Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?

senderista

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

vrganj

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

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.

ai_critic

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

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.

jacknews

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

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

erelong

> 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

bell-cot

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

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.

HPsquared

Because they need to rationalize everything.

girvo

> 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

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.

bel8

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.

fwlr

From the article: 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.

devmor

When one is “full of shit” as they say, the shit needs to spill out somewhere.

bananaflag

It's because you read too slowly.

cubefox

> 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.

jadar

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

cucumber3732842

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.