Introduction
Regular readers of my blog know of my epistemic spot check series, where I take claims (evidential or logical) from a work of nonfiction and check to see if they’re well supported. It’s not a total check of correctness: the goal is to rule out things that are obviously wrong/badly formed before investing much time in a work, and to build up my familiarity with its subject.
Before I did epistemic spot checks, I defined an easy-to-read book as, roughly, imparting an understanding of its claims with as little work from me as possible. After epistemic spot checks, I started defining easy to read as “easy to epistemic spot check”. It should be as easy as possible (but no easier) to identify what claims are load-bearing to a work’s conclusions, and figure out how to check them. This is separate from correctness: things can be extremely legibly wrong. The difference is that when something is legibly wrong someone can tell you why, often quite simply. Illegible things just sit there at an unknown level of correctness, giving the audience no way to engage.
There will be more detailed examples later, but real quick: “The English GDP in 1700 was $890324890. I base this on $TECHNIQUE interpretation of tax records, as recorded in $REFERENCE” is very legible (although probably wrong, since I generated the number by banging on my keyboard). “Historically, England was rich” is not. “Historically, England was richer than France” is somewhere in-between.
“It was easy to apply this blog post format I made up to this book” is not a good name, so I’ve taken to calling the collection of traits that make things easy to check “epistemic legibility”, in the James C. Scott sense of the word legible. Legible works are (comparatively) easy to understand, they require less external context, their explanations scale instead of needing to be tailored for each person. They’re easier to productively disagree with, easier to partially agree with instead of forcing a yes or no, and overall easier to integrate into your own models.
[Like everything in life, epistemic legibility is a spectrum, but I’ll talk about it mostly as a binary for readability’s sake]
When people talk about “legible” in the Scott sense they often mean it as a criticism, because pushing processes to be more legible cuts out illegible sources of value. One of the reasons I chose the term here is that I want to be very clear about the costs of legibility and the harms of demanding it in excess. But I also think epistemic legibility leads people to learn more correct things faster and is typically underprovided in discussion.
If I hear an epistemically legible argument, I have a lot of options. I can point out places I think the author missed data that impacts their conclusion, or made an illogical leap. I can notice when I know of evidence supporting their conclusions that they didn’t mention. I can see implications of their conclusions that they didn’t spell out. I can synthesize with other things I know, that the author didn’t include.
If I hear an illegible argument, I have very few options. Perhaps the best case scenario is that it unlocks something I already knew subconsciously but was unable to articulate, or needed permission to admit. This is a huge service! But if I disagree with the argument, or even just find it suspicious, my options are kind of crap. I write a response of equally low legibility, which is unlikely to improve understanding for anyone. Or I could write up a legible case for why I disagree, but that is much more work than responding to a legible original, and often more work than went into the argument I’m responding to, because it’s not obvious what I’m arguing against. I need to argue against many more things to be considered comprehensive. If you believe Y because of X, I can debate X. If you believe Y because …:shrug:… I have to imagine every possible reason you could do so, counter all of them, and then still leave myself open to something I didn’t think of. Which is exhausting.
I could also ask questions, but the more legible an argument is, the easier it is to know what questions matter and the most productive way to ask them.
I could walk away, and I am in fact much more likely to do that with an illegible argument. But that ends up creating a tax on legibility because it makes one easier to argue with, which is the opposite of what I want.
Not everything should be infinitely legible. But I do think more legibility would be good on most margins, that choices of the level of legibility should be made more deliberately, and that we should treat highly legible and illegible works more differently than we currently do. I’d also like a common understanding of legibility so that we can talk about its pluses and minuses, in general or for a particular piece.
This is pretty abstract and the details matter a lot, so I’d like to give some better examples of what I’m gesturing at. In order to reinforce the point that legibility and correctness are orthogonal; this will be a four quadrant model. (Full Post on LW)
In case you'd prefer the EA Forum format, this post was also crossposted here some time ago: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oRx3LeqFdxN2JTANJ/epistemic-legibility
Ah thanks. I should remember to check for that.