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Comment by eimrine | Hacker News Reader

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.

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If the ideas are not complex enough to warrant a long explanation, it is a failure of the writer to be unable to produce the same information more succinctly.

Its not about short-form content, its about the unneeded over verbosity being a sign of a failure of communication.

Following Grice's maxims of communication, you can infer that they are either poor communicators or worse trying to hide something.

I'm a really slow reader. Had some hilarious conversations with fast readers. They really enjoy fluffy low density content. I ask what is on the page they just read and their first reaction is to look at it again. I describe barely related thoughts I had reading the page, the character of the author from their choice of words, they look at me as if I've done just the thing you aren't suppose to.

It takes a few words to communicate an idea; it takes a lot more to defend it. Which one is the blog post in question trying to do?

But "a lot more" is not a bounded heuristic. A good communicator would use more words to defend and idea than to present it, but way less than a bad communicator.

Defending rambling texts on the basis of "ideas take more words to defend them" is defending the incorrect idea that quantity is a quality in itself. Some ideas are self evident, some ideas can be defended in short well laid out arguments.

Even if a idea is complicated and requires a relatively long explanation. If that is the smallest possible defense, it would still be succinct even if the text is long.

The complaint is about the lack of writing skill:

  Nearly every blog post I have read in this ecosystem, even the rare one that contains some good ideas, is painfully long and extremely tedious.

My controversial thesis was about author's poor reading skill. The dilemma of the rationalist writer is about whether be skipped by wizards or be understandable by maglesses.

You can take the truthest truth ever like "god does not exist". This statement is rationalist and true and short so the author is supposed to cry with a tears of happiness. But making a wisard to behave like this requires something more thorough to be sent. Maybe the author's post also has a chance to become a rationalist if it would be a little bit... longer?

> My controversial thesis was about author's poor reading skill.

What makes you think the author has poor reading skill?

Projection by the look of it.

If he would follow his own advice he just put the Pascal's quote, maybe in slightly different words. What is this article if not a rationalist blog post way too long for the scope of thoughts has been put within?

Do you not think their belief to some extent involves believing formalizing things [even to a reductively useless point] makes them more adept at understanding the world?

I'll cite an example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qDmnyEMtJkE9Wrpau/simulacra-.... I can make the case that one might feel smarter simply having read through the grating writing.

What's a magless? Is that some weird variation on muggle? If so, oh my god, get a life.

I tried to search about it, and Google AI overview gave an answer based on your comment. I didn't find anything about magless in rationalism page on Wikipedia or LessWrong, so the answer was based only on this thread. I'm surprised about how easy is to mess with AI overview answers like that. State actors must have been doing this by the clock

Like a certain Terry Pratchett character you think you are a wizard but also spelled wizard wrong...

Do not tell anyone I still have not achieved C1. And sorry for not using a spellchecker, the war condition and scattered blackouts is why I am busy with trolling on the only resource on the Internets which provides a decent experience via edge (2.5G).

I score way above average on reading skill and I can still tell that many rationalist articles have a word count higher than the subject matter itself requires. If the point of a rationalist article is to exclude people by requiring them to have a willingness to absorb long overly verbose writing then they have succeeded admirably. But that is still bad writing.

Nothing requires you to abandon skimming. But imagine some Christian person which is going to become an atheist. If the rationalist resource requires the reader to have in his mind all the atheist memes, he will never switch and probably report some errors. If you are a bald reader then have a bit of respect who might read these things his first time. Rationalist articles should be made for stupids, like a "technology connections" yt channel. If you are not stupid, you might not need to read a rationalist's stuff any more to save your time for more advanced topics.

I don’t think brief writing has to be niche/rely on pre-existing context in its audience. Good writing is accessible because it is brief.

The assumption that “stupids” are going to be more receptive to long-form/from-first-principles arguments is wrong, I think. So is the assumption that that’s why rationalists write that way (it’s more likely because of bubble culture and/or because people like hearing themselves talk).

Honestly, Gwern and Scott are both pretty good writers. Dunno about Yud though.

It’s hard to write a rigorous analysis of something without length. The challenge is keeping it interesting.

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” - Mark Twain

Usually that false quote is attributed to Blaise Pascal, but I have also seen it being attributed to Albert Einstein.

I am a fan of falsely attributed quotes...

After a quick Google you seem to be right that it is falsely attributed. Blaise Pascal does seem to be the most accepted originator however.

>> “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” - Mark Twain

> Usually that false quote is attributed to Blaise Pascal, but I have also seen it being attributed to Albert Einstein.

Not false: Balzac published first, Pascal second:

* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

I was so confused about how this could be chronologically possible, until I learned there is another famous Balzac besides Honoré.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Guez_de_Balzac

The author didn't say that they wanted a short video. You're constructing a strawman to gleefully knock down. How very "rational".

Rationalism is for people who enjoy jerking off to their supposed superior intellect while reading bad Harry Potter fan fictions.

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