alt Hacker NewsWhy is every rationalist blog post way too long?
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"The idea that something may be true, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited tradition is anathema to them"
This is reasonable though. Tradition and common sense suggest value perhaps more than rationalists think, but if tradition and common sense have value, there is an underlying reason.
Coincidentally I was thinking about this topic earlier today. It seems that we train students to write in the worst way possible, by giving arbitrary word counts as benchmark for completeness.
I suppose letting students turn in 3 sentence essays may not be a better option, but it at least it doesn't encourage students who engage with the assignment in good faith to turn a high-quality six paragraphs into six pages.
> In any case, what is missing from this endlessly verbose rationalist writing style is wisdom. Wisdom involves discretion: an intuition for what ideas are and are not worth seriously pursuing, and the ability to determine what does and does not need to be said. This community, broadly speaking, does not seem to value wisdom as a trait at all; the idea that something may be true, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited tradition is anathema to them.
I haven't heard the term "rationalist blogger" before, but surely, not assuming tradition is correct is sort of key to the "rationalist" part?
The verbosity of the entire post can be condensed down to just this bit:
> verbosity is a substitute for thoroughness
Clearly OP author is far too wordy as well!
The Economist is so good in this respect.
A smart, very good writer will write something and get to the point quickly. Articles are mostly a page or less.
Writing like that respects people's time.
Many bloggers could do with writing things more briefly.
The author of this piece also makes a very good point that often long pieces go into weird corners of their own argument without thinking about their own assumptions.
It takes skill and effort to condense knowledge.
"I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal in “Lettres Provinciales,” 1657.
This is basically a dunk piece. Scott’s and gwern’s posts are often long because they contain arguments, which ironically the author does not use, other to point to one gwern post. He says that rationalists substitute thoroughness for verbosity when gwern’s post does the exact opposite!
It’s easy to dismiss the argument with “lol nicotine bad”, but I think it’s good to examine studies on the addictiveness of nicotine when not smoked, and not assume it would be just like smoking. There are plenty of things that seem obvious but are not and it’s always good to be rigorous.
Because they have autism
> It turns out, actually, nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it, as you probably already obviously knew.
This is not the point, but I’m very confused by the link that is linked as evidence on that line? It doesn’t match the sentence it’s attached to
Link in question: https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/a-love-song-to-nicot...
Philosophy also tends to rattle on. I think part of it is that if the ideas are not that strong and seem obvious or wrong if stated briefly you can make it look more significant by lengthening up.
See Hobbes, Calvin https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/ac...
A problem with long articles is there are so many important topics to be informed about today, and if I spend an hour on one, then I don't have time for others.
While notionally my interests align very well with lesswrong, I am seldom able to make it through the length of a post without losing interest.
From the article:
Consider when blogger Gwern explained that nicotine, actually, is not addictive, and is good for you, as long as you don't smoke it, over the course of 9,000 words, with over 100 references. It turns out, actually, nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it, as you probably already obviously knew.
The second sentence is a link to a Substack essay, which has two screenshots of two individuals self-reporting “nicotine bad” on Twitter, one of whom smoked it.
By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.
Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”, I find that I agree with his claim that extra words don’t make his articles better, and I would extend this to say that fewer words would make them better still, with perfection achieved when the number of words reaches zero.
As one young philosopher put it, wisdom is a moral choice. It is a decision to only speak about what you truly know; and that is very little. E. g. most of us do not truly know the Earth is a sphere; we only "know" this from a hearsay and that is not it.
i think there is room for word vomit overexplaining every little nuance, detail, and caveat as a style of writing especially if one is trying to be through and “rational”, but I think it takes much more skill to condense the meat of a subject
Because they need to rationalize everything.
What, exactly, is the point of this post, and especially the point of it on HN? It appears to be a rant directed at 2 people on the internet that has nothing to do with tech.
In Scott Alexander's case, it's because he's into ideas (e.g., eugenics) that most people find reprehensible, so he has to couch them in a lot of bullshit to make them more palatable, and to give himself some credibility.
I think it's pretty simple. To prioritize concision, you need to value other people's time more than stroking your own ego. A lot of "rationalists" are just people who, more than anything else, think they are smarter than other people and desperately need to prove it. This naturally means they don't respect other people's time and it naturally leads to voluminous prose.
Personally, I often write long responses when making a contrarian point. The reason is because people have been heavily conditioned to believe certain things and making a contrarian point requires you to provide an alternative interpretation for all of their many beliefs around the subject.
