An edgy writing style is an epistemic red flag. A writing style designed to provoke a strong, usually negative, emotional response from the reader can be used to disguise the thinness of the substance behind the author’s arguments. Instead of carefully considering and evaluating the author’s arguments, the reader gets distracted by the disruption to their emotional state and reacts to the text in a way that more closely resembles a trauma response, with all the negative effects on their reasoning capabilities that such a response entails. Some examples of authors who do this: Friedrich Nietzsche, Grant Morrison, and The Last Psychiatrist.
Allow me to quote from Lem’s novel “Golem XIV”, which is about a superhuman AI named Golem:
Being devoid of the affective centers fundamentally characteristic of man, and therefore having no proper emotional life, Golem is incapable of displaying feelings spontaneously. It can, to be sure, imitate any emotional states it chooses— not for the sake of histrionics but, as it says itself, because simulations of feelings facilitate the formation of utterances that are understood with maximum accuracy, Golem uses this device, putting it on an “anthropocentric level,” as it were, to make the best contact with us.
May not this method also be employed by human writers?
It’s a natural tendency to taunting, which is meant to motivate the reader to attack the author, who is frustrated at the lack of engagement. The more sure you are of yourself, the more provocative you tend to be, especially if you’re eager to put your ideas to the test.
A thing which often follows edginess/confidence, and the two may even be a cause of eachother, is mania. Even hypomanic moods has a strong effect on ones behaviour. I believe this is what happened to Kanye West. If you read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, you might find that it seems to contain a lot of mood-swings, and it was written in just 10 days as far as I know (and periods of high productivity are indeed a characteristic of mania)
I think it makes for great reading, and while such people have a higher risk of being wrong, I also think they have more interesting ideas. But I will admit that I’m a little biased on this topic as I’ve made myself a little edgy (confidence has a positive effect on mood)
An edgy writing style is an epistemic red flag. A writing style designed to provoke a strong, usually negative, emotional response from the reader can be used to disguise the thinness of the substance behind the author’s arguments. Instead of carefully considering and evaluating the author’s arguments, the reader gets distracted by the disruption to their emotional state and reacts to the text in a way that more closely resembles a trauma response, with all the negative effects on their reasoning capabilities that such a response entails. Some examples of authors who do this: Friedrich Nietzsche, Grant Morrison, and The Last Psychiatrist.
Allow me to quote from Lem’s novel “Golem XIV”, which is about a superhuman AI named Golem:
May not this method also be employed by human writers?
One thing to do here is to re-write their arguments in your own (ideally more neutral) language, and see whether it still seems as strong.
It’s a natural tendency to taunting, which is meant to motivate the reader to attack the author, who is frustrated at the lack of engagement. The more sure you are of yourself, the more provocative you tend to be, especially if you’re eager to put your ideas to the test.
A thing which often follows edginess/confidence, and the two may even be a cause of eachother, is mania. Even hypomanic moods has a strong effect on ones behaviour. I believe this is what happened to Kanye West. If you read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, you might find that it seems to contain a lot of mood-swings, and it was written in just 10 days as far as I know (and periods of high productivity are indeed a characteristic of mania)
I think it makes for great reading, and while such people have a higher risk of being wrong, I also think they have more interesting ideas. But I will admit that I’m a little biased on this topic as I’ve made myself a little edgy (confidence has a positive effect on mood)