https://nonesense.substack.com/p/lesswrong-house-style
Given that they are imbeciles given, occasionally, to dangerous ideas, I think it’s worth taking a moment now and then to beat them up. This is another such moment.
https://nonesense.substack.com/p/lesswrong-house-style
Given that they are imbeciles given, occasionally, to dangerous ideas, I think it’s worth taking a moment now and then to beat them up. This is another such moment.
This is an interesting companion to that other essay castigating Rationalist prose, Elizabeth Sandifer’s The Beigeness. The current LW style indulges in straight-up obscurantism and technobabble, which is probably better at hiding how dumb the underlying argument is and cloaking unsupported assertions as meaningful arguments. It also doesn’t require you to be as widely-read as our favorite philosophy major turned psychiatrist turned cryptoreactionary, since you’re not switching contexts every time it starts becoming apparent that you’re arguing for something dumb and/or racist.
This has always been the case. I think I first stumbled across less wrong in the early two thousands when I was a maths undergrad.
At this point it was mostly Eliezer writing extremely long blog posts about Bayesian thinking, and my take home was just, wow these guys are really bad at maths.
A good mathematician will carefully select the right level of abstraction to make what they’re saying as simple as possible. Less wrong has always done the complete opposite, everything is full of junk details and needless complexity, in order to make it feel harder than it really is
Basically, Eliezer needs an editor, and everyone who copies his style needs one too.
Oh, nice! I stumbled across this essay ages ago and misplaced it due to forgetting to bookmark it. Thanks for bringing it back to my attention.
It is quite a beautiful thing to see Scott Alexander’s beige technobabble eviscerated by such vibrant and incisive prose.