Yet another Hacker News

Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?

51 points epestr 5 hours ago 36 comments

senderista 5 hours ago | parent

So that's where Claude's verbosity comes from.

throwawayy6767 4 hours ago | parent

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).

staticman2 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

vrganj 5 hours ago | parent

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.

eimrine 5 hours ago | parent

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.

defrost 5 hours ago | parent

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.

eimrine 3 hours ago | parent

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?

defrost 2 hours ago | parent

> My controversial thesis was about author's poor reading skill.

What makes you think the author has poor reading skill?

dcminter 17 minutes ago | parent

Projection by the look of it.

eimrine 5 minutes ago | parent

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?

epestr 1 hour ago | parent

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.

EdwardDiego 1 hour ago | parent

What's a magless? Is that some weird variation on muggle? If so, oh my god, get a life.

tuesdaynight 34 minutes ago | parent

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

staticman2 7 minutes ago | parent

Like a certain Terry Pratchett character you think you are a wizard but also spelled wizard wrong...

EdwardDiego 1 hour ago | parent

The author didn't say that they wanted a short video. You're constructing a strawman to gleefully knock down. How very "rational".

GaryBluto 53 minutes ago | parent

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

AndyPa32 38 minutes ago | parent

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...

GaryBluto 36 minutes ago | parent

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.

Arkhaine_kupo 37 minutes ago | parent

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.

ai_critic 5 hours ago | parent

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.

throwawayy6767 4 hours ago | parent

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.

roryirvine 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jacknews 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

f30e3dfed1c9 34 minutes ago | parent

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.

rglover 7 minutes ago | parent

Found what's going on my gravestone.

erelong 25 minutes ago | parent

> 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

zulux 19 minutes ago | parent

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

ahlCVA 6 minutes ago | parent

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

girvo 4 minutes ago | parent

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 doesn’t say the exact opposite to me?

bell-cot 21 minutes ago | parent

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.

sien 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

parodysbird 4 minutes ago | parent

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.

HPsquared 10 minutes ago | parent

Because they need to rationalize everything.

girvo 6 minutes ago | parent

> 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...

ModernMech 4 minutes ago | parent

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, you counter with even more words until they give up. Rhetorically it’s where they feel most comfortable.

bel8 1 minute ago | parent

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.