tags: #publish links: [[Communication]] created: 2022-02-06 Sun --- # Nuanced communication doesn't work at scale - create one clear messageR Related: [[It scales if it's hard to get wrong, not hard to get right]] From a [Dan Luu thread](https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1487228574608211969) and [a Hacker News comment](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128061&utm_term=comment) *Dan Luu*: > One thing it took me quite a while to understand is how few bits of information it's possible to reliably convey to a large number of people. > ...nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale. > ...most internet commenters can't follow constructions as simple as an AND, and I don't want to be in the business of trying to convey what I'd like to convey to people who won't bother to understand an AND since I'd rather convey nuance > ...if 5% of HN readers get it and 95% miss the point, I view that as a good outcome since was useful for 5% of people and, if you want to convey nuanced information to everyone, I think that's impossible and I don't want to lose the nuance > ...it's a choice between conveying nuance to people who will read and avoiding nuance since most people don't read > > **But it's different if you run a large org.** ==If you send out a nuanced message and 5% of people get it and 95% of people do contradictory things because they understood different parts of the message, that's a disaster.== *another commenter*: > If your org is large, you create one actionable, concrete, clear message, and you stick to it, and you communicate it downwards. *HN thread*: > Nuance requires representing uncertainty and is higher complexity from accounting for multiple special cases. Placing more cognitive load and attentional demands on the receiver. > > Human communication is lossy and decoding can be non-trivial inference. Given that everyone comes with differing priors, the more finer grained and complex details are required in reconstructing message intent, the more likely it is to be misconstrued. Failing to attend to a single core detail can rend meaning. > > At scale the chance for errors to propagate without correction increases. > > Getting rid of fine grained details and communicating a lower entropy message inline with a crowd's biases also ensures it's more likely to survive in a form close to original intent. A good manipulative orator focuses less on truth or content and more on minimizing mismatch between receiver mental states and orator's directional preferences