# You get about.... how many words exactly?

[You Get About Five Words](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-get-about-five-words) seems to be among my most-cited posts (although credit for the idea actually goes to Catherine Olsson).

Back when it went through the Annual Review, [@DanielFilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/danielfilan?mention=user) left a [review](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-get-about-five-words?commentId=JxDH6wYKSsGCZwoNS) noting that the post is erring on the side of "simplistic poetry", at the expense of actually giving good models for "Why '5 words' as opposed to '10'?", and whether this kicks in at hundreds or thousands of people or what.

I've had a TODO of someday researching working memory and memetics and writing up a better post. I haven't gotten around to it. But, here is a short summary of the concepts I believe, followed by the back-and-forth with Daniel.

People have about 5 working memory slots ("chunks")
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I'm much less confident about the exact mechanism than the empirical takeaway. But, my guess is: in the limit, the amount of words you get is "the number of words that people can fit into their working memory slots."

(Or, more confidently: "The number of words you get is what people can fit into one block of their attention." Where, "working memory" is a more specific hypothesis about how attention is operationalized)

People have about 5 working memory slots. Research seems a bit unclear, reports vary from 4 - 7 last I checked. So, when people are not particularly motivated to listen, or preserve your nuance, you get the amount of bandwidth that one fleeting moment of attention provides.

A "chunk" is not exactly the same thing as "a word", but, I think for purposes of communication, they are pretty much identical. (Chunks don't have to be words, when you are thinking on your own. But they basically have to be words when communicating to other people).

Worse, it matters not just that people parse your initial idea when they aren't motivated, but they have to remember it, and then pass it on to others. When people further spread your idea, it's often the number of slots available when people are trying to *_combine_* your concept with *_other_* concepts. If you spent 5-7 words, but someone wants to take your idea and combine in with their own idea, they might compress it down to 2-3 words.

(i.e. you might say "ML-based superintelligence would kill everyone", and people compress it to "AI will kill us" or just "AI doom")

You can spend your 5 words on motivating people to learn more
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Some commenters complained I was underselling how possible it was to teach more complex concepts.

I think this rule applies when you are communicating to people who are not (initially) motivated to put in effort to understand you, or preserve your nuance. But, you can sometimes spend your 5 words on "motivate people motivated to look up more words."

Hence, clickbait headlines.

"Read the Bible, it'll change your life" is 7 words, but it can successfully get more words across in some cases.

* * *

Discussion
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****Daniel Filan's initial Review**** ([link](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-get-about-five-words#JxDH6wYKSsGCZwoNS))

> I think this post, as promised in the epistemic status, errs on the side of simplistic poetry. I see its core contribution as saying that the more people you want to communicate to, the less you can communicate to them, because the marginal people aren't willing to put in work to understand you, and because it's harder to talk to marginal people who are far away and can't ask clarifying questions or see your facial expressions or hear your tone of voice. The numbers attached (e.g. 'five' and 'thousands of people') seem to not be super precise.

> That being said: the numbers are the easiest thing to take away from this post. The title includes the words 'about five' but not the words 'simplifed poetry'. And I'm just not sure about the numbers. The best part of the post is the initial part, which does a calculation and links to a paper to support an order-of-magnitude calculation on how many words you can communicate to people. But as the paragraphs go on, the justifications get less airtight, until it's basically an assertion. I think I understand stylistically why this was done, but at the end of the day that's the trade-off that was made.

> So a reader of this post has to ask themselves: Why is the number about five? Is this 'about' meaning that you have a factor of 2 wiggle-room? 10? 100? How do I know that this kicks in once I hit thousands of people, rather than hundreds or millions? If I want to communicate to billions of people, does that go down much? These questions are left unanswered in the post. That would be fine if they were answered somewhere else that was linked, but they aren't. As such, the discerning reader should only believe the conclusion (to the extent they can make it out) if they trust Ray Arnold, the author.

> I think plausibly people should trust Ray on this, at least people who know him. But much of the readership of this post doesn't know him and has no reason to trust him on this one.

> Overall: this post has a true and important core that can be explained and argued for. But the main surface claim isn't justified in the post or in places the post links to, so I don't think that this was one of the best posts of 2019, either by my standards or by the standards I think the LessWrong community should hold itself to.

****Raemon****

The aspiring-rigorous-next-post I hope to write someday is called "The Working Memory Hypothesis", laying out more concretely that at some maximum scale, your coordination-complexity is bottlenecked on a single working-memory-cluster, which (AFAICT based on experience and working memory research) amounts to 3-7 chunks of concepts that people already are familiar with. 

So, I am fairly confident that in the limit it is actually about 5 words +/- 2, because Working Memory Science and some observations about what slogans propagate. (But, am much less sure about how fast the limit approaches and what happens along the way)

****Daniel****

Aren't working memory chunks much bigger than one word each, at least potentially?

