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Comment by eimrine | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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).

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

> 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.

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).

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