For my piece on Catholic miracle\napologetics, I\nread (correction: skimmed) a 25,000-word post by rationalist blogger Scott\nAlexander. My piece, which cited (but does not focus on) his, ended up being a\ncool 2,700 words. I don't think it would benefit from being longer, and it was\nthe result of me cutting around 70% of the text I initially wrote.
\nRationalist bloggers do not generally appear to have this impulse. Eliezer Yudkowsky's\n"sequences" are over one million words\nlong.\nNearly every blog post I have read in this ecosystem, even the rare one that\ncontains some good ideas, is painfully long and extremely tedious. These\nbloggers tend to spend their time on precisely the wrong things, i.e.\nadding layers of detail and nuance rather than interrogating\nthe one or two assumptions they make at the start or\nbroadening their philosophical background beyond the\ncollection of texts popular within their subculture.
\nIt seems to me that, in this community, verbosity is a substitute for\nthoroughness: surely, if someone wrote a lot about something, and is able to\ndemonstrate that by producing a large volume of text, they must have something\nworthwhile to say about it? Consider when blogger\nGwern explained that nicotine, actually, is not\naddictive, and is good for you, as long as you don't smoke it, over the course\nof 9,000 words, with over 100 references. It turns out, actually, nicotine is\naddictive, and is bad for\nyou even if\nyou don't smoke it, as you probably already obviously knew.
\nIn any case, what is missing from this endlessly verbose rationalist writing\nstyle is wisdom. Wisdom involves discretion: an intuition for what ideas are\nand are not worth seriously pursuing, and the ability to determine what does\nand does not need to be said. This community, broadly speaking, does\nnot seem to value wisdom as a trait at all; the idea that something may be\ntrue, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited\ntradition is anathema to them. Instead, there is a heavy bias towards that\nwhich is unconventional and counterculture, with the amount of ink\nspilled for heterodox ideas taken as evidence in itself that these ideas are worth\ntaking seriously.
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