I sometimes like things being said in a long way. Mostly that’s just because it helps me stew on the ideas and look at them from different angles. But also, specifically, I liked the engagement with a bunch of epistemological intuitions and figuring out what can be recovered from them. I like in particular connecting the “trend continues” trend to the redoubtable “electron will weigh the same tomorrow” intuition.
(I realise you didn’t claim there was nothing else in the dialogue, just not enough to justify the length)
I strongly emphasize with “I sometimes like things being said in a long way.”, and am in general doubtful of comments like “I think this post can be summarized as [one paragraph]”.
(The extreme caricature of this is “isn’t your post just [one sentence description that strips off all nuance and rounds the post to the closest nearby cliche, completely missing the point, perhaps also mocking the author about complicating such a simple matter]”, which I have encountered sometimes.)
Some of the most valuable blog posts I have read have been exactly of the form “write a long essay about a common-wisdom-ish thing, but really drill down on the details and look at the thing from multiple perspectives”.
Some years back I read Scott Alexander’s I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup. For context, I’m not from the US. I was very excited about the post and upon reading it hastily tried to explain it to my friends. I said something like “your outgroups are not who you think they are, in the US partisan biases are stronger than racial biases”. The response I got?
“Yeah I mean the US partisan biases are really extreme.”, in a tone implying that surely nothing like that affects us in [country I live in].
People who have actually read and internalized the post might notice the irony here. (If you haven’t, well, sorry, I’m not going to give a one sentence description that strips off all nuance and rounds the post to the closest nearby cliche.)
Which is to say: short summaries really aren’t sufficient for teaching new concepts.
Or, imagine someone says
I don’t get why people like the Meditations on Moloch post so much. Isn’t the whole point just “coordination problems are hard and coordination failure results in falling off the Pareto-curve”, which is game theory 101?
To which I say: “Yes, the topic of the post is coordination. But really, don’t you see any value the post provides on top of this one sentence summary? Even if one has taken a game theory class before, the post does convey how it shows up in real life, all kinds of nuance that comes with it, and one shouldn’t belittle the vibes. Also, be mindful that the vast majority of readers likely haven’t taken a game theory class and are not familiar with 101 concepts like Pareto-curvers.”
For similar reasons I’m not particularly fond of the grandparent comment’s summary that builds on top of Solomonoff induction. I’m assuming the intended audience of the linked Twitter thread is not people who have a good intuitive grasp of Solomonoff induction. And I happened to get value out of the post even though I am quite familiar with SI.
The opposite approach of Said Achmiz, namely appealing very concretely to the object level, misses the point as well: the post is not trying to give practical advice about how to spot Ponzi schemes. “We thus defeat the Spokesperson’s argument on his own terms, without needing to get into abstractions or theory—and we do it in one paragraph.” is not the boast you think it is.
All this long comment tries to say is “I sometimes like things being said in a long way”.
I’ll add that sometimes, there is a big difference between verbally agreeing with a short summary, even if it is accurate, and really understanding and appreciating it and its implications. That often requires long explanations with many examples and looking at the same issue from various angles. The two Scott Alexander posts you mentioned are a good example.
The opposite approach of Said Achmiz, namely appealing very concretely to the object level, misses the point as well: the post is not trying to give practical advice about how to spot Ponzi schemes. “We thus defeat the Spokesperson’s argument on his own terms, without needing to get into abstractions or theory—and we do it in one paragraph.” is not the boast you think it is.
If the post describes a method for analyzing a situation, and that described method is not in fact the correct method for analyzing that situation (and is actually much worse than the correct method), then this is a problem with the post.
(Also, your description of my approach as “appealing very concretely to the object level”, and your corresponding dismissal of that approach, is very ironic! The post, in essence, argues precisely for appealing concretely to the object level; but then if we actually do that, as I demonstrated, we render the post moot.)
I sometimes like things being said in a long way. Mostly that’s just because it helps me stew on the ideas and look at them from different angles. But also, specifically, I liked the engagement with a bunch of epistemological intuitions and figuring out what can be recovered from them. I like in particular connecting the “trend continues” trend to the redoubtable “electron will weigh the same tomorrow” intuition.
(I realise you didn’t claim there was nothing else in the dialogue, just not enough to justify the length)
I strongly emphasize with “I sometimes like things being said in a long way.”, and am in general doubtful of comments like “I think this post can be summarized as [one paragraph]”.
(The extreme caricature of this is “isn’t your post just [one sentence description that strips off all nuance and rounds the post to the closest nearby cliche, completely missing the point, perhaps also mocking the author about complicating such a simple matter]”, which I have encountered sometimes.)
Some of the most valuable blog posts I have read have been exactly of the form “write a long essay about a common-wisdom-ish thing, but really drill down on the details and look at the thing from multiple perspectives”.
Some years back I read Scott Alexander’s I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup. For context, I’m not from the US. I was very excited about the post and upon reading it hastily tried to explain it to my friends. I said something like “your outgroups are not who you think they are, in the US partisan biases are stronger than racial biases”. The response I got?
“Yeah I mean the US partisan biases are really extreme.”, in a tone implying that surely nothing like that affects us in [country I live in].
People who have actually read and internalized the post might notice the irony here. (If you haven’t, well, sorry, I’m not going to give a one sentence description that strips off all nuance and rounds the post to the closest nearby cliche.)
Which is to say: short summaries really aren’t sufficient for teaching new concepts.
Or, imagine someone says
To which I say: “Yes, the topic of the post is coordination. But really, don’t you see any value the post provides on top of this one sentence summary? Even if one has taken a game theory class before, the post does convey how it shows up in real life, all kinds of nuance that comes with it, and one shouldn’t belittle the vibes. Also, be mindful that the vast majority of readers likely haven’t taken a game theory class and are not familiar with 101 concepts like Pareto-curvers.”
For similar reasons I’m not particularly fond of the grandparent comment’s summary that builds on top of Solomonoff induction. I’m assuming the intended audience of the linked Twitter thread is not people who have a good intuitive grasp of Solomonoff induction. And I happened to get value out of the post even though I am quite familiar with SI.
The opposite approach of Said Achmiz, namely appealing very concretely to the object level, misses the point as well: the post is not trying to give practical advice about how to spot Ponzi schemes. “We thus defeat the Spokesperson’s argument on his own terms, without needing to get into abstractions or theory—and we do it in one paragraph.” is not the boast you think it is.
All this long comment tries to say is “I sometimes like things being said in a long way”.
I’ll add that sometimes, there is a big difference between verbally agreeing with a short summary, even if it is accurate, and really understanding and appreciating it and its implications. That often requires long explanations with many examples and looking at the same issue from various angles. The two Scott Alexander posts you mentioned are a good example.
If the post describes a method for analyzing a situation, and that described method is not in fact the correct method for analyzing that situation (and is actually much worse than the correct method), then this is a problem with the post.
(Also, your description of my approach as “appealing very concretely to the object level”, and your corresponding dismissal of that approach, is very ironic! The post, in essence, argues precisely for appealing concretely to the object level; but then if we actually do that, as I demonstrated, we render the post moot.)