Every contrarian idea has to dismantle layer upon layer of existing beliefs to even be considered plausible. Many people will discard it outright because of how much it goes against their worldview.
The worst part is that people have also been conditioned to believe that long, detailed explanations are the result of delusions and built up in social media 'echo chambers' or 'conspiracy theories' built upon fake news. LLMs will typically act as though they are concerned for your mental health if you provide a valid rebuttal to all of their points in such a discussion; they will say "Note what you did, you've made your argument unfalsifiable..." And I have to point out that its own mainstream version is also merely a narrative and also unfalsifiable. The discussion has to be evaluated from first principles, taking into account empirical evidence and trends.
It's a mix of bad writing ability, contrived arguments (coming up with weird hypotheticals or simulating what an opponent would say), cargo-culting rationalist thought leaders (Yarvin, Scott, Yudkowsky, gwern) and the concealing of unsavory ideas.
There's also a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass - when all your friends are way too online and probably also rationalists and much of your identity and status is tied to online posting, you invest a lot in cultivating that social identity and signaling to your community, even to a degree that would look unhealthy to normies.
> nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it
meh, this is legitimately disputed today, for example as there are less smokers today lung cancer has gone down but Parkinson's disease has gone up, suggesting nicotine does have some cognitive benefits
> Eliezer Yudkowsky's "sequences" are over one million words long.
The sequences are really books made up of chapters (blog posts). Most of those posts are relatively short.
This is true. The Preacher says,
“Do not be rash with your mouth, And let not your heart utter anything hastily before God. For God is in heaven, and you on earth; Therefore let your words be few. For a dream comes through much activity, And a fool’s voice is known by his many words.” -Ecclesiastes 5:2
I think it comes from their culture "growing up" in hostile parts of the internet (twitter, Reddit, HN, etc) and so having to hedge every statement with excruciating delineation of edge cases and precise scoping lest some sneering POS leave drive by comments that twist their words into some straw man that the local majority will be against.
Basically it's a defense mechanism against adversarial HN commenter type behavior that's been cargo culted a couple times over and doesn't actually service it's original purpose anymore and is just a group signaling mechanism.
On an internet where almost every atypical person can find a niche to fit their oddities, rationalism is one of the bubbles for people who are strongly inclined toward (and have the time for) very long, clever-sounding essays. Pretty much everything else is downstream of that bias, so there's no real prospect of improvement.
Because, although the arguments might make sense in an abstract, detached way, they're very often against 'gut feel', and for good reason.
Therefore they use a kickstarter or aliexpress style torrent of argument and features to try to cudgel you into agreement.
Because a defining feature of those people is confusing the appearance of seriousness with seriousness itself, just like they confuse their ideological preference with rationality.
When one is “full of shit” as they say, the shit needs to spill out somewhere.
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
It’s called a gish gallop. Rationalists are masters at bullshitting, and the best way to do that is to say so many things that people can’t really devote the time to proving you wrong. If they do try, they counter with even more words until you give up. Rhetorically it’s where they feel most comfortable.
Most of them are too smart to have brief thoughts, but not smart enough to have succinct ones.
There's also rhetorical advantage in spewing so much stuff that you snow your reader under a blizzard; what's worse, some of that tends to be true.
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It's because you read too slowly.
Rationalism is for people who have the reading skill. If someone prefers short videos, it means that the doors of rationalism is closed for him.
The post's clearest claim is that rationalists "lack wisdom" and makes a circular argument - posts are too long because they lack the wisdom to make shorter posts, and the evidence for the lack of wisdom is the length of the posts. It says nothing useful or with predictive power. Another claim is that they didn't read an article by Scott Alexander, they didn't have much to say about it, and somehow conclude that makes them wiser, or a better writer, or superior in some vague way.
I may as well ask why so many replies, and responses to rationalist posts are empty posturing, sneering, ad-hom attacks, and writing so much while being so insubstanial. That post could be replaced by Bart Simpson bashing a saucepan shouting "I AM SO GREAT" and it would be no less informative.
> "even the rare one that contains some good ideas"
"Tee hee lols, cutting insight from superior mind, zing, burn, am I so great, or am I so great? I hope you feel wiser for reading my wisdom. Imagine how much worse this would be if I committed that sin of 'adding detail and nuance'. Also I'm not going to do the one thing I said they should do - interrogate the assumptions I made at the start."
I don't know if nicotine is good for you, but I've enjoyed all the parodies at https://morewrong.lol/