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On the contrary - I found rationalist bloggers to be the most willing to change their mind in face of new evidence out of all groups of people I've ever met o the internet. Although HN commenters are a close second.

Yes! There's often no clear thesis or argumentative structure, instead it reads like notes after a rabbit hole session, with little convincing involved.

I see comments defending them for considering "all viewpoints", but these are still a subset of perspectives they've constructed themselves. Good philosophy engages with a work in a way its readers would recognise, rather than arguing against a simplified set of beliefs and closing the book claiming victory.

Even in my brief stint with philosophy of biology, I saw concrete examples and actual positions discussed in the texts, while a lot of rationalist constructions seem to reduce what people believe to almost comical reductive strawmen. I'd say the verbosity often compensates for the lack of historical depth or understanding on the topic.

An example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple.... Its fictional opponent's inability to understand elementary explanations does much of the argumentative work.

Though sadly what I'm doing here is pretty much the same. Maybe the quantity the internet allows us to produce simply makes this form of argumentation more natural.

Academic philosophical arguments are enormously wordy. A bulk of points academic papers try to convey could be cut dramatically short, but then passing peer review would be challenging. Authors are thus incentivized to signal erudition through hard (analytic) or soft (continental) obscurantism. Being educated (read - socialized) in this environment would only hurt a person already predisposed to being too wordy.

This may not be the case for historical philosophical arguments. And while these are enormously influential from the standpoint of history of ideas, from the standpoint of a contemporary observer most of them contain trivial logical mistakes.

t. majored in philosophy

It reminds me a bit of elaborate theological arguments that build up in denominational seminaries. The authors just have an obsessive compulsion to catalogue and resolve every minute detail, details that only really matter if you've already accepted many other dubious and compounding premises. IE, the articles are really for existing converts.

Ironically very similar to LLM output.

lol, Jordan Peterson comes to mind

The problem part in that quote is “rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start”, not that they’re including nuance. Nuance can be a value add or it can be a distraction. It is not by itself virtuous.

The trick is to include a lot of nuance, details, and steelmanned arguments about little concessions and downstream, but to leave the key assumptions at the start largely unquestioned.

The reader spends 15 minutes reading what feels like a highly nuanced, deeply researched article. If you’re not paying close attention you don’t notice that some pivotal assumptions were spared from the nuance and steelmanning.

Rationalist bloggers aren’t the only ones who use this technique, but it is oddly common in rationalist blogs. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.

I think he just used nuance as a polite way to say meandering.

Personally I really wish authors would pack their 'nuance' into well-sectioned areas, maybe even collapsible (we have the technology!). I shouldn't have to skim several paragraphs just to understand the core of the argument.

Arguably, it's not a big problem if you already love the author and hang on to their every word. But as someone who is often just trying to get the gist of the idea, I find the rationalist writing style really tiresome.

How would it make it much better? Can you give me a nuanced argument and one that isn't nuanced so I can agree with you?

Over a million words is significantly longer than the bible and it's treated as one work:

"There also used to be a practice on LW of telling newbies who weren't producing good content to come back when they'd read the sequences."

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EauwsXht4jrjTTE9m/reading-th...

His weirdo Harry Potter fanfic is 600,000 words long, which is the combined length of the first five real harry Potter books.

I've seen rationalist adjacent tech twitter accept people who take openly awful ideas, and it seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate -- that is, if someone is willing to be verbose and pedantic enough to dissuade anyone from trying to argue against them.

There is also value in the abstract sense, meaning tradition can have value for the consensus and social understanding it causes.

Like, maybe Christmas as understood for Americans has no value. But the fact a Christmas exist does result in families getting together and provides a cohesive context for the winter season across pop culture, and that can have downstream value.

Isn't this just the naturalistic fallacy?

Traditions can often encode good things, but they shouldn't be respected solely because they are tradition.

I don’t think it’s reasonable. The age of an idea does not imply that it’s true, valuable, or good.

The term "Chesterton's Fence" comes to mind.

There's no harm in critically examining why a tradition is there (especially if harmful in other ways). But a lot of the time, "it's a long story" does actually have a reasonable story.

But even if we don't know the underlying reason, they are still valuable by dint of having survived for so long

Of course there is tremendous value in many traditions. However, when the world is changing quickly as it is today, it is also very important to check in frequently with reality, to face facts, as it were.

Many people also use tradition as a cover for bias, bigotry, and bullying. When one has been on the other end of that, one learns to view blind tradition with a healthy dose of skepticism.

And yet, still, there is much of value there. Ironically it takes some wisdom to learn which is worth keeping and which is not.

