what does it contribute to a conversation in which participants have hours to formulate a reply before the reply becomes stale?
The potential for humor. Is this not an acceptable purpose on Lesswrong? If so, I will cease posting potentially humorous or interesting quotes and other miscellany outside of Quote and Open Threads.
I don’t think most people object to humour here, I think the complaint was not that this was a joke but that it was not a very good joke.
I don’t think it’s a very good joke for the same reason as rhollerith but then I’m a dyed-in-the-wool C++ programmer so I can’t understand why anyone would start indexes at 1...
Speaking just for myself—well, speaking for myself and for anyone who upvotes this comment—I have a slight preference for you to restrict your humor and interesting quotes to Rationality Quotes, which by the way I do not read. (I do not have a way to avoid reading humorous comments in Open Thread without avoiding all the other comments there.)
I approve of the potential for humor and found the joke amusing until I noticed that it is flawed.
You can start your indexes anywhere. 0 and 1 are the most common but I have had occasion to use others.
It doesn’t matter how you index it, the size is not altered. {0 ⇒ “a”, 1 ⇒ “b”}.size = 2. {1 ⇒ “a”, 2=>”b”}.size = 2.
Then I noticed that the humor itself is a powerful persuader, it nearly distracted me from both those obvious flaws despite their familiarity with the subject. The fact that pointing this out would in most contexts be a faux pas demonstrates a risk that the abuse of humor entails.
I have found the persona required to interact positively with this community to be very different than the others I have adopted in the past, and the scrutiny is merciless.
Which is to say, I have mixed feelings on the matter, and am willing to continue engagement.
1) Use longer sentences and bigger words. The community appears to react favorably to academic styling in prose.
2) State all the givens. Things which I believed would be understood automatically and omitted to save time are much more likely to be picked apart as flaws, where the other person assumes I have not thought the matter through.
3) Be careful about how much you share. People here are far more willing to do research and analysis to pick apart every claim you make, even if its a metaphor, and they will look into your background. Any of the information you’ve posted can and will be used against (for?) you. Alternately, this same point should be used as a suggestion for how to treat other posters. Link to their previous comments and any evidence regarding their claims.
4) Don’t let your rationality slip due a sense of comradery. I feel that this community doesn’t treat commenters as friends; rather, it feels more like being treated as a coworker who is on the clock. As Morendil phrased it, “I wish someone had told me, quite plainly [...] this is a rationality dojo.”
That’s off the top of my head and in no particular order. There are other aspects I’m still developing which do not have a formal definition.
2) State all the givens. Things which I believed would be understood automatically and omitted to save time are much more likely to be picked apart as flaws, where the other person assumes I have not thought the matter through.
Yes—I have seen this so many times!
It’s particularly frustrating, because encountering it feels like discovering that you’ve overestimated your audience at the same time that they’ve underestimated you.
4) Don’t let your rationality slip due a sense of comradery. I feel that this community doesn’t treat commenters as friends; rather, it feels more like being treated as a coworker who is on the clock. As Morendil phrased it, “I wish someone had told me, quite plainly [...] this is a rationality dojo.”
I’ve noticed this too, and I long for the day when our rationality skills have advanced to the point where we can be rational and nice.
I haven’t really seen 3), and EY’s posts undermine 1) significantly, it seems to me.
EY’s posts undermine 1) significantly, it seems to me.
Of his most recently posted articles: Undiscriminating Skepticism scores at a Flesch-Kincaid grade level 17 and a Gunning Fog index of 17.9, You’re Entitled to Arguments is at 16 and 17.8, and Outside View as Conversation Halter is at 14 and 14.5. Note that a score of 15+ is considered academic writing by these measures. Tests of his recently upvoted comments show scores ranging from 7 to 20.
Here’s the Flesch-Kincaid calculator I used, and the Gunning Fog calculator. I would be surprised if other measures of readability, and tests of his other posts, did not show it to be academic-level writing.
Of his most recently posted articles: Undiscriminating Skepticism scores at a Flesch-Kincaid grade level 17 and a Gunning Fog index of 17.9,
“Undiscriminating Skepticism”—why, that’s ten (10) syllables right there in the title! My head is already spinning!
Seriously: tests like those do not control for the content or subject matter of the writing. There exists, furthermore, a significant subset of the (adult!) human population who would consider a phrase like “undiscriminating skepticism” itself to be difficult and unusually abstract. Needless to say, tests which heavily weight the judgements of such people are not very useful for the purpose of judging “readability” in most contexts here.
If you want to judge the readability of LW posts, I suggest spending some time reading typical articles published in academic journals.
