The Philosophy Writing Management Triangle

Pfhorrest

In philosophy we are taught a mnemonic to help ensure our writing will be as clear, concise, and unambiguous as possible: to write for an audience assumed to be “stupid, lazy, and mean”.

- “Stupid” in that they’re not just going to understand you right away, so you need to really explain yourself clearly.
- “Lazy” in that they’re not going to put in any effort to understand you, so you need to spoon-feed it to them very concisely.
- “Mean” in that if they understand you at all it will be in the least charitable way, so you need to unambiguously explain exactly what you do and don't mean so you can't be misinterpreted.

I propose that like the famous Project Management Triangle (“good, fast, cheap — pick any two”), in practice we can at best write for an audience that is any two of these things, but not all three at once.

You can write for a stupid and lazy audience, with clear, concise explanations, only if you can assume they’re charitable enough to look for your intended meaning without lengthy disclaimers and clarifications.

You can write for a stupid and mean audience, with detailed explanations and a fortress of disclaimers and clarifications, only if you can assume they’re patient enough to actually read all of that in full.

You can write for a lazy and mean audience, using very concise, precise, unambiguous technical language, only if you can assume that they’re smart enough to understand all that.

To get through to an audience, they must be at least one of those three things:
- Smart enough to understand precise technical language
- Patient enough to read through a fortress of clarifications, or
- Charitable enough to look your intended meaning.

Any audience that is none of those things will be unreachable no matter how much you try, and the more effort you put into fortifying against one kind of vice, the more you sacrifice toward your defense against at least one of the other two.

Possibility

↪Pfhorrest

I can relate to this. My day job is marketing communications for a school. Our parents and staff would be predominantly lazy and mean, so while my key aims are to reduce ambiguity and verbosity, I also rely on building consistency of terminology, familiar patterns and well-worn conventions so they feel smart enough to understand the information.

boethius

In philosophy we are taught a mnemonic to help ensure our writing will be as clear, concise, and unambiguous as possible: to write for an audience assumed to be “stupid, lazy, and mean”. — Pfhorrest

Whoever taught you this is an idiot.

Essentially all of the philosophical cannon, however you want to define it, does not assume the audience is stupid, lazy and mean, nor any combination. Which of the philosophers implemented such maxims?

You are referring to advice intended for commercial writing, not philosophical writing.

Furthermore, it is only good advice for commercial writing because mainstream news works for advertisers and not readers, and advertisers do not want any critical analysis of their practices nor the corrupt status quo and so it's safest to simply not have anyone capable of critical analysis on the payroll. When writers and journalists are fired for saying something "controversial" (such as noting the propaganda model of how the mainstream media operates stands up to scrutiny) it is not the case that their readers lost interest in them.

It is more accurate to say "if you want to be hired by a mainstream and historically prestigious media institution -- with that prestige built up before the advertiser imperative and almost gone now -- then you should yourself be stupid, lazy and mean, as that's the basis of a 'proper' career in writing".

Pfhorrest

Whoever taught you this is an idiot. — boethius

You are referring to advice intended for commercial writing, not philosophical writing. — boethius

It was literally taught by many of my philosophy professors, and if you google “lazy stupid and mean” together with “philosophy” and “writing” you’ll find plenty if hand-outs from professors at various universities advising exactly that in those words.

boethius

It was literally taught by many of my philosophy professors — Pfhorrest

I have zero qualms calling your philosophy professors idiots.

Let them come here to defend this adage themselves if you are certain of their authority on this subject.

If they do not, let them know it's a stupid, lazy and mean thing to leave you hanging like this, and indeed everyone else here that could benefit from their wisdom.

But if you think carefully, you may find that they are following the same commercial imperative I describe, both dreaming of success in the mainstream media as well as navigating similar commercial imperatives within the academic system (i.e. what commercial value is philosophy? to get a writing job! how do you do that? Being stupid, lazy and mean enough to shoo away people from the small cracks in the echo chamber you've been posted to guard).

unenlightened

I wasn't taught that mnemonic. It doesn't look to me to be a good recipe for communication (because communication is a two way process), and thus a really poor recipe for education.

I notice that I am a person wishing to communicate with other persons. So if I have regard for this mnemonic, I would have to assume that I too am lazy stupid and mean. think I would post a lot less...

But here at least, the lazy have no reason to post, the mean have no reason to share their thoughts, and the stupid are easy to ignore for the most part. So why not assume that we are all intelligent, generous, and diligent? We could call it 'The Principle of Charity.'

