous process of revision whereby one attempts an explanation of an idea, this explanation is met with incomprehension or misinterpretation, followed by another attempt to communicate the same idea (or a revised idea), in light of the response to one’s earlier attempt. Obviously, this is much like the process of science itself, in which one attempts an explanation of nature by making an experiment, observes the experiment, and then makes the necessary revisions before attempting the experiment again (presupposing a slightly different explanation of nature). If you get it wrong, you get lost in the weeds and you’ve blown your life on a dead end; if you get it right, you converge on the truth, but you never entirely arrive at the truth, only a somewhat better approximation of the truth. And that has to be good enough, because reason gives us only so much, and it doesn’t give us metaphysical certainty.
All of my attempts to communicate my thoughts have been a process like this, and as I have attempted new forms of communication, I have learned new lessons about the pitfalls of exposition. When I started blogging in 2008, and when I started giving presentations in 2011, and now that I am regularly producing videos and podcasts, each effort, each medium, teaches me something about communication. Now, it needs to be said that I get very little response to my writing or speaking. If I had experienced robust feedback, my learning curve would have been steeper, and my communications improvement more obvious. But I have been doing this for many years, and the trickle of feedback I have received has been enough to make at least a slight difference, and it has taught me a few things.
Recently I posted a half hour long video (and podcast) on Philosophy of History before Augustine, in which I said a number of things that have been on my mind, and which I have been wanting to say. In my presentations at conferences it has been frustrating to deal with time limits, especially as the implicit concision requirement militates against giving an adequate background to any truly new approach. Again, this is a communications problem. If you spend your twenty minutes on giving the background, you only tell people what they already know, and you never get to your original contribution; if you only give your original contribution without filling in the relevant background, most of the audience isn’t going to follow what you say, and most will have no idea why you are saying the things you are saying. And, of course, if you talk too long, people will tune you out. So you have to try to be interesting (as interesting as possible) over a period of time, and that isn’t easy. This is, indeed, one of my motivations for starting to produce videos: to get better at spoken communication. Having the free form of online monologue available has been something like a feeling of release, since I am now free to talk about anything I like for as long as I like. At a rate of attending one or two conferences a year, what I have posted so far already represents a conference communications effort of a decade.
Now, of course I know that speaking in a video is not the same thing as going to a conference and talking to people in person. Everyone says, and it is true, that the best part of a conference is talking with others at a conference outside the official program. However, this only works if (1) you already know several people in attendance at the conference so there are people to talk to outside the conference program, or (2) you are a celebrity, so that others want to engage with you, or (3) you are garrulous and charismatic and so easily engage with others (the kind of person, my mom would have said, who “never met a stranger”). Mostly none of these have been the case for the conferences I have attended. If you go to a conference as an outsider, and you aren’t famous or charismatic, your opportunities to share ideas outside the conference program will be extremely limited. Another possibility is that you give such a compelling presentation that people come up to talk to you about it later; I have come close to that, but it is never resulted in any sustained communication. Will video presentations offer any better exposure for the ideas, or any better engagement? Only time will tell.
In any case, I received this comment on my Philosophy of History before Augustine:
“Perhaps this is unfair but… two minutes into it, I get the distinct feeling that you are trying to impress other philosophers rather than communicate period, and you haven’t said anything that speaks to the human experience. In this philosophic process, philosophers take what should be a fascinating conversation and make it as dry, flat, and boring as humanly possible. That way no one else is ever going to be able to challenge them, because in order to have the patience to unpack it all and offer an opinion, it takes the same mentality — someone obsessed with the philosopher’s journey and void of passing on true meaning to the masses. All that was a two beer guess. Now, let’s see if I’m right. I hope I’m not.”
I have made a number of grammatical changes to make the above clearer. After the individual left this message, they subsequently erased it, but I had already received the original comment by email. It would certainly be worthwhile input to know what about philosophy of history would speak directly to human experience, would keep the conversation fascinating, and would pass on true meaning to the masses. I would be happy to learn how to do this. However, as the individual notes, having the patience to unpack what someone says implies a similar temperament. This isn’t only true of philosophy. It is also true, for example, of individuals who engage in customizing cars and motorcycles. This example occurs to me because of having recently listened to Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford (mentioned in a PS to Newsletter 270). The work that anyone invests in, say, a customization of a small block Chevy, only will be fully appreciated by someone who is similarly well-versed in small block Chevys. Someone who is learning customization might learn a great deal from someone further along, but they are both on the same path, as it were. The individuals with whom one will be able to effectively communicate concerning that about which one is most passionate, will only be a self-selected minority of other individuals who share the same passion.
When a body of knowledge (or a set of skills) is deemed sufficiently important, a class of individuals will eventually appear who interpret the body of knowledge (or set of skills) to the public. Now, no one thinks of philosophy in these terms today, but I can imagine a philosophical communications specialization as there is now a science communications specialization, in which an individual studies science not in order to do original research, but in order to communicate original research to a mass audience. Of course, philosophy today doesn’t have the prestige of science, but what philosophers do is largely inaccessible to a popular audience, so that a special effort would need to be made by philosophy communications to bridge the gap between philosophy and the public.