“Undiscriminating Skepticism”—why, that’s ten (10) syllables right there in the title! My head is already spinning!
You’re right! It’s agonizing! Oh the pain of posting and reading here! My mouth is bloodied. You have defeated me, oh wise and amazing person who obviously knows better and is fully within their right to ridicule every attempt I make to explain the use of a single word in a sentence whose structure is still largely intact, as it was meant to be a frickin’ suggestion.
I would be surprised if other measures of readability, and tests of his other posts, did not show it [Eliezer’s postings] to be academic-level writing.
And yet I find his writing a model of clarity here, despite a few randomly chosen articles by other people having a far lower Fog Index. How useful are these indices? On the Gunning Fog page it says “The higher the Fog Index the trickier it is to read.” But the Wikipages for these tests reference no empirical studies.
I find his writing to be very readable as well. However, I consider myself highly educated, with excellent English skills, and I have been following his writing for some years now.
I was deferring to experts in the field of readability, and considered it likely that they would provide a better measure than self-reports of “looks fine to me.”
Further, it seems likely to me that Eliezer is very good at targeting his audience and maintaining interest despite the complexity of his prose. Academic doesn’t mean “boring” by necessity. One of the references from the Gunning Fog page states:
Although we have often given permission for reprinting the Fog Index, our means of measuring reading difficulty, we have sometimes cringed at the use made of it. In our work, we emphasize that the Fog Index is a tool, not a rule. It is a warning system, not a formula for writing. Testing without the support of analysis based on experience can be detrimental.
And yes, I do realize that this criticism can be applied to my own use of the tool, but point out that the measure directly supports my initial statement: “Use longer sentences and bigger words,” with the caveat that you should also be a good writer, to ensure the complexity doesn’t hinder the message. Or I could add, only do this if you can get away with it (still be a successful communicator).
I’d also like to point out that this feels like a good example of the dojo-style response to my clumsy use of a single word: academic.
For better or worse, [EY] enjoys a special status in this community.
A status earned precisely by writing posts that people enjoy reading!
If you’re suggesting that the ordinary academic/intellectual norm of only allowing high-status people to write informally, with everyone else being forced to write in soporific formal-sounding prose, is operative here, then I suggest we make every effort to nip that in the bud ASAP.
It’s particularly frustrating, because encountering it feels like discovering that you’ve overestimated your audience at the same time that they’ve underestimated you.
It feels the same way from the other end too! I.e. “Really? I have to explain this to you?”
There’s definitely a martial feel to the way this community requires you to earn its respect, rather than granting it to you almost immediately upon uttering the appropriate shibboleths as is common elsewhere. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
Sometimes I feel that upvotes are wordless substitutes for what would otherwise be verbal “strokes” of appreciation; the community prefers when words are used to convey info rather than good vibes.
I would add a 5) which really surprised me when I noticed it: link, link, link. This is a community which lives less than others in an ever-flowing present, but instead constantly strives to weave together past, present and future thought and discourse. That could well be an explanation for your 3.
I feel perfectly at home with 1) as long as it doesn’t reach the passive-voice level of academic styling. I see the writing style here as literate rather than academic. ;)
Actually, to me, the first seems rather like a G* for the G that is precision and the third and fourth seem like ordinary, fully-general good advice.
It might be worth noting that all are fundamentally comparative—it could be that your starting point on 2-4 is sufficiently different to Rain’s as to render them inapt.
Good list. I was going to say “in particular, 3)” but 2, 3 and 4 all seem to be vying for first spot. I’ve certainly noticed that any forays into comradery seem to backfire. I don’t notice 1) but that is probably because I have instead stopped noticing the converse.
the other person assumes I have not thought the matter through.
It is sometimes very difficult detect expertise and to communicate it. This would be a very helpful skill to improve on but I have no idea how.
1) Use longer sentences and bigger words. The community appears to react favorably to academic styling in prose.
I guess this is right. I tend to very rapidly adapt the style of writing or talking of people around me. I feel like I manage to get in a fair amount of levity, though. Somehow “True story: my lesbian roommate runs mad game” got 5 karma. Sometimes I think, informal language is a way people here highlight really important messages. You’ll see really informal bumper-stickers to summarize academic style posts, I guess because informal language stands out from the formal.
Don’t let your rationality slip due a sense of comradery.
This makes me sad. It hasn’t felt quite that bad to me, still sad that people feel this way though.
Have you thought about which of these you would change?
Have you thought about which of these you would change?
They were observations about how I’ve had to alter myself to fit in successfully. I wasn’t trying to judge whether they were good or bad, and I’m not sure any of them really need changing.
