I wish Brevity was considered another important rationalist virtue. Unfortunately, it isn’t practiced as such, including by me.
In programming, “lines of code” is a cost, not an accomplishment. It’s a proxy for something we care about (like the functionality and robustness of a program), but all other things being equal, we’d prefer the number to be as small as possible. Similarly, the number of words in our posts and comments is a cost for the things we actually care about (e.g. legible communication), and all other things being equal, we’d prefer this number to be as small as possible.
These are also related costs: complexity, jargon, parenthetical asides (like the ones in this comment), clarifications, footnotes, …
That doesn’t mean that the costs are never worth paying. Just that they shouldn’t be paid mindlessly, and that brevity is too often subordinated to other virtues and goals.
Finally, there are some ways to add and edit text whose benefits imo usually outweigh their costs: like adding outlines and headings, or using formatting.
After thinking more about it, declaring sth like brevity as a virtue might be outright required, because the other virtues and elements of discourse don’t directly trade off against one another. So a perfectionist might try to optimize by fulfilling all of them, at the cost of writing absurdly long and hard-to-parse text. Hence there’s value in naming some virtue that’s opposed to the others, as a counterbalance, to make the tradeoffs explicit.
I think considering brevity, for its own sake, to be an important rationalist virtue is unlikely to prove beneficial for maintaining, or raising, the quality of rationalist discourse. That’s because it is a poorly defined goal that could easily be misinterpreted as encouraging undesirable tradeoffs at the expense of, for example, clarity of communication, laying out of examples to aid in understanding of a point, or making explicit potentially dry details such as the epistemic status of a belief, or the cruxes upon which a position hinges.
There is truth to the points you’ve brought up though, and thinking about about how brevity could be incorporated into a list of rationalist virtues has brought two ideas to mind:
1. It seems to me that this could be considered an aspect of purpose-minding. If you know your purpose, and keep clearly in mind why you’re having a conversation, then an appropriate level of brevity should be the natural result. The costs of brevity, or lack thereof, can be payed as needed according to what best fits your purpose. A good example of this is this post here on lesswrong, and the longer, but less jargony, version of it that exists on the EA forum.
2. The idea of epistemic legibility feels like it includes the importance of brevity while also making the tradeoffs that brevity, or lack thereof, involves more explicit than directly stating brevity as a rationalist virtue. For example a shorter piece of writing that cites fewer sources is more likely to be read in full rather than skimmed, and more likely to have its sources checked rather than having readers simply hope that they provide the support that the author claims. This is in contrast to a longer piece of writing that cites more sources which allows an author to more thoroughly explain their position, or demonstrate greater support for claims that they make. No matter how long or short a piece of writing is, there are always benefits and costs to be considered.
While writing this out I noticed that there was a specific point you made that did not sit well with me, and which both of the ideas above address.
Similarly, the number of words in our posts and comments is a cost for the things we actually care about (e.g. legible communication), and all other things being equal, we’d prefer this number to be as small as possible.
To me this feels like focusing on the theoretical ideal of brevity at the expense of the practical reality of brevity. All other things are never equal, and I believe the preference should be for having precisely as many words as necessary, for whatever specific purpose and context a piece of writing is intended for.
I realize that “we’d prefer this number to be as small as possible” could be interpreted as equivalent to “the preference should be for having precisely as many words as necessary”, but the difference in implications between these phrases, and the difference in their potential for unfortunate interpretations, does not seem at all trivial to me.
As an example, something that I’ve seen discussed both on here, and on the EA forum, is the struggle to get new writers to participate in posting and commenting. This is a struggle that I feel very keenly as I started reading lesswrong many years ago, but have (to my own great misfortune) avoided posting and commenting for various reasons. If I think about a hypothetical new poster who wants to embody the ideals and virtues of rationalist discourse, asking them to have their writing use as small a number of words as possible feels like a relatively intimidating request when compared to asking that they consider the purpose and context of their writing and try to find an appropriate length with that in mind. The latter framing also feels much more conducive to experimenting, failing, and learning to do better.
To be clear, I didn’t mean that all LW posts and comments should be maximally short, merely that it would be better if brevity or a related virtue (like “ease of being read”) were considered as part of an equation to balance. Because I currently feel like we’re erring towards writing stuff that’s far longer than would be warranted if there was some virtue which could counterbalance spending extra paragraphs on buying diminishing returns in virtues like legibility (where e.g. the first footnote is often very valuable, but the fifth is less so).
If I think about a hypothetical new poster who wants to embody the ideals and virtues of rationalist discourse, asking them to have their writing use as small a number of words as possible feels like a relatively intimidating request when compared to asking that they consider the purpose and context of their writing and try to find an appropriate length with that in mind. The latter framing also feels much more conducive to experimenting, failing, and learning to do better.
I actually think that, if the community considered and practiced brevity as one of our virtues, the site would be more welcoming to new posters, not less. The notion of writing my first comment on this site in 2023, rather than 2013, feels daunting to me. Right now I imagine it feels like you have to dot all your i’s and cross all your t’s before you can get started, whereas I’m pretty sure the standards for new commenters were far lower in the beginning of the site.
