This is interesting, but how do you explain the observation that LW posts are frequently much much longer than they need to be to convey their main point? They take forever to get started (“what this NOT arguing: [list of 10 points]” etc) and take forever to finish.
Point 1: I think “writing less concisely than would be ideal” is the natural default for writers, so we don’t need to look to incentives to explain it. Pick up any book of writing advice and it will say that, right? “You have to kill your darlings”, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”, etc.
Point 2: I don’t know if this applies to you-in-particular, but there’s a systematic dynamic where readers generally somewhat underestimate the ideal length of a piece of nonfiction writing. The problem is, the writer is writing for a heterogeneous audience of readers. Different readers are coming in with different confusions, different topics-of-interest, different depths-of-interest, etc. So you can imagine, for example, that every reader really only benefits from 70% of the prose … but it’s a different 70% for different readers. Then each individual reader will be complaining that it’s unnecessarily long, but actually it can’t be cut at all without totally losing a bunch of the audience.
(To be clear, I think both of these are true—Point 2 is not meant as a denial to Point 1; not all extra length is adding anything. I think the solution is to both try to write concisely and make it easy for the reader to recognize and skip over the parts that they don’t need to read, for example with good headings and a summary / table-of-contents at the top. Making it fun to read can also somewhat substitute for making it quick to read.)
This is interesting, but how do you explain the observation that LW posts are frequently much much longer than they need to be to convey their main point? They take forever to get started (“what this NOT arguing: [list of 10 points]” etc) and take forever to finish.
Point 1: I think “writing less concisely than would be ideal” is the natural default for writers, so we don’t need to look to incentives to explain it. Pick up any book of writing advice and it will say that, right? “You have to kill your darlings”, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”, etc.
Point 2: I don’t know if this applies to you-in-particular, but there’s a systematic dynamic where readers generally somewhat underestimate the ideal length of a piece of nonfiction writing. The problem is, the writer is writing for a heterogeneous audience of readers. Different readers are coming in with different confusions, different topics-of-interest, different depths-of-interest, etc. So you can imagine, for example, that every reader really only benefits from 70% of the prose … but it’s a different 70% for different readers. Then each individual reader will be complaining that it’s unnecessarily long, but actually it can’t be cut at all without totally losing a bunch of the audience.
(To be clear, I think both of these are true—Point 2 is not meant as a denial to Point 1; not all extra length is adding anything. I think the solution is to both try to write concisely and make it easy for the reader to recognize and skip over the parts that they don’t need to read, for example with good headings and a summary / table-of-contents at the top. Making it fun to read can also somewhat substitute for making it quick to read.)