The only thing I’d look into further is the amount of time people spend “on the clock” or sparring in the dojo, preferring a bit more tolerance of lighter material. But this desire appears at odds with the standards of the community, as it seems to consider lighter material as pure noise in the signal/noise ratio, and there’s a high demand for signal.
To appease both desires, perhaps improve on the Open Thread-style areas. Forums? More easily followed thread structures? Allowance for ‘OpenThread’ tagged, top-level posts with separate ‘recent’ threads? I’m not sure what specific action to suggest.
The potential for humor. Is this not an acceptable purpose on Lesswrong? If so, I will cease posting potentially humorous or interesting quotes and other miscellany outside of Quote and Open Threads.
I don’t think most people object to humour here, I think the complaint was not that this was a joke but that it was not a very good joke.
I don’t think it’s a very good joke for the same reason as rhollerith but then I’m a dyed-in-the-wool C++ programmer so I can’t understand why anyone would start indexes at 1...
Speaking just for myself—well, speaking for myself and for anyone who upvotes this comment—I have a slight preference for you to restrict your humor and interesting quotes to Rationality Quotes, which by the way I do not read. (I do not have a way to avoid reading humorous comments in Open Thread without avoiding all the other comments there.)
I approve of the potential for humor and found the joke amusing until I noticed that it is flawed.
You can start your indexes anywhere. 0 and 1 are the most common but I have had occasion to use others.
It doesn’t matter how you index it, the size is not altered. {0 ⇒ “a”, 1 ⇒ “b”}.size = 2. {1 ⇒ “a”, 2=>”b”}.size = 2.
Then I noticed that the humor itself is a powerful persuader, it nearly distracted me from both those obvious flaws despite their familiarity with the subject. The fact that pointing this out would in most contexts be a faux pas demonstrates a risk that the abuse of humor entails.
I hope I have not made you feel unwelcome, Rain. I find what you have to say interesting in general, and I am glad you are here.
ADDED. And I admire anyone who donates to the Singularity Institute.
I have found the persona required to interact positively with this community to be very different than the others I have adopted in the past, and the scrutiny is merciless.
Which is to say, I have mixed feelings on the matter, and am willing to continue engagement.
I am intrigued and wonder how much my experience matches yours. Are there any observations you would be willing to share?
1) Use longer sentences and bigger words. The community appears to react favorably to academic styling in prose.
2) State all the givens. Things which I believed would be understood automatically and omitted to save time are much more likely to be picked apart as flaws, where the other person assumes I have not thought the matter through.
3) Be careful about how much you share. People here are far more willing to do research and analysis to pick apart every claim you make, even if its a metaphor, and they will look into your background. Any of the information you’ve posted can and will be used against (for?) you. Alternately, this same point should be used as a suggestion for how to treat other posters. Link to their previous comments and any evidence regarding their claims.
4) Don’t let your rationality slip due a sense of comradery. I feel that this community doesn’t treat commenters as friends; rather, it feels more like being treated as a coworker who is on the clock. As Morendil phrased it, “I wish someone had told me, quite plainly [...] this is a rationality dojo.”
That’s off the top of my head and in no particular order. There are other aspects I’m still developing which do not have a formal definition.
Yes—I have seen this so many times!
It’s particularly frustrating, because encountering it feels like discovering that you’ve overestimated your audience at the same time that they’ve underestimated you.
I’ve noticed this too, and I long for the day when our rationality skills have advanced to the point where we can be rational and nice.
I haven’t really seen 3), and EY’s posts undermine 1) significantly, it seems to me.
Of his most recently posted articles: Undiscriminating Skepticism scores at a Flesch-Kincaid grade level 17 and a Gunning Fog index of 17.9, You’re Entitled to Arguments is at 16 and 17.8, and Outside View as Conversation Halter is at 14 and 14.5. Note that a score of 15+ is considered academic writing by these measures. Tests of his recently upvoted comments show scores ranging from 7 to 20.
Here’s the Flesch-Kincaid calculator I used, and the Gunning Fog calculator. I would be surprised if other measures of readability, and tests of his other posts, did not show it to be academic-level writing.
“Undiscriminating Skepticism”—why, that’s ten (10) syllables right there in the title! My head is already spinning!
Seriously: tests like those do not control for the content or subject matter of the writing. There exists, furthermore, a significant subset of the (adult!) human population who would consider a phrase like “undiscriminating skepticism” itself to be difficult and unusually abstract. Needless to say, tests which heavily weight the judgements of such people are not very useful for the purpose of judging “readability” in most contexts here.
