Priming Programmable Precision

MM04

In last week's issue, I promised I would discuss E-Prime and operational speech next. Let's do that.

What is E-Prime?

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

"E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes denoted É or E′) is a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms. Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing. A number of other scholars have criticized E-Prime's utility."

Now, other people have done a great job already explaining how E-Prime (often abbreviated as E') can, for example, sharpen your critical thinking, help you become a master editor, or write better papers.

But to understand the value of writing in E-Prime, pick a paragraph – any paragraph – of existing writing, preferably your own but one from a news article will do as well, eliminate all uses of "to be", and rewrite that paragraph without it in as natural a flow as you can. Go ahead!

Seriously, take 5 minutes and try it, I'll wait...

Click here for a real 5 minute timer

When you're done, write a comment down below in the comment section with the original paragraph (plus its source) and your rewritten version plus any insights you had. If you do so before reading on, I believe you'll get more out of this than if you do it after or don't do it at all.

Alright, now that you have a little experience with writing E-Prime yourself, I'll do the same exercise. Here's a paragraph I took from the paper “Interpersonal Neurobiology: Applications for the Counseling Profession”, my morning reading from earlier today:

"From an IPNB perspective, the mind is more than brain activity. The mind includes consciousness (subjective experience), information processing and self-organization. Although the mind may be dependent on neural firing, it is not the same as neural firing. The mind is one of three components that constitute the triangle of human experience: mind, brain, relationships. Each of these components is capable of shaping and being shaped by the other two."

Before doing any analysis, here's my rewritten version using E’:

"From an IPNB perspective, the concept of the mind refers to more than just brain activity. It includes consciousness (subjective experience), information processing and self-organization. Although neural firing strongly determines and constrains the mind, we do not treat them as equivalent. Instead, the mind only appears as one of three components that constitute the triangle of human experience: mind, brain, relationships. Each of these components, in this view, has the capacity to shape and get shaped by the other two."

As you can see, this version is slightly longer. This happens most of the time you write something in E-Prime: by eliminating the copula ("to be"), we have to compensate for the lack of access to everyday vernacular with greater verbosity.

This version also feels a bit more technical, clinical even. That may be due to my particular choices, but in my experience most people experience this when they first encounter or practice E-Prime writing. It can be a bit frustrating, even disorienting at times, but what you lose in readability you gain in precision.

One thing that has always annoyed me when reading scientific and academic papers is the passive voice and the pretense of objectivity it carries. I could never understand how scientists, otherwise so concerned with clarity of thought, completely paper over crucial details of how they arrive at a conclusion and what it is valid for by using passive voice. Shouldn't you want to qualify and hedge your assertions as much as possible so readers can distinguish clearly between your (biased, limited) perspective and general validity?

In my rewritten paragraph above, you can see how E-Prime eliminated a lot of this "borrowed objectivity", replacing it with qualifications. All four sentences now contain perspectival hedges, compared to just one in the original version: "From an IPNB perspective", "we do not treat them", "the mind only appears", "in this view" all hint at a specific context, frame, or source that these statements emerge from or exist within.

In my view (😜), this is the key to the biggest benefit I’ve gotten in using this technique: learning more easily / faster. By forcing me to qualify my statements, I no longer deceive myself quite as easily about what I actually know, perceive, and believe, which in turn allows me to more accurately identify my gaps and then work to fill them. This somewhat resembles the way Elon Musk uses first principles thinking and diagramming to decompose statements into component parts, look up and learn what those mean and how they work, and then reason up from there.

My interest in this subject was particularly top of mind for me today after watching a Roam Hangouts recording where @roamhacker, the creator of Roam42, demoed his new SmartBlocks feature. Both his articulation of it in that recording and the documentation he has made available touched on this concept of a programmable note-taking tool for networked thought.

Check out the SmartBlocks documentation here

Now, what this points to for me is the emergence of something I’ve termed an Integrated Thought Environment (ITE), slightly adapting what in software development is called an Integrated Development Environment to this space. If you think about it, we really haven’t had much time at all yet in using the digital medium not just to publish or consume, but to think! It should be no wonder then that the tools and conventions for a distinctly digital mode of thinking may only emerge now.

Sure, computers have been around for a couple decades, but widespread access to them isn’t that old, even if the Zoomers can’t remember that time. In that short period, we went from a fledgling network of still rather expensive devices (the internet) to a de facto standard of participating in all aspects of life. And Corona this year has only expedited that trend, forcing everyone who could work from home to do so.

Today, the sheer rate of information production and (mostly) consumption of the average internet user far exceeds anything even the most connected people in pre-internet times ever dealt with. As a consequence, phenomena of networking now must move down from large organizations or even teams to the individual. With greater connectivity comes greater risk (and reward) from viral (or fat-tailed) threats and opportunities, creating a selective pressure on people to either evolve better sense-making capacities or lose agency to those who do. What an ITE provides is exactly that: an extensible and customizable tool which enables its users to acquire technical skill in, to automate, and to fluidly structure their thoughts in service of their personal objectives and in alignment with their values.

What would an E-Prime SmartBlock look like?

SmartBlocks are merely the latest, and surely not the last, example of a successful extension that radically increases the ability of its users to do so –– like macros but for text instead of computer scripts. I can already imagine a set of SmartBlocks that, when invoked, runs through an existing text and highlights all forms and occurrences of to be in a bullet or page, neatly references those in a series of bullets, and reminds you of how E’ works and for what you like to use it. This drastically lowers the neuro-economic cost of moving from intention to action, which makes certain kinds of working – and thus producing output – feasible where they weren’t before.

Perhaps even the “one man international mega corporation” a friend of mine has been bandying about…

E’ can help in this process, especially when combined with powerful tools like Roam and SmartBlocks. The clarity and certainty it can produce are neurologically cheaper and the psychological experience associated with it certainly more enjoyable. What E’ is not particularly well suited to is quick writing or easy digestion, which was kind of the point of inventing it. According to Wikipedia, the originator D. David Bourland Jr. "devised E-Prime as an addition to Korzybski's general semantics in the late 1940s" and suggested that "use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of language that reduces the possibility of misunderstanding or conflict". I recommend reading the full Wikipedia page for it to get a more complete picture of the reasons, but also the criticisms which were numerous.

But were most critics rejected E-Prime for going too far for little gain, others (myself included) believe it doesn't actually go far enough. See, I was introduced to E' in the context of online discussions on political philosophy, western civilization, and epistemology. More specifically, I had encountered a thinker who had come to the conclusion that many of the 20th century's terrible experiments in societal organization were directly related to most academic fields failing to convert from a mathy or rationalist paradigm to the operationalist paradigm (sometimes called operationist).

But that is a story for another day. I hope you join me next week.

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