Comment by atoav
4 days ago
Can this truly be the reason? Aren't there infinitly many non-verbose writers out there who believe themselves to be correct just as much?
I suspect a reason for the length of rationalist writers is often rather that they value being objectively correct more than others. Length is just an attempt to be less wrong by including many aspects of a topic to paint as complete a picture as possible.
Additionally people often write what they like to read. It may be shocking to many, but some people may enjoy reading long form text that includes a lot of information that allows them to form their own thoughts. Just like some people enjoy noise music others would characterize as a frontal assault on human hearing. Those people would often find 90% of the music regular people enjoy mind-numbingly boring. Human taste is surprisingly diverse.
That doesn't mean that there isn't objectively bad rationalist writing (or objectively bad noise music). E.g. sometimes the train of thought is entirely missing and instead of building an argument it feels more like a lose pile of material that the author stumbled upon by chance in that specific order. If it is declared as that in the start, fine. If it pretends to be a great essay on the nature of $topic and then derails, that means the promise isn't kept.
I always get the impression that they correlate length and correctness. As if the Perfect Best Answer to some question is an infinitely long essay that resembles someone’s rambling mind obsessing over a particular topic, forever.
Which is part of the reason why many people find their actual arguments lacking, and the attitude self-absorbed. Because they don’t seem super interested in arriving at a precise argument, but rather in demonstrating the operation of their mind.
Length is no substitute for substance. However, reality, as they say, has an surprising amount of detail. That means if someones goal is to adequately represent it you will not be able to do so in a engaging, polemic one-liner that puts everything neatly into a box.
Note that within my argument the arrow of causality points in one direction: To explain complex topics adequately a certain amount of length is needed. That obviously doesn't mean long texts are automatically the more adequate explaination of a complex topic in all cases.
The linked post points out that writing from the rationality community often spends excess time on insubstantial parts of an argument, which can actually distract focus from the truly essential reasoning and doesn't help the reader. I've read a lot from LessWrong/rationality adjacent community and agree with that observation.
1 reply →
> Length is just an attempt to be less wrong
Don't know if it was intended but there's something to be said about the discussions happening at length on www.lesswrong.com and I felt I had to acknowledge your penmanship.
On the actual topic I for one think some people like reading themselves just as much as hearing themselves thus they're writing for their own audience of one.
Yeah sure. Writing is a way of structuring your thinking. Now whether you need to air that out to the public is a question of character. I tend to do 90% of writing purely for myself and need to force myself to write a blog post, for others that may differ.
Some of my favourite websites are weird 90s website where some weirdo decided to dedicate a website to their extremely obscure niche interest in way more detail than anybody would ever need.