"Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity."
- H.P. Grice
This newsletter is sponsored by Wild Roman.
I love everything about these products and the company. A few months ago, I was chatting with NYT best-selling author Sahil Bloom about his company, Wild Roman, and he asked if I wanted to be an affiliate. After using almost every product they make and impressed with each one, it was an obvious yes.
They specialize in skin care for men, and they use nothing but natural ingredients. Sahil is known for emphasizing the right kind of values, coming out of a career in finance, and the company is named after his son, Roman. Treat yourself, get something as a gift, and help support the newsletter with my 15% off affiliate link here https://wildroman.com/JARED (or you can use the code JARED).
Have you ever regretted volunteering for something?
I know someone who recently volunteered for a position on a committee. The volunteer part is important, because the committee duties have required more time and work than the regular job requirements. So they are going over and above their normal workload in the pursuit of service to the organization. And this person was happy to put in the extra work and hours if it meant helping colleagues and the organization.
Unfortunately the direction on how to serve was completely confusing. Some of the committee tasks were overly tedious, requiring committee members to also be data entry workers, redundantly entering the same info multiple times and unnecessarily costing time and energy. Each member was paired with a colleague, but there was no clear reason why, or how to communicate as a pair to complete the service task. The what and the how were unclear.
​Studies show that “handing out pointless work” and “overriding people’s better judgment” destroy the meaningfulness of work. There’s no faster way to demotivate someone than requiring something that’s pointless and removing their agency. Further studies showed that unnecessary tasks predict resentment toward the organization, lower self-esteem, and burnout.
In the case of the committee member, unnecessary busy work and unclear instructions killed a genuine heart for service. What started out as a well-meant, motivated offer to help others quickly became a laborious and confusing chore. When what you’re doing and why you’re doing it is unclear, you lose all the meaningfulness of work.
In contrast, I’m convinced that communicating with clarity is itself an act of service to others. That there is a real ethical dimension to communicating in a way that doesn't cloud meaning.
Communicating in a way that's clear is not easy. It takes effort. I often fail at it. But if there are virtues like honesty and courage, and intellectual virtues like intellectual humility, I think there can be communication virtues like communicational charity.
Philosopher H.P. Grice, famous for his philosophy of language, developed what he called a Cooperative Principle in communication:
I include the supermaxim—’Be perspicuous’—and various maxims such as:
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
4. Be orderly.*
Brilliant.
The work that communication requires is always distributed in some way between the speaker and the listener/reader. When the speaker puts in little work or effort, the bulk of the communication labor falls on the listener. But when the speaker charitably puts in the pre-speech mental work in an effort to be more perspicuous and clear, less work falls on the listener. That is an act of communicative service and charity, in the same way that being a charitable listener requires interpreting a speaker in a charitable way.
Just as communication barriers in the context of a job destroy the meaningfulness of work, communication barriers in our social lives (including digital communication and social media) destroy interpersonal, social meaning.
I don’t remember if I mentioned this explicitly in this newsletter, but gaining clarity was the primary reason I decided to do a mid-career PhD in philosophy. Not clarity on answers, but clarity in my communication and structure in my own thinking. I knew I needed to sharpen some things up, in a way that I couldn’t self-train. I recognized that getting razor-sharp training on categories, concepts, and precision in my own language and communication would add value to whatever I did in my career, but also in my personal life. In what area of life is clear communication unimportant?
I’m still working out what that looks like, but much of what I predicted would be helpful has turned out to be true. Fine-tuning language and communications is one of the most practical, useful benefits of philosophy, in my experience.
Until next time.
Jared
*Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics, Vol. 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). Academic Press. (Quotes appear on pp. 45–46).
Missed a week?
You can access all previous newsletters on my Creator Profile here.
I am an affiliate of Kit, the newsletter service I use to send this out weekly. If you are interested in creating your own newsletter, I couldn't recommend it more highly. Click here to get started using my affiliate link!
If you like listening to just audio in the car, on a run, or while you're supposed to be working, subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode:
If you like watching the conversation, subscribe, and the latest episode will show up in your feed. (Extra credit: like whatever videos you watch if you genuinely like what you're hearing.)
Take a sec to follow me on your favorite social platform:​
X: @jaredoliphint
Instagram: @jaredoliphint
Threads: @jaredoliphint
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/jaredoliphint