****Raemon****

I think if you end up having a chunk that you use repeatedly and need to communicate about, it ends up turning into a word.

(like, chunks are flexible, but so are words)

****Daniel****

To me, this suggests a major change to the message of the post. Reading it, I'd think that I have five samples from the bank of existing words, but if the constraint is just that I have five concepts that can eventually be turned into words, that's a much looser constraint!

****Raemon****

Not 100% sure I understand the point, but for concepts-you-can-communicate, I think you are bottlenecked on already-popular-words.

Chunks and words don't map perfectly. But... word-space is probably *_mostly_* a subset of chunk-space?

I think wordless chunks matter for intellectual progress, where an individual thinker might have juuuust reached the point where they've distilled a concept in their head down into a single chunk, so they can then reason about how that fits with other concepts. But, if they want to communicate about that concept, they'll need to somehow turn it into words.

****Daniel****

Is the claim that before I learn some new thing, each of my working memory slots is just a single word that I already know? Because I'm pretty sure that's not true.

****Raemon****

First: the epistemic status of this whole convo is "thing Ray is still thinking through and is not very sure about."[^rj939v816jd]

Two, for your specific question: No, my claim is that wordspace is a (mostly) subset of chunkspace, not the other way round. My claim is something like "words are chunks that you've given a name", but you can think in chunks that have not been given names.

Three: I'm not taking that claim literally, I'm just sorta trying it out to see if it fits, and where it fails. I'm guessing it'll fail somewhere but I'm not actually sure where yet. If you can point to a concrete way that it fails to make sense that'd be helpful.

But, insofar as I'm running with this idea:

An inventor who is coming up with a new thing might be working entirely with wordless chunks, that they invent, combine them into bigger ideas, compress into smaller chunks, without ever being verbalized or given word form.

****Daniel****

If wordspace is a subset of chunkspace and not the other way around, and you have about five chunks, do you agree that you do not have about five words, but rather more?

****Raemon****

Yes[^z0kxpa51mcl], although I've heard mixed things about how many chunks you actually have, and that the number might be more like 4.

Also, the ideas often get propagated in conjunction with other ideas. I.e. people don't just say "politics is the mindkiller", they say "politics is the mindkiller, therefore X" (where X is whatever point they're making in the conversation). And *_that_* sentence is bottlenecked on total comprehensibility. So, basically the more chunks you're using up with your core idea, the more you're at the mercy of other people truncating it when they need to fit other ideas in. 

I'd argue "politics is the mindkiller" is two chunks initially, because people parse "is" and "the" somewhat intuitively or fill them in. Whereas [Avoid Unnecessarily Political Examples](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bNAEBRWiKHG6mtQX8/avoid-unnecessarily-political-examples) is more like 4 chunks. I think you typically need at least 2 chunks to say something meaningful, although maybe not always.

Once something becomes popular it can eventually compress down to 1 chunk. But, also, I think "sentence complexity" is not *_only_* bottlenecked on chunks. "Politics is the mindkiller" can be conceptually one chunk, but it still takes a bunch of visual or verbal space up while parsing a sentence that makes it harder to read if it's only one clause in a multi-step argument. I'm not 100% sure if this is secretly still an application of working memory, or if it's a different issue.

...

...

****Raemon continues:****

Continuing to babble down this thought-trail \[about "people inventing concepts" vs "people sharing them\]

I'm wondering how Gendlin Focusing interacts with working memory.

I think the first phase of focusing is pre-chunk, as well as pre-verbal. You're noticing a bunch of stuff going on in your body. It's more of a sensation than a thought.

The process of focusing is trying to get those sensations into a form your brain can actually work with and think about.

I... notice that focusing takes basically all my concentration. I think at *_some_* part of the process it's using working memory (and basically all of my working memory). But I'm not sure when that is.

One of the things you do in focusing is try to give your felt-sense a bunch of names and see if they fit, and notice the dissonance. I think when this process starts, the felt-sense is *_not_* stored in chunk form. I think as I try to give it different names I'm trying to find the right chunk.

Gendlin Focusing might be a process where:

1.  I'm trying to feel out a bunch of felt-data that isn't even in chunk form yet
2.  I sort of feel it out, while trying different word-combos on it. Meanwhile it's getting more solid in my head. I think it's... slowly transitioning from wordless non-chunks into wordless chunks, and then when I finally find the right name that describes it I'm like "ah, that's it", and then it simultaneiously solidifies into one-or-more chunks I can store properly in working memory, *_and also_* gets a name. (The name might be multiple words, and depending on context those words could correspond to one chunk or multiple)

[^rj939v816jd]: Years later, I don't think I thought through it in much more detail. 

[^z0kxpa51mcl]: I'm not actually sure why I said "yes" here. I think when you're communicating to other people, you only get to communicate via chunks you can easily communicate, and basically for all practical purposes these are words.