He says that “Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers”. I’d update this to say that “ONE WAY OF THINKING ABOUT politics is AS IF IT IS an extension of war by other means. Arguments CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS soldiers”.
This is a good shift for you to have made and I’m glad you can make it. Now you can just do this mentally to everyone’s writing (and speaking, for that matter) all the time.
But asking writers to do it themselves is crippling. The new sentence you propose is obviously technically more accurate but it’s also clunky, anemic prose.
Someone ages ago (maybe Viliam_Bur?) said that people thought they were drawn to LW by the good ideas but they were equally if not more drawn to LW by the quality of Eliezer’s writing, and a key quality of Eliezer’s writing is that he knew how to be punchy when he needed to be.
“Arguments are soldiers” is, and was always, poetry, not a mathematical identity. The point was to shock you into a frame shift in how you look at arguments (away from e.g. an implicit frame of “arguments are neutral tools we use to search for truth”), not tell you a Platonic Truth that you Believe Forever. And punchy writing is key to provoking these kinds of frame shifts; clunky writing just doesn’t actually get through to any part of you that matters.
This is a good shift for you to have made and I’m glad you can make it. Now you can just do this mentally to everyone’s writing (and speaking, for that matter) all the time.
But asking writers to do it themselves is crippling. The new sentence you propose is obviously technically more accurate but it’s also clunky, anemic prose.
Someone ages ago (maybe Viliam_Bur?) said that people thought they were drawn to LW by the good ideas but they were equally if not more drawn to LW by the quality of Eliezer’s writing, and a key quality of Eliezer’s writing is that he knew how to be punchy when he needed to be.
“Arguments are soldiers” is, and was always, poetry, not a mathematical identity. The point was to shock you into a frame shift in how you look at arguments (away from e.g. an implicit frame of “arguments are neutral tools we use to search for truth”), not tell you a Platonic Truth that you Believe Forever. And punchy writing is key to provoking these kinds of frame shifts; clunky writing just doesn’t actually get through to any part of you that matters.