Refusing to elaborate.md

One troublesome communication pattern I so often see on social networks is posting an idea and refusing to elaborate on it under the premise that “explaining would take too long”.

Problems

It’s visibly dismissive

It makes the other party think that the speaker doesn’t have a good reason to dismiss their opinion and only has their authority to back it up even when they could actually produce good evidence.

It’s not constructive

All that a conversation receives from it is an opinion. And that does not necessarily matter if listeners don’t perceive the speaker as an authority on the subject in question.

And even known experts should probably acknowledge newcomers to their fields, as they will have to eventually pass their knowledge on.

Adverse effects

When such statements are the norm, people gradually stop considering the expertise of people making statements.

This is something that advertising relies on a lot. Sponsored ad integrations on YouTube, for instance, rely on creators delivering advertising talking points to audiences that have already worked out their trust for creators enough to not consider the creators’ areas of expertise. This is why we’re getting numerous VPN ads with bold security promises from creators that have absolutely nothing to do with cybersecurity. And this is just the most obvious example, practically all integrations I see these days are like this!

Remediation

[…] it would certainly be a lovely communication revolution if everyone instead of “that’s how it is, feel free to educate youself on the subject” would actually provide a link to a decent (in their opinion anyway) source to do so. Because that’s a source of quite many frustrations all across the Net and the reason why people can’t align. And we’ve had the concept of hyperlinks for actual decades by now.

— me, on Godot’s alleged dismissive response regarding console ports, FUTO Chat (signup required to view)

Not wanting to waste time on people who aren’t willing to learn is actually understandable. But by dismissing people who’d be willing to learn about your position you’re undermining future support of your own position. Which can work when there’s overwhelming support for it in other sources, but is it always there?

These takes aren’t always tied deeply into a conversation and can be explained in greater detail in advance, published, then linked to.

One major obstacle in the way of this working effectively is differences between readers. You might encounter differently educated readers that would need explanations of different concepts in order to fully understand what you mean. Not just in the amount (although that can be an issue too), but possibly in areas, e. g. Linux game compatibility would have to be explained differently to a Linux power user and an avid gamer. But I believe this bit can be automated to a large extent by structuring topics in a way that would make them easier to tailor for a particular reader — skipping over the parts they already know and giving them the choice of formats and authors.

This way we’d be making the best use of experts’ time and not relying too much on their authority, hopefully propagating their messages, as long as they’re internally consistent enough for readers to adopt them.