> 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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
It is a bit overused phrase, but I find it to be absolutely correct -- to make something concise without losing meaning and not being overly dry is both a skill and also lots of effort. I don't think it is impossible, it is just that often it is not worth it.
To me it's clearly the opposite. They could condense but did not have the time to do so. And I struggle to understand how the opposite conclusion could be reached when the explanation is right there, leaving little margin to extrapolation.
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.
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.
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.
Dataset of one, but I am struggling to quit sublingual nicotine after using it to quit vaping, which I used to quit smoking. Nicotine in any form is intensely moreish in my view.
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.
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.
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.
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 first sentence is a link to the Gwern essay, which does indeed have over 100 references and is rigorously argued and appropriately caveated.
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.
> 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!
He should have reasonably foreseen that that would be the exact effect.
Most normal people reading his piece would come away with the opposite conclusion.
The title alone: "On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)"
Is enough to make people go 'oh, that's ok then' without investing in trying to understand the subtlety of the argument made. You can add 500 references and spend 30K words but you've already lost by the first line of the article.
It would have taken 10 seconds to put a bit right at the top that says 'do not see this article as an excuse to go smoke or vape' or maybe even something harsher than that. With great power etc ...
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
> 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.
> Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you.
Gwern's article cites many, many peer reviewed journal articles (aka mainstream medical science) about how nicotine's addictiveness is overblown, and you're citing three tweets.
Common sense points to you being clueless in all of your writing, even though I haven't read it, and I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view.
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).
I'm speculating but there must be someone who writes a style guide for how Claude is supposed to speak then they design a way to reward for that style? So the problem could be they employ rationalist adjacent people who think this is peak A.I. design.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
Not sure about earlier, but during WWI cigarettes were smoked at incredible scale, to help deal with the stresses and horrors of war. Ensuring an ample supply to front-line troops was major gov't priority.
And I certainly have known cigarette smokers who explained "yes, I know they cause cancer and other bad stuff - but they also help with other serious (physical and mental) problems that I have, and I'm choosing quality of life over quantity".
This is linking to the appendix of a generally positive post (it's called "A Love Song to Nicotine") where the author caveats that some people report that they have indeed encountered addiction issues.
Weird that this is how OP chose to support their argument.
“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
"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.
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.
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.
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?
First off, it's not my belief system. I'm not a rationalist.
Second off, I didn't call the whole audience "sneering POS's". I only implied it. Regardless of whether they're 5% or 50% those types are sufficiently plentiful in the comments, here and elsewhere, such that anyone posting stuff that's against the grain will be quickly predated upon by them unless their take is hedged in a nearly airtight manner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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 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).
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 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).
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."
> "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.
Take this HN thread, here are some comments that could all be replaced with "because <someone else> is dumber than me" and convey the same meaning:
- "It's because you read too slowly."
- "Most of them are too smart to have brief thoughts, but not smart enough to have succinct ones"
- "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."
- "a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass"
- "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."
Extremely normal to do, and boring to read. At least Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary is witty with its scathing putdowns. None of these is a good contribution by the HN guidelines (thoughtful, effortful, edit out snark and sneering). Why is it "actually quite interesting" that people who want to focus on evidence and logic are averse to sneering as if that's surprising - who isn't averse to it? (NB. 'simply choosing not to engage' and 'ad-hom the author' are different, btw).
You aren't being asked to speak on behalf of Hacker New commenters, I'm asking you things like:
- why are you surprised that anyone doesn't like being sneered at?
- do you think those 'sneering' comments I quoted are good and interesting, would you like it if there were more of them?
- why were your words ""Sneering" is what they are most averse to: as if the worst crime is simply to choose not to engage with something" when sneering and not engaging are different things?
- why are you surprised that a group which is trying to avoid the normal vibes, personal attacks, gut feelings, and instead focus on evidence, logic and reasoning, is particularly against the things they are trying to avoid?
In your original comment, you quoted my text. In the follow-up, you changed the subject, talking about a bunch of other comments (most of which are heavily downvoted). My reply was a commentary on my text, not what anyone else said. My point was that you took one mildly acerbic offhand comment and made it out to be something that it was not (i.e. unfairly cruel and hostile). This is because you interpreted offhand dismissal as "sneering." Frankly, your reply was far ruder and more sarcastic than anything I said.
I don't know if nicotine is good for you, but I've enjoyed all the parodies at https://morewrong.lol/
How come I hadn't already seen that? Thank you.
> 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?
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It is a bit overused phrase, but I find it to be absolutely correct -- to make something concise without losing meaning and not being overly dry is both a skill and also lots of effort. I don't think it is impossible, it is just that often it is not worth it.
To me it's clearly the opposite. They could condense but did not have the time to do so. And I struggle to understand how the opposite conclusion could be reached when the explanation is right there, leaving little margin to extrapolation.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
Dataset of one, but I am struggling to quit sublingual nicotine after using it to quit vaping, which I used to quit smoking. Nicotine in any form is intensely moreish in my view.
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...
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.
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.