If you want to judge the readability of LW posts, I suggest spending some time reading typical articles published in academic journals.
You’re right! It’s agonizing! Oh the pain of posting and reading here! My mouth is bloodied. You have defeated me, oh wise and amazing person who obviously knows better and is fully within their right to ridicule every attempt I make to explain the use of a single word in a sentence whose structure is still largely intact, as it was meant to be a frickin’ suggestion.
good jorb.
(addresses both of the posters above)
Wow, sarcasm. That’s original.
And yet I find his writing a model of clarity here, despite a few randomly chosen articles by other people having a far lower Fog Index. How useful are these indices? On the Gunning Fog page it says “The higher the Fog Index the trickier it is to read.” But the Wiki pages for these tests reference no empirical studies.
I find his writing to be very readable as well. However, I consider myself highly educated, with excellent English skills, and I have been following his writing for some years now.
I was deferring to experts in the field of readability, and considered it likely that they would provide a better measure than self-reports of “looks fine to me.”
Further, it seems likely to me that Eliezer is very good at targeting his audience and maintaining interest despite the complexity of his prose. Academic doesn’t mean “boring” by necessity. One of the references from the Gunning Fog page states:
And yes, I do realize that this criticism can be applied to my own use of the tool, but point out that the measure directly supports my initial statement: “Use longer sentences and bigger words,” with the caveat that you should also be a good writer, to ensure the complexity doesn’t hinder the message. Or I could add, only do this if you can get away with it (still be a successful communicator).
I’d also like to point out that this feels like a good example of the dojo-style response to my clumsy use of a single word: academic.
What works for EY may not work for everyone else. For better or worse, he enjoys a special status in this community.
A status earned precisely by writing posts that people enjoy reading!
If you’re suggesting that the ordinary academic/intellectual norm of only allowing high-status people to write informally, with everyone else being forced to write in soporific formal-sounding prose, is operative here, then I suggest we make every effort to nip that in the bud ASAP.
This is a blog; let’s keep it that way.
It feels the same way from the other end too! I.e. “Really? I have to explain this to you?”
There’s definitely a martial feel to the way this community requires you to earn its respect, rather than granting it to you almost immediately upon uttering the appropriate shibboleths as is common elsewhere. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
Sometimes I feel that upvotes are wordless substitutes for what would otherwise be verbal “strokes” of appreciation; the community prefers when words are used to convey info rather than good vibes.
I would add a 5) which really surprised me when I noticed it: link, link, link. This is a community which lives less than others in an ever-flowing present, but instead constantly strives to weave together past, present and future thought and discourse. That could well be an explanation for your 3.
I feel perfectly at home with 1) as long as it doesn’t reach the passive-voice level of academic styling. I see the writing style here as literate rather than academic. ;)
Perhaps I’m just being oblivious, but only the first of these ring true for me.
Actually, to me, the first seems rather like a G* for the G that is precision and the third and fourth seem like ordinary, fully-general good advice.
It might be worth noting that all are fundamentally comparative—it could be that your starting point on 2-4 is sufficiently different to Rain’s as to render them inapt.
Good list. I was going to say “in particular, 3)” but 2, 3 and 4 all seem to be vying for first spot. I’ve certainly noticed that any forays into comradery seem to backfire. I don’t notice 1) but that is probably because I have instead stopped noticing the converse.
It is sometimes very difficult detect expertise and to communicate it. This would be a very helpful skill to improve on but I have no idea how.
I guess this is right. I tend to very rapidly adapt the style of writing or talking of people around me. I feel like I manage to get in a fair amount of levity, though. Somehow “True story: my lesbian roommate runs mad game” got 5 karma. Sometimes I think, informal language is a way people here highlight really important messages. You’ll see really informal bumper-stickers to summarize academic style posts, I guess because informal language stands out from the formal.
This makes me sad. It hasn’t felt quite that bad to me, still sad that people feel this way though.
Have you thought about which of these you would change?
They were observations about how I’ve had to alter myself to fit in successfully. I wasn’t trying to judge whether they were good or bad, and I’m not sure any of them really need changing.
The only thing I’d look into further is the amount of time people spend “on the clock” or sparring in the dojo, preferring a bit more tolerance of lighter material. But this desire appears at odds with the standards of the community, as it seems to consider lighter material as pure noise in the signal/noise ratio, and there’s a high demand for signal.
To appease both desires, perhaps improve on the Open Thread-style areas. Forums? More easily followed thread structures? Allowance for ‘OpenThread’ tagged, top-level posts with separate ‘recent’ threads? I’m not sure what specific action to suggest.