The role of social considerations in rationality and dysrationality
More information on how the unconscious works (and what it can do when we understand it)
A more detailed overview of the ways we can improve unconscious thinking, along with examples of actually doing so.
Information on the process of investigating this thinking
The remainder is unsupported folk psychology, repetition, and superfluous elaboration.
There should be a “looks like” in there somewhere, at least with regard to “unsupported folk psychology” (repetition and superfluous elaboration...I wouldn’t put the latter in those terms, but those may be an issue). Again, this may look similar in ways. But it is the process of multiple revisions of the ideas, looking for different ways to think of them that help me use them more productively, cutting things down to their fundamentals and removing elements from the model that didn’t buy me any bits of prediction. (Mostly) everything here is load-bearing.
I think you need to improve your own writing, rather than using someone else to fix it up afterwards. A programmer has to fix his own code, and a writer likewise.
Obviously that would be better! While I’ve received moderate compliments on my writing in the past, I obviously wish I was much better. I would love to be able to phrase an idea more clearly, simply, and accurately, while keeping the reader engaged and perhaps even entertained. These posts are my current best efforts, and I know that despite this the writing isn’t going to be that excellent, and that a more experienced writer would probably be able to put together something much better, and with less work. I would love to know how to do that!
But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try and use whatever tools I might find available to improve that writing, such as looking at a professionally-edited version of the very thing I worked on, if I get a chance to read something like that.
One exercise that I found extremely helpful when learning how to condense my writing was:
Try to include a verb and a direct object in each of your bullet points.
Try to make sure each of your bullet points makes a falsifiable claim.
This forces you to confirm that each of your major points has substantive, useful content. “The process behind deprecation” is an excellent ‘note to self’ to remind you of what your topic is, but a person can write that note without having the faintest idea what the process behind deprecation is. My Bayesian prior for notes like that after reading thousands of social science articles is that you’re most likely going to go on for pages and pages without drawing any firm conclusions. If, instead, you make a bold claim like “Deprecation is strictly dominated by other social strategies,” then I predict that you’re going to try to say something interesting. I may disagree with your methods or your evidence, but at least I can gauge whether your effort, if successful, would be of interest to me.
I think you’re a good writer, in that you form sentences well, and you understand how the language works, and your prose is not stilted or boring. The problem I personally had, mostly with the previous two entries in this series, was that the “meat”—the interesting bits telling me what you had concluded, and why, and how to apply it, and how (specifically) you have applied it - seemed very spread out among a lot of filler or elaboration. I couldn’t tell what you were eventually going to arrive at, and whether it’d be of use or interest to me. Too much generality, perhaps: compare “this made my life better” with “by doing X I caught myself thinking Y and changed this to result in the accomplishment of Z.”
I tell you this only in case you are interested in constructive criticism from yet another perspective; some undoubtedly consider the things I have mentioned virtues in an author. In any case, I have upvoted this article; it doesn’t deserve a negative score, I think—long-winded, maybe; poorly done or actively irrational, certainly not. The ideas are interesting, the methodology is reasonable, and the effort is appreciated.
I would summarize the main points as:
The process behind deprecation
The role of social considerations in rationality and dysrationality
More information on how the unconscious works (and what it can do when we understand it)
A more detailed overview of the ways we can improve unconscious thinking, along with examples of actually doing so.
Information on the process of investigating this thinking
There should be a “looks like” in there somewhere, at least with regard to “unsupported folk psychology” (repetition and superfluous elaboration...I wouldn’t put the latter in those terms, but those may be an issue). Again, this may look similar in ways. But it is the process of multiple revisions of the ideas, looking for different ways to think of them that help me use them more productively, cutting things down to their fundamentals and removing elements from the model that didn’t buy me any bits of prediction. (Mostly) everything here is load-bearing.
Obviously that would be better! While I’ve received moderate compliments on my writing in the past, I obviously wish I was much better. I would love to be able to phrase an idea more clearly, simply, and accurately, while keeping the reader engaged and perhaps even entertained. These posts are my current best efforts, and I know that despite this the writing isn’t going to be that excellent, and that a more experienced writer would probably be able to put together something much better, and with less work. I would love to know how to do that!
But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try and use whatever tools I might find available to improve that writing, such as looking at a professionally-edited version of the very thing I worked on, if I get a chance to read something like that.
One exercise that I found extremely helpful when learning how to condense my writing was:
Try to include a verb and a direct object in each of your bullet points.
Try to make sure each of your bullet points makes a falsifiable claim.
This forces you to confirm that each of your major points has substantive, useful content. “The process behind deprecation” is an excellent ‘note to self’ to remind you of what your topic is, but a person can write that note without having the faintest idea what the process behind deprecation is. My Bayesian prior for notes like that after reading thousands of social science articles is that you’re most likely going to go on for pages and pages without drawing any firm conclusions. If, instead, you make a bold claim like “Deprecation is strictly dominated by other social strategies,” then I predict that you’re going to try to say something interesting. I may disagree with your methods or your evidence, but at least I can gauge whether your effort, if successful, would be of interest to me.
I think you’re a good writer, in that you form sentences well, and you understand how the language works, and your prose is not stilted or boring. The problem I personally had, mostly with the previous two entries in this series, was that the “meat”—the interesting bits telling me what you had concluded, and why, and how to apply it, and how (specifically) you have applied it - seemed very spread out among a lot of filler or elaboration. I couldn’t tell what you were eventually going to arrive at, and whether it’d be of use or interest to me. Too much generality, perhaps: compare “this made my life better” with “by doing X I caught myself thinking Y and changed this to result in the accomplishment of Z.”
I tell you this only in case you are interested in constructive criticism from yet another perspective; some undoubtedly consider the things I have mentioned virtues in an author. In any case, I have upvoted this article; it doesn’t deserve a negative score, I think—long-winded, maybe; poorly done or actively irrational, certainly not. The ideas are interesting, the methodology is reasonable, and the effort is appreciated.