I followed your advice and read chapter 9 of Rationaly from Ai to Zombies. This chapter title is "Expecting Short Inferential Distances", my summary is that if you are using a scientific language and your audience is not used to it then you should explain basic terminology. So from this piece I should estimate content with low density of information.
"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." -- Woody Allen
I mean, yes, Yudkowsky is pretty verbose, but that's not what I'd call a super-accurate summary and there's definitely more in that chapter than your one-sentence summary.
(It's about understanding as well as knowledge, and in so far as it's about knowledge it's not only about terminology or only about science. There's some evo-psych-y speculation on why it's so easy to forget that inferential distances are there, which may or may not be correct but (1) is interesting in its own right and (2) helps to fit the notion of "inferential distance" into the reader's overall model of the world, rather than just giving specific instructions like "explain basic terminology". There's the concrete and I think useful suggestion that when you encounter a failure of communication you probably need to back off further than you are initially inclined to. There's a concrete example (appeals to "simplicity") of the sort of thing that once you've been immersed in, say, scientific thinking for a while becomes second nature to you and that you may not think to explain -- and, please note, it's not primarily a matter of terminology. There's an important warning of a failure mode you may encounter when trying to take inferential distances into account -- which seems like it should be obvious, but I've seen people fall into it often enough.)
[Note: Those things are on the Less Wrong page from which the chapter is derived. I haven't read the ebook, and it's possible that some stuff was trimmed out.]
There's also a bit of irony in complaining "this could have been explained much more briefly" about a chapter whose whole point is to warn about how communication can fail unexpectedly when you don't take the time to explain things slowly and apparently redundantly.
I think that there more interesting examples to ilustrate the fact that communication require to explain the basic to those that don't work in the field. Any good teacher knows that you have to motivate students and explain things adapting your classes to the knowledge of your students. Also, those who sell services or products know very well how to communicate the value of products. Perhaps some empathy is necessary for communication, but chapter 9 sound voiceless to me.
Yudkowsky is a polarizing writer. Some people love his writing; I do not. There's the occasional nugget of wisdom but I find his style so irritating and pretentious that it's not worth suffering through.
Scott Alexander (Slatestarcodex) is related and more readable if verbose, but less focused on that groundwork material of (so-called) rationality.
Thanks, I just read in his blog the post "beware the man of one study". Discussing if rising minimum wage hurts the economy give rise to 270 comments. I agree with the conclusion: Even if someone give you overwhelming evidence in favor of a certain point of view just wait and see if the opposite side has equally overwhelming evidence. My example: This coin came 7000 times heads so almost always gives head. Just wait and count how many times it came tails.
