Who is to blame if people misunderstand you?

Robin Hanson makes the case against disclaimers:

Blog posts are short and have a broad audience. One of the worst things about writing them is having to make disclaimers. Not just legal disclaimers mind you – those are only the tip of an iceberg.

Writing is hard in part because words have many associations that vary among readers. Even when we use carefully choose our words to signal certain associations, we know some readers will instead hear other associations. So in addition to saying what we do mean, we sometimes have to say explicitly what we do not mean.

…

Unfortunately, the problem goes way beyond dumb legal rules. Consider these common presumptions:

* If you say anything about correlates of race you must hate a race.
* If you say anything about genetic correlates of success you are a social Darwinist.
* Any general claim about human behavior is presumed an absolute law without exception unless you add qualifiers like “tends” or “often.”
* If you quote someone you agree with everything they’ve said.
* If you say you prefer option A to option B, you also prefer A to any option C.
* If you say anything nice (or critical) about anything associated with a group or person you are presumed to support (or oppose) them overall.
* If you say anything nice (or critical) about anything associated with an idea or claim you are presumed to support (or oppose) it and related ideas overall.
* If you worry that more A will cost too much of B, you don’t care about B at all.
* If you dislike a proposed solution to a certain problem, you don’t care about that problem.

Most who say such things do not intend these further claims, and their conversation could be much easier if they did not need to constantly disclaim them. But they are stuck in a signaling game; since most who say such things do add the required disclaimers, observers can infer something unusual about the few who do not.

…

I know this problem very well. On the whole I find the current state sub-optimal, but functional. I must admit I do not always add all the ‘necessary’ disclaimers, causing perhaps some people to misunderstand my position on various subjects from time to time, but at the same time implicitly making me participate in gaming the system and moving the equilibrium in the ‘right’ direction. Sometimes the lack of disclaimers cause people to comment in order to question my position and figure out if I mean what they think I mean, using the sub-optimal system of language and interpretation that is currently predominant, which incidentally I find is the optimal response in case you’re in doubt – you can’t lose much by demanding clarification. But I do try, and even if I find the current state sub-optimal, I still think it’s best to take it mainly as a given. Unless Robin figures out some brilliant way to give people incentives to optimize the use of language according to his (and my) preferences, it’s not likely that the problem with excess disclaimers is to be solved any time soon.

Now, there’s always going to be a tradeoff between clarity and efficiency. In the post Robin points out a problem with inefficiency, where I’d much rather focus on clarity. “Writing is hard in part because words have many associations that vary among readers“, Robin says, and that’s correct. But that’s no excuse for not trying. It’s a very common phenomenon to see people argue that if they are misunderstood, it’s the reader’s own fault. But if people misunderstand you, you are very often the one who should take the greater part of the blame. If you fail to formulate your ideas and arguments clearly and so that others understand what you mean, in my experience the problem is far more often a problem with the ideas and arguments in your head, than it is a problem with the specific words you choose. The point being: Writing is not easy, no, but it is also not supposed to be easy, and there are conceivable adverse effects related to making it easier, as the adjustement path will usually contain some degree of loss of clarity. Readers do make logical flaws like the ones RH lists in the post all the time (incidentally, so do writers), and that is annonying. But if you don’t try to anticipate some of the logical flaws they are prone to make absent any elaboration on your part, and adjust your writing accordingly in order to help them figure out just why some of those specific lines of reasoning are faulty, nothing is likely to change.

One might here argue that even if actions undertaken in order to improve efficiency is a public good, well so are actions undertaken in order to improve clarity, following the argument above. However, I consider an effort spent to write more clearly is also an effort spent to become a better and more systematic thinker. That is, focusing on clarity has personal benefits too. So on the whole, the way things are now, I think that on the margin the primary focus object should be clarity, not efficiency. Yes, I am aware that the two covariate somewhat.