Comment by tim333
5 days ago
Philosophy also tends to rattle on. I think part of it is that if the ideas are not that strong and seem obvious or wrong if stated briefly you can make it look more significant by lengthening up.
See Hobbes, Calvin https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/ac...
A 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.
Yes, a lot of pieces just aren't written for beginners, they are part of an ongoing and voluminous discourse. Writing something short just wouldn't be very interesting (for the experts), they want to engage with all of the prior art.
I think that when references to the prior work are only implicit, pieces tend to be nearly unreadable for casual readers.
However, when interesting counter arguments are stated explicitly, the long articles can still be kind of fun, and personally think this is something Scott Alexander does pretty well, for instance. He is not the main offender of unreadable long rationalist blog posts, of which there are many.
I guess with something like consciousness you get a lot of so and so said this and that guy said that but I where I think they went wrong is this point. I've yet to find it very illuminating when it goes much beyond scientific observation though.
I have a theory the best philosophy can be stated simply and briefly. Like with consciousness Nagel asking what it's like to be a bat is an interesting idea but you don't need hundreds of pages to explain it.