I like sushi

↪unenlightened

I remember such ideas being parroted in physics classes when writing up experiments - works for that because every, ‘seemingly pointless,’ detail matters if experiments are to be repeated.

It that sense, for scientific writing up scientific experiments, it’s a pretty solid base to start from.

Amity

In philosophy we are taught a mnemonic to help ensure our writing will be as clear, concise, and unambiguous as possible: to write for an audience assumed to be “stupid, lazy, and mean”. — Pfhorrest

Also taught to reference quotes to give context.

From : 'Guidelines on writing a philosophy paper'.

3. Be concise, but explain yourself fully

http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/writing.html

180 Proof

... the lazy have no reason to post, the mean have no reason to share their thoughts, and the stupid are easy to ignore for the most part. So why not assume that we are all intelligent, generous, and diligent? We could call it 'The Principle of Charity.' — unenlightened

:up:

Pantagruel

Whoever taught you this is an idiot.

Essentially all of the philosophical cannon, however you want to define it, does not assume the audience is stupid, lazy and mean, nor any combination. Which of the philosophers implemented such maxims?

You are referring to advice intended for commercial writing, not philosophical writing — boethius

I don't necessarily endorse the implied ad hominen here, but I do concur that this mnemonic falls more in the way of an heuristic than a principle. I used write in tortuously complex sentences that required you to be completely in sync with the ideas. I liked the way it read. Eventually I realized that readability was, in itself, a philosophical virtue. All I did was break things up, turn subordinate clauses into sentences.

Simple, concise, clear. I think think these are the underlying philosophical virtues to which writing should aspire. I think these are the underlying objectives of these heuristics.

unenlightened

I remember such ideas being parroted in physics classes when writing up experiments - works for that because every, ‘seemingly pointless,’ detail matters if experiments are to be repeated. — I like sushi

It explains why social sciences are in such an appalling state. It is an inherently authoritarian dogmatic attitude to take that might be appropriate in the lower reaches of shut up and calculate physics to a very limited extent. I might ask why anyone wants to even try to teach these people that one has clearly nothing to learn from, except that would be to take the uncharitable position I am rejecting.

Communicate clearly, completely and with detail of course is another matter. Or should I charitably assume that this is what is really meant, and the universal insult is just 'banter'?

Jamal

Any audience that is none of those things will be unreachable no matter how much you try, and the more effort you put into fortifying against one kind of vice, the more you sacrifice toward your defense against at least one of the other two. — Pfhorrest

I think you're right. And in particular, fortifying your writing against mean readers can result in verbosity, with, as you say, "a fortress of disclaimers and clarifications". Scruton said that "philosophers have become so nervous of their nit-picking colleagues, that they dot every i and cross every t, lest they should be accused of slap-dash thinking".

I can see the point of the triangle, but writing for the mean, while it might encourage you to anticipate objections and so on, mostly just promotes ponderous prose. So my solution is: be clear (for the stupid) and concise (for the lazy), and forget about those who don't apply the principle of charity, the meanies. Like this:

You can write for a stupid and lazy audience, with clear, concise explanations, only if you can assume they’re charitable enough to look for your intended meaning without lengthy disclaimers and clarifications. — Pfhorrest

I think that's a reasonable assumption, unless you and your readers are doing philosophy as some kind of battle of wits.

As we all discover on a forum like this, people will very often be mean, that is, they will pick on easy targets and argue against the weakest version of your argument. I've found those people not to be worth the time, and one's writing suffers from all the disclaimers and hedging.

boethius

I don't necessarily endorse the implied ad hominen here, — Pantagruel

Good thing you don't necessarily disagree, as it's not an ad hominen.

Ad hominen must be in the structure "This person is an idiot, therefore what this person says is wrong or can be dismissed". However, saying "this person is wrong and therefore an idiot", is perfectly valid if the idiocy is commensurate with the wrongness.

Eventually I realized that readability was, in itself, a philosophical virtue. — Pantagruel

Well, this is up for debate. What's one's purpose in writing? is that purpose justified? what method attains that purpose? are valid questions. Readability, be it one definition or another, may or may not be useful to one's project.

Why I am so confident that whoever is teaching this "stupid, lazy, mean" maxim in philosophy is an idiot, is because so much of the very normal philosophical cannon is clearly not written in this way, in any sense.