From the article:
The first sentence is a link to the Gwern essay, which does indeed have over 100 references and is rigorously argued and appropriately caveated.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.
> 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!
That's a complete cop-out then.
He should have reasonably foreseen that that would be the exact effect.
Most normal people reading his piece would come away with the opposite conclusion.
The title alone: "On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)"
Is enough to make people go 'oh, that's ok then' without investing in trying to understand the subtlety of the argument made. You can add 500 references and spend 30K words but you've already lost by the first line of the article.
It would have taken 10 seconds to put a bit right at the top that says 'do not see this article as an excuse to go smoke or vape' or maybe even something harsher than that. With great power etc ...
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
> 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.
> Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you.
Gwern's article cites many, many peer reviewed journal articles (aka mainstream medical science) about how nicotine's addictiveness is overblown, and you're citing three tweets.
Common sense points to you being clueless in all of your writing, even though I haven't read it, and I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view.
So that's where Claude's verbosity comes from.
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).
They use automated graders now. It's more likely the communication style was rewarded by overly strict grading rubrics.
(ie "honest caveats" wording comes from a reward for being honest about drawbacks instead of covering them up)
Note Opus 5.5 is much less likely to do it.
I'm speculating but there must be someone who writes a style guide for how Claude is supposed to speak then they design a way to reward for that style? So the problem could be they employ rationalist adjacent people who think this is peak A.I. design.
So the length is load-bearing?
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.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander
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.
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.
Because they need to rationalize everything.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
Not sure about earlier, but during WWI cigarettes were smoked at incredible scale, to help deal with the stresses and horrors of war. Ensuring an ample supply to front-line troops was major gov't priority.
And I certainly have known cigarette smokers who explained "yes, I know they cause cancer and other bad stuff - but they also help with other serious (physical and mental) problems that I have, and I'm choosing quality of life over quantity".
Funnily enough, the main body of the post the author links to is about the exact opposite
It is? Am I getting a different link to you, or is my reading comprehension just terrible at 9.30pm or something.
https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/a-love-song-to-nicot...
It says the exact opposite to me?
This is linking to the appendix of a generally positive post (it's called "A Love Song to Nicotine") where the author caveats that some people report that they have indeed encountered addiction issues.
Weird that this is how OP chose to support their argument.
And “bad for you” is left completely unexamined. It feels very dishonest to me, and it’s a shame because I was hoping to learn something new.
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
Found what's going on my gravestone.
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
"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.
> 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.
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.
Many posts/chapters are written to be understood individually, so they overlap but with different emphasis. They are made to be skippable.
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.
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.
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?
Tbf the people who are against rationalists describe themselves as sneering. See r/sneerclub
First off, it's not my belief system. I'm not a rationalist.
Second off, I didn't call the whole audience "sneering POS's". I only implied it. Regardless of whether they're 5% or 50% those types are sufficiently plentiful in the comments, here and elsewhere, such that anyone posting stuff that's against the grain will be quickly predated upon by them unless their take is hedged in a nearly airtight manner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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...
>> “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/
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.
The complaint is about the lack of writing skill:
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.
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?
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?
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).
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.
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).
Rationalism is for people who enjoy jerking off to their supposed superior intellect while reading bad Harry Potter fan fictions.
The author didn't say that they wanted a short video. You're constructing a strawman to gleefully knock down. How very "rational".
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."
> "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.
Take this HN thread, here are some comments that could all be replaced with "because <someone else> is dumber than me" and convey the same meaning:
- "It's because you read too slowly."
- "Most of them are too smart to have brief thoughts, but not smart enough to have succinct ones"
- "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."
- "a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass"
- "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."
Extremely normal to do, and boring to read. At least Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary is witty with its scathing putdowns. None of these is a good contribution by the HN guidelines (thoughtful, effortful, edit out snark and sneering). Why is it "actually quite interesting" that people who want to focus on evidence and logic are averse to sneering as if that's surprising - who isn't averse to it? (NB. 'simply choosing not to engage' and 'ad-hom the author' are different, btw).
I cannot speak on behalf of Hacker News commenters that are not myself, I can only defend my words, which were far milder than that.
You aren't being asked to speak on behalf of Hacker New commenters, I'm asking you things like:
- why are you surprised that anyone doesn't like being sneered at?
- do you think those 'sneering' comments I quoted are good and interesting, would you like it if there were more of them?
- why were your words ""Sneering" is what they are most averse to: as if the worst crime is simply to choose not to engage with something" when sneering and not engaging are different things?
- why are you surprised that a group which is trying to avoid the normal vibes, personal attacks, gut feelings, and instead focus on evidence, logic and reasoning, is particularly against the things they are trying to avoid?
In your original comment, you quoted my text. In the follow-up, you changed the subject, talking about a bunch of other comments (most of which are heavily downvoted). My reply was a commentary on my text, not what anyone else said. My point was that you took one mildly acerbic offhand comment and made it out to be something that it was not (i.e. unfairly cruel and hostile). This is because you interpreted offhand dismissal as "sneering." Frankly, your reply was far ruder and more sarcastic than anything I said.