Comment by elzbardico

A lot of times, it feels like reading the Talmud.

First, it has a canon, every rationalist ends up referencing Yudowsky, arguments frequently refer back to earlier ones, and to make matters worse, by shorthand ("Molochs", "The Litany of Tarski", "conflict vs mistake theory")

Like the Talmud, rationalists like to use extreme hypotheticals to test principles. The contrivance of the situations is the point, as if stress-testing a rule by applying it to extreme situations to distil it to a single variable problem.

Both writing traditions keep opposing arguments in full. The Talmud records minority options and the full log of disputes that went for centuries. Rationalist's steelmanning is basically the same.

It is not surprising that Yudkowsky is Jewish and grew up Orthodox. A lot of other very important figures are also Jewish like Scott Alexander, so, it is plausible that they brought a lot of the disputation-as-study and commentary-on-commentary traditions with them and set the tone for the community.

Of course, I am not directly comparing the Talmud to Rationalist writing. The Talmud is ultimatelly a legal document, its hypotheticals feed a system that tells people how to act, compressing centuries of legal precedent, this is by nature dense, and this density makes it hard to read more than simply verbose. Rationalist blogs are often long due to a lack of professional editing.