Even interpreted generously as "simple and concise", many of "the great philosophers" are not in such a category. Organon, Plutarch's Moralia, Proslogium, Spinoza's Ethics, The Meditations, Critique of Pure Reason, Being and Time, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, are all pretty standard and famous philosophical texts but few would say any are "simple and concise" and fewer still written based on the assumption the reader is "stupid, lazy and mean", and these difficult readings are fairly typical in philosophy, not the glaring exceptions.

"Writing advice", or a heuristic as you say, presupposes a lot of things; the history of philosophy does not show any consensus on such advice, other than at least someone able to understand and talk about you (which itself we could debate philosophically as a worthy goal; for instance, we could imagine ourselves debating with someone who holds the view that only concrete political actions are meaningful and inspiring communication and writing about philosophical theory serves no purpose at all and is counter productive).

Pantagruel

Good thing you don't necessarily disagree, as it's not an ad hominen. — boethius

Yeah, it was tongue in cheek.

Pantagruel

many of "the great philosophers" are not in such a category — boethius

Absolutely! But that is not necessarily a point in their favour. Just because something is great, doesn't mean it couldn't have been better.

Amity

I propose that like the famous Project Management Triangle (“good, fast, cheap — pick any two”), in practice we can at best write for an audience that is any two of these things, but not all three at once. — Pfhorrest

Who is this 'we' and who is the 'audience' ?
The part of writing guidelines for a student paper you appear to have referenced is only that - small.

I am interested in this 'famous Project Management Triangle', first I've heard of it. Before likening it to writing for an audience, I need to understand it better. As things stand, I am not convinced.

Here are a few of my questions:

If a philosopher paper is a project, what are the aims, how is it managed ?
What are the characteristics or constraints ?
What are the criteria for success ?

I would suggest some constraints are time, scope and intelligence of a student.

The 'stupid, lazy and mean' in the 3rd guideline (see link) is only there to help envisage the worst case audience to convince.
This to encourage clear writing. To elaborate qualitatively.
The end product an 'A' in academia.
http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/writing.html

To imagine in general that an audience has such negative characteristics is to miss the point. It also shows a lack of respect.

In sum, I disagree with the proposal of the OP:
'The Philosophy Writing Management Triangle'.

Frank Apisa

In philosophy we are taught a mnemonic to help ensure our writing will be as clear, concise, and unambiguous as possible: to write for an audience assumed to be “stupid, lazy, and mean”. — Pfhorrest

My philosophy courses came a very long time ago (I'm 83)...but I was never taught that...and it does not sound like a philosophical position of much merit to me.

It sounds to me like the kind of thing Trump might say when lecturing Generals about how to run a war.

That said...it makes sense to be as clear, concise, and unambiguous as possible when writing anything...unless you are writing something like...

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

One of my favorite poems, by Lewis Carroll

boethius

Absolutely! But that is not necessarily a point in their favour. Just because something is great, doesn't mean it couldn't have been better. — Pantagruel

Certainly few authors view their work as perfect, but it's up for debate what they would view as potential improvement.

For instance, Aristotle was elitist and viewed slaves as necessary to provide the leisure time for some to philosophize. So, if "simple and concise" is meant as "understandable by the commoner and slave" we can surmise Aristotle would not care. However, even considering that, the Organon seems to be lecture notes and so not meant to be self-explanatory without additional explanations. Indeed, even among non-elitists, some philosophical texts are written not to be assisted by their own commentary but assumes summary and commentary will be written by someone else and ideas will eventually get to the common person through the arts. Some philosophers write both theoretical texts for advanced students and theater and novels for common people. Some had only disdain for theory and so wrote only popular literature. Wittgenstein introduces his book with a "maybe", maybe one single person may understand him, which even that he doesn't really care about. Some philosophers were clear they write in a purposefully complicated and challenging, borderline incorrect, way to rouse the spirit of their reader. We can also easily view mysticism as a general school of philosophy, typified as being as far from simple and clear as one can possibly go while still being intelligible at all.

There is not a general convergence of writing style among the great philosophers.

Writing advice presupposes knowing what the goal is, as @I like sushi suggested @Pfhorrest try to decide, which, from what I understand, led to this post.

180 Proof

↪Frank Apisa

:cool:

Mww

we are taught a mnemonic (....) to write for an audience assumed to be “stupid, lazy, and mean”. — Pfhorrest

Yikes!! What does that say about peer review?