When I open a general article and it starts with things like:

In a cold autumn in 1967, a barely awake scientist in the now defunct Institute of XYZ thought he'd go through his lab notes as he has done for the past 3 years since leaving the serene setting of the University of...

I immediately close it.

It's all about understanding the medium. The Economist makes a wide-ranging, newsstand magazine that isn't too far different of a medium than like a weekend Financial Times paper. I think blogs, or free-ish or frequently publishing substances, naturally slot into that kind of medium where you want to pack the most info and analysis into a deftly concise format.

If you want to write long form, please use a medium where that is naturally part of that medium. Quarterly magazines, books, full length investigative pieces, etc. An important part of WHY longer form writing works in those media is that the author is understood and expected to have devoted much more time and work into it, and doesn't output content so frequently. In other words, respect the axiom that the medium is also the message.

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Yeah. It's titled "a love song to nicotine" and 80+% of it is about the benefits of nicotine with a claim that "sublingual nicotine’s addictive potential feels low", but TFA links to the tacked-on twitter screenshots at the end. Not the point, but it does make one wonder. Though, to be fair, I only realised that the main body of the article existed when I accidentally scrolled back up "too far". Perhaps the author of TFA received the exact same link and made the same mistake as I initially did.

I see this quote being thrown around a lot as if it supports the article's point, but this quote is just some of the most famously smart, skilled, and effortful people ever admitting even they cannot condense their knowledge that much.

I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.

so that's why Claude is so verbose

I think Scott in particular just really enjoys writing. He is very articulate and obviously just brimming with clever connections and turns of phrase. And he can generate a lot of words very easily.

When I was younger, sometimes I would just get carried away by the splendor and awe of it all and soak in the 25,000 word articles (or whatever they are.)

Today I would say that either he has fallen off a little, or I've just grown a little weary of the form, but I don't really get the same rush out of his writing anymore; and I notice more of the motivated reasoning and cheap tricks.

Still, sometimes I'll come across one of his posts and think 'damn, Scott's still got it.'

What the author here misses is that the verbosity is often a signal of work done.

It's like the "alternatives considered" section in a design doc or RFC: it shows you've thought through different approaches, considered trade-offs, etc. It's a little like showing your work combined with taking the reader on a journey.

Because they know that quantity is a substitute for quality. If you write enough words about something, no matter how nonsensical your actual arguments are, people tend to assume you know what you are talking about. If someone points out a flaw in one of your arguments you just say "well you aren't addressing all my other arguments"

It's gish gallop

I suspect it's the consequence of a depth-first search for truth, when reality is deep.

Imho narrative and metaphor and feeling hits more like the breadth-first mode. Lots of compression in pursuit of demarking a reality, whether or not everyone likes where a story does its compression. It takes visiting a lot places (and listening to how lot of signals bounce back) to drop a good metaphor, or craft a good story, that reaches and affects a large quorum of minds.

> I haven't heard the term "rationalist blogger" before, but surely, not assuming tradition is correct is sort of key to the "rationalist" part?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community

IME they're usually the first thing you see when you get to the comments, so the really long essays are possibly a way to bore people into not getting to the comment section.

Autism is often associated with bottoms-up communication, start with the details, then the big picture will emerge. I.e., https://autisticphd.com/theblog/what-is-bottom-up-thinking-i...

Which I find is the lesswrong-style to a T: here are all the details, literally all of them, and then we'll find our way to the point together, eventually.

> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience

Or they understand that this “shared context” is a myth that doesn’t exist in reality. Plenty of situations where everybody just nods “yea, right” and then walks away with a different idea because they’ve been looking at it from a different perspective/set of assumptions.

> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience, so they splay out all the detail to compensate

I would say this is fascinatingly true of AI as well, and probably one of the reasons I (and maybe other ND folks?) work with it so well, cringey slop word choice aside.

I was joking a few years ago that if the AI was trained on the internet, the corpus included massive overrepresentation with ND style writing.

Autistic misunderstand each other as much as they misunderatand neurotypical people.

Assuming I am a rationalist (I honestly don't like this word, it's more of a self-identifying label; if not it is just saying something really trivial. But yet these people, probably only on LW, decide to call them so, so let's use that word) and is writing to others on this forum, I would assume that they have the same mindset and peer review standard as mine, so I would not write with defensive mindset emphasized.

Most of the time the benchmark word count isn't any more than six paragraphs to begin with. And putting out more words means more practice, which is valuable in a school setting.

The alternative is to "turn in a good paper" which is not quantifiable and thus anathema to the modern Taylorism inspired world of education. If the student can't agree, it's a problem and so word count it is - can't argue with basic math.

Having a well-defined rubric is better than having a minimum word count or page count. If they can meet all the rubric's requirements in 3 sentences then so be it.

