That seems to illustrate a potential shortcoming of the Readability Estimator, though. The Simple Truth doesn’t use as much sophisticated vocabulary as many posts on Less Wrong (it seems that posts are penalized heavily for multisyllabic words) but it is a fair bit harder to understand then to read.
I didn’t really get it (if by ‘get it’ you mean ‘see why Eliezer wrote it, and what questions it was intended to answer’) until I’d read most of the rest of the site.
In short, it seems like a decent measure of writing clarity, but it’s not a measure of inferential distance at all.
In short, it seems like a decent measure of writing clarity, but it’s not a measure of inferential distance at all.
Very true. The reason I picked The Simple Truth for an example is that I thought it did a good job of explaining a hard idea in simple language. The idea was still hard to get, but the writing made it much easier than it could have been.
I second (third?) the suggestion of a readability estimator; I need it. I have a tendency toward excessively long sentences.
Another comparison: The Simple Truth Flesch Reading Ease of 69.51, and supposedly needs only 8.51 years of education to read.
That seems to illustrate a potential shortcoming of the Readability Estimator, though. The Simple Truth doesn’t use as much sophisticated vocabulary as many posts on Less Wrong (it seems that posts are penalized heavily for multisyllabic words) but it is a fair bit harder to understand then to read.
I didn’t really get it (if by ‘get it’ you mean ‘see why Eliezer wrote it, and what questions it was intended to answer’) until I’d read most of the rest of the site.
In short, it seems like a decent measure of writing clarity, but it’s not a measure of inferential distance at all.
Very true. The reason I picked The Simple Truth for an example is that I thought it did a good job of explaining a hard idea in simple language. The idea was still hard to get, but the writing made it much easier than it could have been.
Yeah, polysyllabicity gets a bad rap ’round some parts.