Pantagruel

Yikes!! What does that say about peer review? — Mww

:lol:

Amity

Writing advice presupposes knowing what the goal is, as I like sushi suggested @Pfhorrest try to decide, which, from what I understand, led to this post. — boethius

Indeed. Knowing what the goal of any piece of writing is most helpful. The intention of the author is...what ?

From what you say, the OP seems to be following on from another conversation ?
I've been out of the loop for a while...

Shawn

I've been out of the loop for a while... — Amity

Hellllooo!, Please stay. :flower:

boethius

From what you say, the OP seems to be following on from another conversation ?
I've been out of the loop for a while... — Amity

Yes, from I can tell, this post is in response to criticism from @I like sushi of @Pfhorrest's book; in particular deciding an audience (which I like sushi points out could be just oneself, but an adviser clearly needs to know, is all).

@jkg20 and @Baden also had good followup explanations of why this this basic point is critical.

This thread seems to be motivated out of frustration with this audience identification process; a sort of "fine! I'll dumb myself down to the stupid, lazy and mean level of the internet troll!".

Now, what the OP states is correct, for a certain kind of commercial writing where the job is essentially to bully around the populace into being a tad bit less deplorable from the kleptocratic point of view, but this isn't the only option. Many "heretics" of political analysis still manage to subsist somehow and get their stuff out. Granted, with a woefully inadequate supply of cocktails, if any at all, and so "real writers" can just spit on them from the top Manhattan boulevard, a small gift of blessed cocktail residue falling from the sky -- but, still, no matter how dry they may become in the vast desert of not having a Pulitzer and Times column, these heretical writers aren't dead; they may even sell books and some are pretty famous on the internet affecting the culture in big ways that are best to ignore.

Anyways, the advice I found pretty good, and topical to the subject here, so I'll re-post it.

When I said ‘high-school’ I meant that in such essays you are writing to show comprehension. If you’re writing a book/essay you’re writing for your audience and given the subject matter you have to address the audience differently because the audience is different.

I’m still unsure what your aim is. You seem to be writing something that is an introduction to philosophy, an educational resource, your own personal philosophical view, and a critique of philosophy in general. If it’s educational (textbook) then terms like ‘I’/‘we’/‘us’ should be avoided as much as possible. I don’t need to know about your personal story or journey; I don’t care (in terms of a educational piece of writing.

If you’re going for something more like ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ though, I’d certainly go into more personal detail.

The thrust of what I’m saying is that I don’t know who this is for and I not convinced you do yet either. I’m getting mixed messages due to how it is lain out. The ‘set up’ matters a lot because people like to know what they are getting themselves into.

My own critique of my critique here would be to say I should really give positive feedback too. I like a lot of the content because I’ve looked at your essays before. I judged you to be someone less concerned with compliments and more likely to take criticism seriously if it was straight up - if you were a student it would be a different matter and I’d likely use a more ‘encouraging’ tone. — I like sushi

I like sushi has a point Pfhorrest. From experience of my own, here is some advice about seeking feedback on your writing;
1. Do not expect useful literary criticism from anybody close to you emotionally. There are reasons why they have that connection to you, all of them sincere, and that are likely to bias their approach to your writing whether they are aware of that bias or not. That bias may, of course, be negative or positive.
2. Find someone close enough to your target audience as you can and who has no, or very little, vested interest in your emotional wellbeing, and ask them to devote some time to reading your work. You will no doubt have a clear picture of that kind of individual, so you can perhaps identify a suitable person or some suitable people within your circle of loose acquaintances. You might find such a person on this board, but I have my doubts. When you do find that person, ask that they be brutally honest and convince them that you have a thick skin, even if you don't. Do not expect that person to advise you what to do to improve the book, you are writing it, not them. When they do come back to you with a list of problems, and from personal experience with following this advice myself, they are likely to have quite a number of them, address those issues yourself and try to convince them to reread your work to see if they believe it has improved.

On a different note, if you goal is to see this book in print and to be published by someone other than yourself, you need to be able to convince a literay agent that you have a target audience that is crystal clear from a marketing point of view, and sufficiently large to give a chance that there will be some profit to be made. Agents and publishers are in it for the money, although perhaps not exclusively. What you have said about your target audience seems to me to be too nebulous to meet those commercial requirements. — jkg20

Sushi made it obvious from the start he didn't give a shit about your feelings and was just going to say what he was going to say. Which is exactly what you should ideally expect (and hope for) in criticism.