This is an amazing site

> Pascal’s Mugging and Why I Gave an Escort My Son’s College Fund

https://morewrong.lol/?post=pascals-mugging-college-fund

Hehe, that got a chuckle out of me, it's a bit like that HN parody site.

That has some serious n-gate vibes (http://n-gate.com/)

How come I hadn't already seen that? Thank you.

I’m an avid less wrong reader, but this is incredible

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A lot of academics are bad writers, philosophers included. In my opinion, philosophy is actually far from the worst offender. If you read philosophers who are good at writing and actually have something to say (e.g. Bertrand Russell, Thomas Nagel, Susan Wolf) they can be short and illuminating.

By the way, there's a big divide between continental (European) and analytic (Anglosphere) philosophy. The Calvin and Hobbes joke is poking fun at postmodern continental philosophy (or literary criticism or gender studies) but most analytic philosophy is not like that.

Or there is a lot of nuance and long history of arguments behind concepts like free will, consciousness, realism, emergence. You can't simplify the arguments without glossing over a lot of detail. Philosophers prattle on because they're responding to all that. They're aware of the various objections to their position.

Not sure about the verbosity but that's probably where the useless and annoying claudisms come from, they are rewarded by (rationalist adjacent) users because they feel good about understanding the jargon and it reinforces the feeling of communicating with a superior alien intelligence (and that oneself is also somewhat superior for being able to understand it).

So the length is load-bearing?

That really is a fine book, it brings back good memories.

However, I don't think this article is really complaining about style. Scott Alexander has great style, the clarity/grace people would find much to love about him.

The complaint is about the length of his writing, and the content, ie focusing on endless arguments as opposed to honoring prior traditions.

> The second sentence is a link to a Substack essay

The author of the second essay here! It's a pro-nicotine one — the OP just linked to the very end of it. Moreover Gwern himself reviewed my essay during Inkhaven (https://www.inkhaven.blog/), a 30-posts-in-30-days program.

I asked Gwern explicitly if he ever feels responsible for getting some people addicted to nicotine. His answer was something along of the lines of: “No, I explicitly warned people that (1) vaping/smoking is addictive and (2) if you ever was addicted to nicotine, even sublingual nicotine is enough to get people addicted”.

I do think it's important to warn people that they should be careful with the substance and watch their usage, so I included the screenshots in my essay!

I don't have a horse in the "is nicotine good/bad" race, but having lots of references and being argued to death isn't a proxy for being true. Gwern is a former wikipedia admin so peppering everything with references and going line by line, usenet style, to demolish someone's argument is his bread and butter. That just makes him an excellent rhetorician in the online community of people who relate to this argumentative style (typically people who read wikipedia a lot), not a source of truth. When it comes to fields I know a bit more about it's pretty easy to see through the irrelevant citation gish gallop.

Yes, I hate to admit I am/was someone that assumed nicotine is bad, but Gwern's article is fascinating and well researched. This was a poor hill to die on for this article.

Ironically, the Substack essay which was linked to is titled "A Love Song to Nicotine" and is all about how the author enjoys using nicotine for productivity boosts, and doesn't feel like he experiences many downsides to using it.

(To clarify the Gwernpost, nicotine isn't primarily addictive but habit forming. So for instance if you get your nicotine from cigarettes you end up habituated to smoking cigs, and so on. But you can use it to habituate to anything else as well.)

> 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”

Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you. I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view, especially when "interrogating" in this context would mean spending dozens of hours of my life going line-by-line through each reference and trying to understand the context of a field which, frankly speaking, neither me nor the author of the article have any business trying to evaluate. The only winning move is not to play.

I’m not trying to argue against his post. If I was, I would devote more than two sentences to it. I’m trying to argue that it’s too long

Tweets aren't great for citing sources, two links and you hit the word limit.

Yarvin is about as anti-rationalist as you can get.

Obscurantism as a form of deliberate concealment is definitely a large part of it, and adds weight to the idea that rationalism is essentially a post-modern take on libertarianism.

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

Aristotelian physics is simpler than Newtonian physics, which is simpler than either relativity or quantum mechanics, both of which will probably turn out to be simpler than whatever theory we come up with that somehow encompasses both.

Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis is shorter than On the origin of species, which in turn is shorter than the shelf-full of books you would need to cover all the details Darwin didn't know about.

The truth does generally turn out to be simpler than its alternatives, when you fill in all their details and add the epicycles you need to make them consistent with what we actually observe. In some sense that's how we recognize the truth: it's what you don't need to keep making increasingly implausible excuses for.

But it's not reliably "very simple" if that means "short blogpost length at most", and things that purport to be that simple often turn out to be simple only in appearance. (Like saying "a witch did it", which in some sense can explain anything, and for the exact same reason explains nothing until you've filled in lots of details about what witches can do and how, at which point it stops looking like a good explanation for anything.)

