Happens to all of us. It’s not stark enough for me to suggest redacting the comment, but you should be aware of when you make vague but authoritative-sounding statements like “Feed the flame of your curiosity, and it will grow brighter, hotter, and will demand more fuel”. Anything that, when I read it out loud, sounds like the words of a preacher or a fortune cookie, I reevaluate to see if I can express it less mysteriously, or whether it’s a redundant restatement of a point already made elsewhere.
On second thought, I’m no more qualified than you to give advice on writing style...
Hmm. In this case what I meant by that was the factual claim “The more time you spend learning things simply because you want to know them, the more those things will suggest other things which you will also want to know. If you devote sufficient time to this, and free yourself of influences which confound your curiosity with other, more fear-based drives, this process becomes self-sustaining, and leads to strong personal growth.” I also considered using the image of an engine which, with each revolution, draws in the fuel it will need to push it through the next.
Do you mean to say that
my statement of that claim sacrifices clarity in order to sound deep
by phrasing it as “deep wisdom,” I’m obscuring the fact that it is a factual claim, and thus can, and maybe should, be disputed as such
or that pulling off that style simply requires more skill than I have yet developed?
(If I’m going to ask such things, I should, of course, add that Crocker’s rules apply for this discussion—I care more about being a better writer tomorrow than I do about feeling like a good writer today.)
Well, in this case, it’s pretty clear in context what the phrase means, and it certainly won’t stop others here from disagreeing with it if need be; it’s just that it comes across as an affectation, and not a sincere style. The third option, I’d guess.
Obscured in Eliezer’s writing style is the difficulty of writing in this way without coming across as full of oneself. He’s honed his craft to the point that he can write something like the Twelve Virtues without looking ridiculous or kitschy, but in a certain sense he makes it look too easy to use highly metaphorical and evocative language while making serious points. For example, let’s compare
Feed the flame of your curiosity, and it will grow brighter, hotter, and will demand more fuel.
with a sentence from 12 Virtues like
Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own.
The “flame of your curiosity” sentence flies like a lead balloon, in my humble aesthetic opinion; the metaphor is hackneyed, the sentence structure is halting and dull, and there’s no meter to the sentence when you read it out loud. The everyday form of most prose sentences just won’t do if you’re trying to sound the least bit lyrical; go all the way, or not at all.
By contrast, the “leaf in the wind” sentence has this quality: when you read it, you almost hear it out loud. It’s a novel metaphor, in a flowing sentence with one well-placed pause, and with an audible metrical structure. That’s the kind of form you want if you’re trying to trigger the Deep Wisdom circuits toward a good end.
All that being said, there are definitely worse places to practice on one’s prose style than Less Wrong.
Happens to all of us. It’s not stark enough for me to suggest redacting the comment, but you should be aware of when you make vague but authoritative-sounding statements like “Feed the flame of your curiosity, and it will grow brighter, hotter, and will demand more fuel”. Anything that, when I read it out loud, sounds like the words of a preacher or a fortune cookie, I reevaluate to see if I can express it less mysteriously, or whether it’s a redundant restatement of a point already made elsewhere.
On second thought, I’m no more qualified than you to give advice on writing style...
Hmm. In this case what I meant by that was the factual claim “The more time you spend learning things simply because you want to know them, the more those things will suggest other things which you will also want to know. If you devote sufficient time to this, and free yourself of influences which confound your curiosity with other, more fear-based drives, this process becomes self-sustaining, and leads to strong personal growth.” I also considered using the image of an engine which, with each revolution, draws in the fuel it will need to push it through the next.
Do you mean to say that
my statement of that claim sacrifices clarity in order to sound deep
by phrasing it as “deep wisdom,” I’m obscuring the fact that it is a factual claim, and thus can, and maybe should, be disputed as such
or that pulling off that style simply requires more skill than I have yet developed?
(If I’m going to ask such things, I should, of course, add that Crocker’s rules apply for this discussion—I care more about being a better writer tomorrow than I do about feeling like a good writer today.)
Well, in this case, it’s pretty clear in context what the phrase means, and it certainly won’t stop others here from disagreeing with it if need be; it’s just that it comes across as an affectation, and not a sincere style. The third option, I’d guess.
Obscured in Eliezer’s writing style is the difficulty of writing in this way without coming across as full of oneself. He’s honed his craft to the point that he can write something like the Twelve Virtues without looking ridiculous or kitschy, but in a certain sense he makes it look too easy to use highly metaphorical and evocative language while making serious points. For example, let’s compare
with a sentence from 12 Virtues like
The “flame of your curiosity” sentence flies like a lead balloon, in my humble aesthetic opinion; the metaphor is hackneyed, the sentence structure is halting and dull, and there’s no meter to the sentence when you read it out loud. The everyday form of most prose sentences just won’t do if you’re trying to sound the least bit lyrical; go all the way, or not at all.
By contrast, the “leaf in the wind” sentence has this quality: when you read it, you almost hear it out loud. It’s a novel metaphor, in a flowing sentence with one well-placed pause, and with an audible metrical structure. That’s the kind of form you want if you’re trying to trigger the Deep Wisdom circuits toward a good end.
All that being said, there are definitely worse places to practice on one’s prose style than Less Wrong.
EDIT: Improved the style, appropriately enough.