As an aside, I've just finished re-editing and relaunching a book of short stories, which I put a lot a lot of work into and which I've been highly emotionally invested in. But it took me over a year to go back and see some of the fuckups in there because it can take that long away from a creative project to divest yourself of bias and look on it in a way similar to a detached critic. Of course, you'll never be fully objective, but you'll get nowhere without giving yourself time to be so. Your reaction to Sushi suggests you're not there yet. But if you want your work to be better, you need to get there. That's just the way it is.

Also, you're not even supposed to be promoting your own work here or getting feedback on it. Normally, I delete that kind of stuff as self-promotion/advertising. And now I've got another good reason, which is people getting pissed off that everyone doesn't love their stuff as much as they do. — Baden

I like sushi

↪unenlightened

Well, when it comes to the social sciences they don’t conduct anything like the same kind of rigor that physics, chemistry or biology does simply because we’re not allowed to experiment on humans en masse - that’s for the politicians! Haha! ;)

Shawn

Seems more like:

The Philosophy Writing Management Triage.

Jamal

@boethius Could it be that you have misunderstood this topic? It looks like it. The advice to assume your readers are stupid, lazy, and mean, is merely an arresting, memorable way of saying you should write clearly, concisely, and should argue carefully. The argument of the OP is that you can't do all three. What does this have to do with commercial writing?

I like sushi

↪Amity

In fact, you can profitably take this one step further and pretend that your reader is lazy, stupid, and mean. He's lazy in that he doesn't want to figure out what your convoluted sentences are supposed to mean, and he doesn't want to figure out what your argument is, if it's not already obvious. He's stupid, so you have to explain everything you say to him in simple, bite-sized pieces. And he's mean, so he's not going to read your paper charitably. (For example, if something you say admits of more than one interpretation, he's going to assume you meant the less plausible thing.) If you understand the material you're writing about, and if you aim your paper at such a reader, you'll probably get an A.

It certainly makes more sense in terms of the above. What I think many here, including myself, took it to mean was something quite different as to how it’s set out here.

When writing any technical paper the writer assumes that the reader understands the subject matter well enough so as not to have to literally teach them something like basic arithmetic. The ‘stupid’ as concise writing, the ‘lazy’ as impatient (get to the point) and the ‘mean’ as actively looking for flaws in your position (people read for their own benefit not the writers benefit).

Two of my go to ‘guides’ for all general writing are these:

http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/72/30.pdf

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html

Grice’s Maxims were made for ‘speech,’ but I’ve found them a sturdy enough guide - especially for evidence based writing. Orwell is simply a master.

Essays and thesis aimed at teachers are quite different beasts - they are being PAID to read your work.

frank

Charitable enough to look your intended meaning. — Pfhorrest

They'll look for it if they think you have something they need, right?

If I speak or write (for real life stuff), I try to engage the audience by presenting them with a problem and asking how it could be solved.

I got that from a math teacher who would have most of his class super eager to hear what he had to say because they wanted the answer: how does the farmer buy just the right amount of seeds for an irregular field? How? How?

I understand that you're focusing on style, but content is where one really connects with an audience, right?

I like sushi

To get through to an audience, they must be at least one of those three things:
- Smart enough to understand precise technical language
- Patient enough to read through a fortress of clarifications, or
- Charitable enough to look your intended meaning.

Any audience that is none of those things will be unreachable no matter how much you try, and the more effort you put into fortifying against one kind of vice, the more you sacrifice toward your defense against at least one of the other two. — Pfhorrest

I generally disagree with this. The audience is not an audience. A person reads for themselves so the primary things to consider when writing is who will read it and of what use is it to them (if we’re talking about a technically minded reader). This means no flip-flopping (ie. ‘Maybe x or maybe why.?Let’s see.’). The reader wants to know the point from the get go, not to be corralled into a corner for the big reveal.

If the point is established then the reader knows why they should care. They want to know what is of value for them NOT what your ideas and thoughts are (that’s tangental).

Maybe it’s better to think as the reader as ‘selfish’. If there is nothing of apparent interest, nothing they care for, nor any visible value within the first few paragraphs, then they’ll move on - unless they’re paid to read (editors, researchers, scholars, teachers and professors).

frank

The reader wants to know the point from the get go, not to be corralled into a corner for the big reveal. — I like sushi

Maybe it depends on the setting? A random academic article is here today and gone tomorrow. Great philosophical works live for millennia. Philosophers write however they like.

Plato's message is embedded in his style.

Kierkegaard suggested that most of his readers were not his intended audience.

Nietzsche wrote like the fool on the hill.

The Philosophy Writing Management Triangle

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