The simplest truths are the hardest to prove/explain.

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly (some translations "as his folly deserves"), lest he be wise in his own eyes." - Proverbs 26:4,5

I think part of what's happening is that the bad ideas and bad reasoning get diluted among 9000 words and 100 references. It's hard to put your finger on one sentence and say "here's where you're wrong", because the conclusion does not (obviously) rest on any one sentence. It rests more on the volume of words.

But "proof by volume" is not actually a thing. (I mean, it's a technique that can be effective in practice, but logically, it's not valid whatsoever.)

How do you answer something like that? If you try a point-by-point rebuttal, you're going to be into it 9000 words yourself (at least), and it is rarely worth it. I think that's "don't answer a fool according to his folly".

"Answer him as his folly deserves" is less clear to me. Is that to just flat out say that his ideas are foolish? Is it to give a concise one-paragraph statement of why his conclusion is folly? I think the latter is preferable (if you can). I mean, the rationalist is just going to claim that you haven't engaged with his arguments, though you can reply "no I didn't; your conclusion is so wrong that I don't need to engage with how you got there". And the concise rebuttal may be helpful to bystanders.

They are also very repetitive. When I started reading it (back in 2015 I think?) I thought that they had some interesting info, but needed a good editor to remove at least 60% of the material; many chapters argued the exact same point as the previous chapter, with a slightly different analogy. Also many are responses to other blogs of the time, which also isn't interesting to read in a book since you don't have any context. Very tiresome to read.

Found what's going on my gravestone.

I'm not being funny, but how do you expect to find a receptive audience for your belief system when you apparently write off a variety of audiences as 'sneering POSs' who are out to get you from the start?

This is a funny juxtaposition; I grew up creationist, and 'gish gallop' of course originated as something the rationalists [0] used to describe the creationists! 'rationalist' may have shifted slightly as a descriptor, but honestly perhaps the shoe has always fit pretty well.

[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

It's like those HN commenters who just spew links to cherry picked sources at you when you call them out for misleading people. It's an only slightly obfuscated attempt to move the goalposts from "hey idiot take a step back and look at the big picture, your core point is garbage and you're a bad person for even making it" type argument to one of implicitly accepting their premise and then bickering over sources (in the case of the filthy linkposters) or the exact nature of the minutia and excruciating detail they have produced in droves (in the case of the rationalists).

That said I consider the rationalists a little bit higher brow since they're at least DIYing (or were before AI) the words and the arguments and responsible for all that verbosity whereas any idiot can cherry pick links.

Indeed, it seems to me that nicotine may indeed have beneficial effects in some contexts.

It is also readily apparent to me that nicotine is bad for us, generally and broadly.

The combination leaves wiggle room for nicotine to be a net-good lever on certain mechanisms. I do think it's best to avoid it; It's a challenging double-edged sword.

The molecular biology of how it's maybe-good and maybe-bad is probably the most useful aspect of it. It's a strange sort of bronchodilator and has weird and ambiguous antiinflammatory properties. (Which seem to tie in to how it is addictive: Short-term bronchodilation and oddly-shaped short-term antiinflammatory properties turn into bronchoconstriction and proinflammatory effects as time passes from taking nicotine, which feels like it would be rather inductive to generating a craving for more nicotine.)

Re. Parkinson's: Wild guess, addled brain hunching on nebulous perspectives, but I do think that nicotine's protective effects against Parkinson's are indeed related to the bronchodilation and antiinflammatory aspects, and more specifically it seems to me that Parkinson's has pulmonary basis. I think we're nuking our lungs in many subtle ways that in some of us cause the dam of cell death in the substantia nigra to break. How might we be nuking our lungs? Say… Air pollution, incl. microplastics and plasticizers, various disruptors of fine pulmonary epithelium and metabolic function and neuroendocrine autonomic control. And I'd think that once we start to lose fine autonomic control by way of loss of dopamine cells in the substantia nigra, we'd be poised to enter a vicious cycle of further loss of pulmonary foundations.

but idk, just sayin lol

I suspect we'll find that some smokers (in addition to being addicted) were self-medicating.

What? Why jump to that conclusion, without any evidence?

Especially in a context where most scientists blame pesticides?

Funnily enough, the main body of the post the author links to is about the exact opposite

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.

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.

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

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.

> "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."

It's actually quite interesting to me that even relatively mild jabs get dismissed by rationalists as "sneering." "Sneering" is what they are most averse to: as if the worst crime is simply to choose not to engage with something or be dismissive of it on its face. Something that is extremely normal to do.