I like to think that I am sometimes able to communicate difficult ideas in plain language, but my expository skills leave much to be desired. I could make videos in which I explain every term I employ that isn’t directly taken from ordinary language, and maybe break videos up into bite-sized five or ten minute expositions. This isn’t a bad idea. Maybe I will pursue this someday. In fact, this is sort of what I had in mind when I started, and while I still do explain myself, it probably isn’t sufficient for someone unfamiliar with the material.
When religion dominated society, there was such a function of explaining religion, and it was filled by the clergy, who explained church doctrine to the laity. In our time of secular substitutes for religious belief, there is a clerisy of sorts that ministers to the believers, in the form of radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and now social media. However, this does not seem to be a stable aspect of our society, since these efforts are largely divisive, pulling apart societies rather than serving as sources of social cohesion, which is implied by the role of a clerisy. If a clerisy does more harm than good to its host society, it is not likely to endure for long; macro-parasites, as William McNeill called them, must learn to limit what they take from a host, or they will kill themselves by killing the host.
One melancholy truth that I have realized about industrial society, is that such a society is so productive of wealth that it can sustain itself under a far larger macroparasitic load than any earlier agricultural society. This has put our industrialized society into unprecedented territory in terms of macroparasitic load, so that historical analogies no longer hold good. Recognizing when an historical analogy fails is at least as important as being able to recognize a valid historical analogy that holds. The ability to sustain our larger macroparasitic load is a classic case of a quantitative change eventually adding up to more than the sum of its parts and becoming a qualitative change. This means that the histories of industrialized societies have been, are, and will be qualitatively distinct from the histories of agricultural societies. We do not know what’s coming next. We cannot predict the catastrophic failure of our grotesquely overextended macroparasitic load, any more than we can predict that some qualitatively novel historical development will emerge from the macroparasites that justifies their parasitism by preventing a catastrophic collapse and ushering in a new Golden Age.
I had a rather different kind of comment after I posted last week’s newsletter to LinkedIn (I cross post to more than twenty social media platforms, and I keep a manual checklist to make sure I haven’t forgotten any site), from Giorgio Gaviraghi. I’ve met professor Gaviraghi at a couple of conferences, in 2013 and 2019 if memory serves, and of my newsletter on perennial space programs and the utopian trap he wrote:
“Like most scholars you are mentioning a future for mankind in human related terms, i.e., a human space program or not. I believe that the real threat is the fact that after the singularity, AI smarter than humans and growing, when AIs will assume consciousness of their existence and being in our society they will conquer their independence and proceed without human anticipation. Since they don’t need life support systems, they can easily expand in space, if their mission is expansion, conquer the solar system and proceed beyond where they may meet similar AI species originated from other biological civilizations with the same limitation than ours and needing a specific (Earth) biosystem for subsisting, The future and space domination may be the business of AI type of societies while the biological ones will have a limited territorial and dominance distribution.”
I did discuss more technocentric futurist scenarios in previous newsletters, but there is something of a gap to be filled in terms of laying out the possible forms of non-human space programs, including space programs that might be pursued by AIs or machine consciousness apart from any human effort. A complete taxonomy of spacefaring possibilities would cover human spacefaring, machine spacefaring, and spacefaring of mixed human-artificial agents. Again, we are dealing with the unprecedented, so most historical analogies will fail. Also, as I recently said in my Dresden and the Technology of Mass Destruction, I take it as a fundamental proposition of the philosophy of technology that, before a technology is constructed, we do not know if it will work or not, nor how well or how poorly it will work. This is why proof of concept is so important, but even proof of concept still falls short of proof of practicality.
Allow me to provide an example of this. We still don’t know if better-than-break-even fusion is possible for magnetic confinement or inertial confinement fusion. We know fusion works in nature for gravitational confinement, but that’s not the same thing as magnetic or inertial confinement; these are distinct technologies. Here, again, we run into the problem of technological taxonomies (discussed in newsletter 273): fusion is a workable technology for nature, but it may not be a workable technology for human beings seeking to power technological civilization. But if someone reliably develops better-than-break-even fusion, then we would know it was possible. At present, we don’t even know if it is possible. However, knowing it is possible does not prove that it is practicable. Some laboratory might produce better-than-break-even fusion, but the technology required to do this might be so cumbersome that the process can never really be made practical, and, in this case, fusion as an energy source would then remain a mere historical curiosity.
One of the reasons that twentieth century was so transformed by cars — we could call the twentieth century the Century of the Automobile — was due to the fact that automobile technology proved itself to be eminently practical, i.e., robust, affordable, useful, convenient, capable of being engineered for mass production, open to almost endless design permutations, and so on. This is no trivial property for a technology to possess. Artificial intelligence research, too, might eventually produce something like artificial general intelligence, but not of a practical kind. Bicycles, while being an inexpensive, robust, and convenient technology, didn’t possess utility in the same way that cars did, so that, while there are millions, maybe billions, of bicycles in the world today, no one would think to call the twentieth century the Century of the Bicycle.
