What if the thoughts we think are nudged by our mediums of communication

# What if the thoughts we think are nudged by our mediums of communication When you’re writing a letter on a piece of paper, it feels like it’s almost the same amount of work to transmit a complicated technical idea as it is to talk about the weather. In a typed letter it’s relatively harder to communicate technical ideas because you can’t scribble random pictures or equations but because there’s still high overhead to the whole endeavor, the marginal effort to communicate technical ideas aren’t too much higher. On the other end of the spectrum, social media and texting make it almost impossible to communicate technical ideas. [[It is hard to explore ideas via texting]]. Podcasts are great for transmitting narratives but terrible at transmitting technical ideas. This point was driven home by the Eric Weinstein/Stephen Wolfram Episode of into the Impossible. Wolfram kept wanting to steer towards less technical topics (like peer review) I suspect because the format doesn’t lend itself well to technical discussions. Many-to-many platforms like Slack feel like they have higher overhead to digging into technical topics than say email lists because they encourage your brain to slide off of long blocks of text. Would our thinking be biased away from technical ideas if most communication is happening through media that make it relatively harder to communicate technical ideas? My hunch is yes. The *relative* ease is important here - communication has become faster and easier overall. However, if it’s there’s a lot of overhead to talk about technical topics via text or tweet for both the sender and recipient, I suspect they’ll bias more towards non-technical topics. Modern communication methods feel like they attenuate precise technical ideas more heavily than others. A good meme can quickly reach everybody in the world. You’re unlikely to pass on a good technical idea for many reasons. Again, it’s about the *relative* ease. The narrative I’m tempted to tell is one in which at least some of the [[Stagnation]] hypothesis is explained by the things that smart people talk about shifting to less technical topics because of shifts in our communication media. That there’s less of “hey I was thinking of this weird design - it looks like this” or “hey here’s a weird physics theory - what do you think?” Anecdotally, excellent people *will* start arguing about technical topics if the overhead is low enough. There are of course, many ways this idea could be wrong. This idea may be built on an idealized version of the past in which technical ideas flowed through a republic of letters. The narrative would be wrong if there were many examples of people having highly technical discussions via text. Alternatively, it could just be that modern technical ideas are just harder to communicate in writing. At least before the coronavirus people spent a lot of time interacting in person so it could almost be a natural experiment for this theory - what will happen to the rate of good technical ideas coming out of this period? On the other hand, (asynchronous) video is a pretty good way for transmitting technical ideas. Others have noted the revolution in tacit knowledge transmission via YouTube. However, as far as I’ve seen, people haven’t used it for having two way conversations. [[Has anybody had a highly technical conversation via asynchronous video?]] If this narrative is true, it’s imperative to make better digital tools for communicating highly technical ideas. (Greedily, I just want that anyway) ### Related - [[Precise communication enables other people to make decisions]] - [[Communication can be designed to minimize cognitive load]] - [[It is important to separate type of communication from the communication tool]] - [[Attention is the ultimate scarce resource]]  [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+if+the+thoughts+we+think+are+nudged+by+our+mediums+of+communication) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+if+the+thoughts+we+think+are+nudged+by+our+mediums+of+communication)