TL;DR Tone can function like (im)precision. So work on the ability to choose its variation instead of some arbitrary thing choosing it for you.
The ability to write in a facetious tone is a wonderful addition to one’s writing toolset, equivalent to the ability to use fewersignificant digits. This is a separate feature from the features of “fun to read” and “irreverent”. People routinely mistake formalese for completeness/rigor, and the ability to counter that incorrect inference in them is very useful.
At some point in Eliezer’s post against bioanchors, he roleplays Open Philanthropy as saying:
OpenPhil: We have commissioned a Very Serious report on a biologically inspired estimate of how much computation will be required to achieve Artificial General Intelligence, for purposes of forecasting an AGI timeline. (Summary of report.) (Full draft of report.) Our leadership takes this report Very Seriously.
It’s true that Open Philanthropy’s public communication tends toward a cautious, serious tone (and I think there are good reasons for this); but beyond that, I don’t think we do much to convey the sort of attitude implied above. The report’s publication announcement was on LessWrong as a draft report for comment, and the report is still in the form of several Google docs. We never did any sort of push to have it treated as a fancy report.
The tendency towards mistaken impressions from formalese is common knowledge (at least, after this post). So “We never did any sort of push to have it treated as fancy” becomes about as defensible as “We never pushed for the last digits in the estimate ‘There are 45,321 hairs on my head’ to be treated as exact”, which… is admittedly kinda unfair to Holden. Mainly because incorporating a writing style is a much harder execution than replacing some digits with zeros.
Eliezer is facetiously pointing out the non-facetiousness in Open Phil’s report (and therefore doing some of the facetiousness-work for them), and Holden solemnly points out the hedged-by-default status of it, which… is admittedly kinda fair for Holden to do. But I’m glad this whole exchange (enabled by facetiousness) happened, because it causes the hedged-by-default-ness to be emphasized.
(He did say they have good reasons for a serious tone. And I do believe there are good reasons for it, such as having to get through to people who wouldn’t take them seriously otherwise, or some other silly Keynesian beauty contest. But my guess is that those constraints would apply less on what people post to this forum, which is evidence that their default tone is more about labor and skill than a carefully-arrived-at choice.)
Some other reasonable objections are addressed in a comment I’ve made below, butoverall: There may be good objections to using it all the time, but not to learning to use the skill, which would involve learning when to not use it. As an example, I considered making the objections comment below more conversational, but I decided against it to allow order-independence.
The Skill of Writing Facetiously
TL;DR Tone can function like (im)precision. So work on the ability to choose its variation instead of some arbitrary thing choosing it for you.
The ability to write in a facetious tone is a wonderful addition to one’s writing toolset, equivalent to the ability to use fewer significant digits. This is a separate feature from the features of “fun to read” and “irreverent”. People routinely mistake formalese for completeness/rigor, and the ability to counter that incorrect inference in them is very useful.
At some point in Eliezer’s post against bioanchors, he roleplays Open Philanthropy as saying:
Here’s Holden’s reply to that specific bit:
The tendency towards mistaken impressions from formalese is common knowledge (at least, after this post). So “We never did any sort of push to have it treated as fancy” becomes about as defensible as “We never pushed for the last digits in the estimate ‘There are 45,321 hairs on my head’ to be treated as exact”, which… is admittedly kinda unfair to Holden. Mainly because incorporating a writing style is a much harder execution than replacing some digits with zeros.
Eliezer is facetiously pointing out the non-facetiousness in Open Phil’s report (and therefore doing some of the facetiousness-work for them), and Holden solemnly points out the hedged-by-default status of it, which… is admittedly kinda fair for Holden to do. But I’m glad this whole exchange (enabled by facetiousness) happened, because it causes the hedged-by-default-ness to be emphasized.
(He did say they have good reasons for a serious tone. And I do believe there are good reasons for it, such as having to get through to people who wouldn’t take them seriously otherwise, or some other silly Keynesian beauty contest. But my guess is that those constraints would apply less on what people post to this forum, which is evidence that their default tone is more about labor and skill than a carefully-arrived-at choice.)
Some other reasonable objections are addressed in a comment I’ve made below, but overall: There may be good objections to using it all the time, but not to learning to use the skill, which would involve learning when to not use it. As an example, I considered making the objections comment below more conversational, but I decided against it to allow order-independence.