When is vague writing ok?

Good and bad reasons to deviate from writing clear understandable prose

The main purpose of writing is to convey information from one person to another. Because we aren't blessed with telepathy, this requires taking complicated thoughts and pressing them into flat desiccated sheets of squiggly lines. It’s a highly lossy process, and so there is an art to preserving the essence of your thoughts. The simplest reason for vagueness, then, is that it’s just a sign of bad writing.

Precise writing doesn’t have to be restricted to purely factual claims. There is a precision in reliably conveying the full complexity of an emotional experience. To eff the ineffable. If you can consistently impart an emotion to people from different walks of life, then that is also a kind of precision.

There are some legitimate reasons to be vague, though. Some things are too spicy to say outright, so they need to be couched in innuendo and metaphor. Scathing social commentary, private interactions that would be rude to broadcast, deep truths of your soul that are too authentic to expose unprotected. Plausible deniability is the name of the game here.

Piet Hein’s Consolation Grook is my favorite example of this:

Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
compared to the pain,
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again.

On the surface, it’s a nice silly poem about a relatable experience. It also happens to be written in April 1940, shortly after Nazi forces had invaded Denmark and thrown the country into an atmosphere of confusion and helplessness. Consolation Grook is thus a veiled plea to his fellow countrymen to mount underground resistance and sabotage against the Nazis. Better to stick to one’s convictions and resist, than to collaborate with the enemy and be viewed as a traitor after liberation. Evidently, this metaphor was subtle enough that the censors allowed it to be published, and Hein survived the occupation to live to the ripe old age of 90.

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Another legitimate reason to be vague is that some pieces of writing aren't meant to convey a particular idea; instead, they hold a mirror up to you. The ambiguity in how to interpret the work lets you read your views into the gaps, and notice your own biases and inclinations.¹

Yeats’s classic The Second Coming is a good example. It’s vague about what exactly is coming. Although it is literally about the second coming of Christ, everyone agrees that it’s a metaphor for something else. Nobody agrees on what that something else is, though. And that’s a good thing! It shows how much extremely different beliefs share this same underlying vibe. Either that, or Yeats predicted AI existential risk all the way back in 1919, and decided to vaguepost about it.² We may never know for sure.

Usefulness as a mirror is a different set of criteria for how we judge the quality of a piece of writing, but it isn’t a get out of jail free card for bad writing. Some pieces of writing make you think about all sorts of interesting ideas by striking just the right balance between giving you inspiration to mull on while being expansive enough to fit many things, and presenting keen observations that leave you with a sense of being personally attacked and yet validated at the same time. Others, uh, don't.

The worst kind of vagueness, worse even than clumsy unskillful vagueness, is willful pseudo-profound vagueness. Many works of literature, poetry, and twitter posts suffer from this ailment, but the field most heavily afflicted is continental philosophy.³

How did this happen? In continental philosophy, quality is not based on any external source of truth, but purely the opinions of critics, who are themselves ordained by other critics.⁴ This creates a runaway signaling game. Incomprehensible gibberish is a great way to make definitive counterarguments impossible. You can’t call out the nonsense because you’ll be accused of not getting it. The only people who keep engaging are those who find a perverse joy in being seen as sophisticated enough to read such difficult texts. It would threaten the status of the tastemakers if their work were shown to be bullshit, so those who try to pull the field back towards any semblance of meaning are driven away.

Despite its problems, I’m sure that continental philosophy has produced at least one good idea ever.⁵ After all, it gave birth to some of my favorite memes of all time, so who can really say if it’s all worth it.

In summary, please write good things, be vague only when there is a good reason to, don't succumb to pretentious signaling games, but also don't retreat into a cave and communicate with the outside world only in unambiguous Lean proofs.

1. This recent post points out that Tarot cards also do something similar. I don’t know anything about Tarot cards, but this seems plausible.

2. You didn’t think this post could actually avoid talking about AI, did you?

3. See also this post about AI generated papers and how they look coherent but are maddeningly vague when you try to pin down what they are actually saying. I get the same feeling when looking at continental philosophy.

4. Compare to other fields. If you are a civil engineer and you devise a fake method for simulating bridge loads, it doesn’t matter how eloquent your justification for its correctness is. Reality will intervene, your bridge will collapse, and dozens will perish. If you design a cancer drug that doesn’t actually work, it will not get through clinical trials. If you make an ML algorithm that doesn’t work, and p-hack your way into NeurIPS, your technique won’t replicate when people try to build on it, and companies with skin in the game won’t use it in production. If you write bullshit math, then it’s very easy for the field to come to a consensus that your argument is flawed (see Mochizuki), because mathematical proof comes with a non-subjective way to evaluate correctness. Even analytic philosophy fares somewhat better than continental: at least analytic philosophers try to lay their assumptions and reasoning out as legibly as possible, so it is easier to identify and demonstrate flaws, similar to math; often even using literal math (see debates over the vNM axioms).

5. To be fair, continental philosophers can sometimes write comprehensible text. For example, Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism actually explains his ideas in such a shockingly lucid manner that I can’t believe this is the same person who wrote Being and Nothingness.