Perhaps the problem is that my writing style is kind of intense, and thus reads as persuasion-coded rather than explanation-coded to this audience? I’d be happy to fix that, but I’ll need a guide if it’s going to happen any time soon.
(Relatedly, does anyone have a good guide for ‘subtext in general’? Connotation varies even more than denotation, of course, but just really diving in to exploring connotations would be nice. Twig was valuable to me for that reason, even if it’s hard to recommend on other counts.)
It doesn’t read as persuasion-coded to me. In fact it reads as stream-of-consciousness musing that defeats its own opening point.
What if everyone actually is a perfectly rational actor?
[...]
Rationality is expertise with the universe we live in.
You’re wondering what if everyone has perfect expertise with the universe we live in? Furthermore this is somehow linked to fake praise, your strong distrust for authority figures who tell you things without explaining their reasoning, and the idea that muscle-tension works as a variably-obvious signalling mechanism to yourself as well as to others?
Well maybe this makes internal sense to you, but it looks incoherent to me.
I was going for a style of writing I’m familiar with in explaining useful things—question to conclusion, I don’t know the formal name for it—and then I wrote the title last, so that people who already knew the core point wouldn’t need to waste time getting the evidence.
I’m not sure excluding this style from LessWrong actually improves Less Wrong’s efficiency at sharing useful knowledge? Tagging it better would be good, of course.
I can see where you’re coming from, but tracing every connection is very difficult, because beliefs/heuristics are based on whole networks of data, which I think are stored as smaller heuristics. Efficiency demands that I not explain more than I must to get my point across. Not just on my end, either. This is why target audience is useful.
...Thinking about it, I should see if I can optimize the site-intro stuff. A proper style guide for posting and reading seem like they’d have big advantages, although they would obviously need justification.
Perhaps the problem is that my writing style is kind of intense, and thus reads as persuasion-coded rather than explanation-coded to this audience? I’d be happy to fix that, but I’ll need a guide if it’s going to happen any time soon.
(Relatedly, does anyone have a good guide for ‘subtext in general’? Connotation varies even more than denotation, of course, but just really diving in to exploring connotations would be nice. Twig was valuable to me for that reason, even if it’s hard to recommend on other counts.)
We like intense. Persuasion is bad, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that your post is incoherent. It lacks a central thesis.
[Meta: I wrote this comment because you specifically requested more negative feedback.]
It doesn’t read as persuasion-coded to me. In fact it reads as stream-of-consciousness musing that defeats its own opening point.
You’re wondering what if everyone has perfect expertise with the universe we live in? Furthermore this is somehow linked to fake praise, your strong distrust for authority figures who tell you things without explaining their reasoning, and the idea that muscle-tension works as a variably-obvious signalling mechanism to yourself as well as to others?
Well maybe this makes internal sense to you, but it looks incoherent to me.
I was going for a style of writing I’m familiar with in explaining useful things—question to conclusion, I don’t know the formal name for it—and then I wrote the title last, so that people who already knew the core point wouldn’t need to waste time getting the evidence.
I’m not sure excluding this style from LessWrong actually improves Less Wrong’s efficiency at sharing useful knowledge? Tagging it better would be good, of course.
So the style is based around making assertions, and if people don’t think the point is obvious, they ask for evidence/ask what you mean?
Do you have any (other) examples of the style?
Seconding that this post seems incoherent, kind of like a half-baked shower thought.
I can see where you’re coming from, but tracing every connection is very difficult, because beliefs/heuristics are based on whole networks of data, which I think are stored as smaller heuristics. Efficiency demands that I not explain more than I must to get my point across. Not just on my end, either. This is why target audience is useful.
...Thinking about it, I should see if I can optimize the site-intro stuff. A proper style guide for posting and reading seem like they’d have big advantages, although they would obviously need justification.
Efficiency demands that you actually get your point across, otherwise your efficiency is zero points-got-across per thousand words.