There is one person whose writings seem of better quality to me than either yours or Eliezer’s, and that’s Yvain. What do you think his writing style is?
(To be clear, I enjoy what you and EY write, despite the style differences, especially when you are at your best.)
Time will tell—he’s still writing, and I find his dispatches from the front lines of patient care more interesting than some of his posts prior to that.
And it may yet be a good thing. Two quotes come to mind, one by Popper and one by Von Neumann:
“The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that 1 can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy...Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted outside philosophy & they die if these roots decay...These roots are easily forgotten by philosophers who ‘study’ philosophy instead of being forced into philosophy by the pressure of nonphilosophical problems.”
“As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or still more, if it is a second or third generation only indirectly inspired by ideas coming from ‘reality’, it is beset with very grave dangers. It becomes more and more purely aestheticizing, more and more purely l’art pour l’art. This need not be bad, if the field is surrounded by correlated subjects, which still have closer empirical connections, or if the discipline is under the influence of men with an exceptionally well-developed taste. But there is a grave danger that the subject will develop along the line of least resistance, that the stream, so far from its source, will separate into a multitude of insignificant branches, and that the discipline will become a disorganized mass of details and complexities. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much ‘abstract’ inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration.”
I don’t think I agree with the Von Neumann quote (vide “pure mathematics”). One thing that does seem to guard against some of the problems discussed in the first quote is the rigor of proof (i.e. either be empirically-driven or formal (or both)).
The writer who I like more than Eliezer, Luke or Yvain is Robin Hanson.
His posts seem supremely succinct and clear. There is no obfuscation of language and there is little attempt to add dressing or flavoring. Examples are extremely relevant. Typically, many possible hypotheses are considered and reasons provided for choosing a subset of these. He is also the best summarizer in the business.
I prefer Yvain’s writing style to Eliezer’s, but Yvain also has the problem of being too verbose for my taste. In terms of information-to-words ratio, my opinion is that lukeprog’s writings outperform Eliezer’s and Yvain’s.
That’s not a good metric to maximize… There is probably some broad optimum preferred by maybe 80% of readers, and too dense or too watery writing is definitely inferior. There ought to be some relevant research out there.
I agree, I think a good writer has a sense when a particular part of his argument is tricky or more difficult to grasp so he may add additional explanations or examples even though he has already made the point.
There is one person whose writings seem of better quality to me than either yours or Eliezer’s, and that’s Yvain. What do you think his writing style is?
(To be clear, I enjoy what you and EY write, despite the style differences, especially when you are at your best.)
Not sure what I’d call it, but I agree with Michael Vassar that the day Yvain began “Real Work” was “a tragic day for literary history.”
Time will tell—he’s still writing, and I find his dispatches from the front lines of patient care more interesting than some of his posts prior to that.
And it may yet be a good thing. Two quotes come to mind, one by Popper and one by Von Neumann:
I don’t think I agree with the Von Neumann quote (vide “pure mathematics”). One thing that does seem to guard against some of the problems discussed in the first quote is the rigor of proof (i.e. either be empirically-driven or formal (or both)).
Has there been anything since I Aten’t Dead?
Not that I know of, alas.
The writer who I like more than Eliezer, Luke or Yvain is Robin Hanson.
His posts seem supremely succinct and clear. There is no obfuscation of language and there is little attempt to add dressing or flavoring. Examples are extremely relevant. Typically, many possible hypotheses are considered and reasons provided for choosing a subset of these. He is also the best summarizer in the business.
I prefer Yvain’s writing style to Eliezer’s, but Yvain also has the problem of being too verbose for my taste. In terms of information-to-words ratio, my opinion is that lukeprog’s writings outperform Eliezer’s and Yvain’s.
That’s not a good metric to maximize… There is probably some broad optimum preferred by maybe 80% of readers, and too dense or too watery writing is definitely inferior. There ought to be some relevant research out there.
I agree, I think a good writer has a sense when a particular part of his argument is tricky or more difficult to grasp so he may add additional explanations or examples even though he has already made the point.