And one thing I find particularly daunting, and would imo find even more daunting as a newcomer, is that it feels like the median post and comment are incredibly long. And that, in order to fit in, one also has to go to such great lengths in everything one writes.
I wish Brevity was considered another important rationalist virtue. Unfortunately, it isn’t practiced as such, including by me.
In programming, “lines of code” is a cost, not an accomplishment. It’s a proxy for something we care about (like the functionality and robustness of a program), but all other things being equal, we’d prefer the number to be as small as possible. Similarly, the number of words in our posts and comments is a cost for the things we actually care about (e.g. legible communication), and all other things being equal, we’d prefer this number to be as small as possible.
These are also related costs: complexity, jargon, parenthetical asides (like the ones in this comment), clarifications, footnotes, …
That doesn’t mean that the costs are never worth paying. Just that they shouldn’t be paid mindlessly, and that brevity is too often subordinated to other virtues and goals.
Finally, there are some ways to add and edit text whose benefits imo usually outweigh their costs: like adding outlines and headings, or using formatting.
Yeah I think brevity straightforwardly should be considered one, at least on the margin.
After thinking more about it, declaring sth like brevity as a virtue might be outright required, because the other virtues and elements of discourse don’t directly trade off against one another. So a perfectionist might try to optimize by fulfilling all of them, at the cost of writing absurdly long and hard-to-parse text. Hence there’s value in naming some virtue that’s opposed to the others, as a counterbalance, to make the tradeoffs explicit.
I think considering brevity, for its own sake, to be an important rationalist virtue is unlikely to prove beneficial for maintaining, or raising, the quality of rationalist discourse. That’s because it is a poorly defined goal that could easily be misinterpreted as encouraging undesirable tradeoffs at the expense of, for example, clarity of communication, laying out of examples to aid in understanding of a point, or making explicit potentially dry details such as the epistemic status of a belief, or the cruxes upon which a position hinges.
There is truth to the points you’ve brought up though, and thinking about about how brevity could be incorporated into a list of rationalist virtues has brought two ideas to mind:
1. It seems to me that this could be considered an aspect of purpose-minding. If you know your purpose, and keep clearly in mind why you’re having a conversation, then an appropriate level of brevity should be the natural result. The costs of brevity, or lack thereof, can be payed as needed according to what best fits your purpose. A good example of this is this post here on lesswrong, and the longer, but less jargony, version of it that exists on the EA forum.
2. The idea of epistemic legibility feels like it includes the importance of brevity while also making the tradeoffs that brevity, or lack thereof, involves more explicit than directly stating brevity as a rationalist virtue. For example a shorter piece of writing that cites fewer sources is more likely to be read in full rather than skimmed, and more likely to have its sources checked rather than having readers simply hope that they provide the support that the author claims. This is in contrast to a longer piece of writing that cites more sources which allows an author to more thoroughly explain their position, or demonstrate greater support for claims that they make. No matter how long or short a piece of writing is, there are always benefits and costs to be considered.
While writing this out I noticed that there was a specific point you made that did not sit well with me, and which both of the ideas above address.
To me this feels like focusing on the theoretical ideal of brevity at the expense of the practical reality of brevity. All other things are never equal, and I believe the preference should be for having precisely as many words as necessary, for whatever specific purpose and context a piece of writing is intended for.
I realize that “we’d prefer this number to be as small as possible” could be interpreted as equivalent to “the preference should be for having precisely as many words as necessary”, but the difference in implications between these phrases, and the difference in their potential for unfortunate interpretations, does not seem at all trivial to me.
As an example, something that I’ve seen discussed both on here, and on the EA forum, is the struggle to get new writers to participate in posting and commenting. This is a struggle that I feel very keenly as I started reading lesswrong many years ago, but have (to my own great misfortune) avoided posting and commenting for various reasons. If I think about a hypothetical new poster who wants to embody the ideals and virtues of rationalist discourse, asking them to have their writing use as small a number of words as possible feels like a relatively intimidating request when compared to asking that they consider the purpose and context of their writing and try to find an appropriate length with that in mind. The latter framing also feels much more conducive to experimenting, failing, and learning to do better.
To be clear, I didn’t mean that all LW posts and comments should be maximally short, merely that it would be better if brevity or a related virtue (like “ease of being read”) were considered as part of an equation to balance. Because I currently feel like we’re erring towards writing stuff that’s far longer than would be warranted if there was some virtue which could counterbalance spending extra paragraphs on buying diminishing returns in virtues like legibility (where e.g. the first footnote is often very valuable, but the fifth is less so).
I actually think that, if the community considered and practiced brevity as one of our virtues, the site would be more welcoming to new posters, not less. The notion of writing my first comment on this site in 2023, rather than 2013, feels daunting to me. Right now I imagine it feels like you have to dot all your i’s and cross all your t’s before you can get started, whereas I’m pretty sure the standards for new commenters were far lower in the beginning of the site.
And one thing I find particularly daunting, and would imo find even more daunting as a newcomer, is that it feels like the median post and comment are incredibly long. And that, in order to fit in, one also has to go to such great lengths in everything one writes.