4 ms·

I love reading, I enjoy long-form articles, but I really wish technical bloggers especially would practice distilling their point into shorter posts. I notice i

I love reading, I enjoy long-form articles, but I really wish technical bloggers especially would practice distilling their point into shorter posts. I notice it a lot with (older) scott alexander articles, this implicit assumption that your writing is informative/entertaining enough that you can stretch a simple idea to many pages. I want to reitterate that I don't want dull, minimal, writing. I don't subscribe to the "reduce your wordcount until it can't be reduced any further" style of writing advice. I just think that many people have very similar ideas about ai (and written very similar things), and if you have something to say that you haven't seen expressed before, it is worthwile (imo) to express it without preamble.

keiferski 1y ago
Ironically this is one of the best use cases I’ve found for AI tools at the moment. Summarize and critique this argument in a series of bullet points. More seriously though, I think there is a lack of rigorous thinking about AI specifically and technology in general. And hence you get a lot of these rambling thought-style posts which are no doubt by intelligent people with something compelling to say, but without any fundamental method for analyzing those thoughts. Which is why I really recommend taking a course in symbolic logic or analytic philosophy, if you are able to. You’ll quickly learn how to communicate your ideas in a straightforward, no nonsense manner.
- SilverSlash 1y ago
  > Which is why I really recommend taking a course in symbolic logic or analytic philosophy, if you are able to. You’ll quickly learn how to communicate your ideas in a straightforward, no nonsense manner. Do you have any free online course recommendations?
  - keiferski 1y ago
    I haven’t taken any online courses unfortunately (took them in person in college) but for symbolic logic I recommend the book by Klenk. I used that in my course and found it to be a good intro. There are a bunch of lectures on YouTube about analytic philosophy though, and from a quick look they seem solid.
stego-tech 1y ago
As someone with this very style (my own blog posts often rise into the 5k word range) and also from a technical background, I can at least explain my motivations for length: absolute domination of the argument. In professional settings, brevity is often mistaken for inexperience or a weak position. As the thinking goes, a competent engineer should be able to defend every position they take like a PhD candidate defending their dissertation. At the same time, however, excess verbosity is viewed as distinctly “cold” and “engineer” in tone, and frowned upon by non-technical folks in my experience; they wanted an answer, not an explainer. The problem is that each of us have the data points of what succeeds in convincing others: the longer argument, every single time. Thus we use it in our own writing because we want to convince the imagined reader (as well as ourselves) that our position is correct, or at the very least, sound. In doing so we write lengthy posts, while often doing research to validate our positions with charts, screenshots, Wikipedia articles, news sources, etc. It’s as much about convincing ourselves as it is other readers, hence why we go for longer posts based on real world experiences. One plot twist subjective to me: my lengthy posts are also about quelling my brain, in a very real sense. It is the reader, and if I do not get everything out of my head about that topic and onto “paper”, it will continue to dwell and gnaw on the missed points in perpetuity. Thus, 5k posts about things like the inefficiency of hate in Capital or a Systems Analysis of American Hegemony, just so I can have peace and quiet in my own head by getting it completely out of said head.
- collinmcnulty 1y ago
  As someone who similarly writes to think, I found a lot of insight from this video [0] from the University of Chicago. Long story appropriately short, he recommends writing something twice: once for yourself and once for the reader. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
  - stego-tech 1y ago
    That approach has helped me immensely in my communications, but less so for blog posts. I think it’s because I’ve fully internalized writing in my downtime as writing for myself first, and I just like longer, in-depth reads as a personal preference.
divan 1y ago
I wish it was a skill easy to learn but it's not.
disambiguation 1y ago
I mean it's their blog, the writing is just as much for them as it is for you.
edent 1y ago
The problem is, unless you expand every point then some jerk on HN will nit-pick your "logical fallacies". I find myself writing longer and more defensively because lots of people don't understand nuance or subtext. Forget hyperbole or humour - lots of technical readers lack the ability to understand them. Finally, editing is hard work. Revising and refining a document often takes several times longer than writing the first draft.
mvdtnz 1y ago
Strategery is the most extreme example of this. He has interesting things to say but boy does he love the act of actually _saying_ them.

keiferski 1y ago

Ironically this is one of the best use cases I’ve found for AI tools at the moment. Summarize and critique this argument in a series of bullet points. More seriously though, I think there is a lack of rigorous thinking about AI specifically and technology in general. And hence you get a lot of these rambling thought-style posts which are no doubt by intelligent people with something compelling to say, but without any fundamental method for analyzing those thoughts. Which is why I really recommend taking a course in symbolic logic or analytic philosophy, if you are able to. You’ll quickly learn how to communicate your ideas in a straightforward, no nonsense manner.

SilverSlash 1y ago
> Which is why I really recommend taking a course in symbolic logic or analytic philosophy, if you are able to. You’ll quickly learn how to communicate your ideas in a straightforward, no nonsense manner. Do you have any free online course recommendations?
- keiferski 1y ago
  I haven’t taken any online courses unfortunately (took them in person in college) but for symbolic logic I recommend the book by Klenk. I used that in my course and found it to be a good intro. There are a bunch of lectures on YouTube about analytic philosophy though, and from a quick look they seem solid.

stego-tech 1y ago

As someone with this very style (my own blog posts often rise into the 5k word range) and also from a technical background, I can at least explain my motivations for length: absolute domination of the argument. In professional settings, brevity is often mistaken for inexperience or a weak position. As the thinking goes, a competent engineer should be able to defend every position they take like a PhD candidate defending their dissertation. At the same time, however, excess verbosity is viewed as distinctly “cold” and “engineer” in tone, and frowned upon by non-technical folks in my experience; they wanted an answer, not an explainer. The problem is that each of us have the data points of what succeeds in convincing others: the longer argument, every single time. Thus we use it in our own writing because we want to convince the imagined reader (as well as ourselves) that our position is correct, or at the very least, sound. In doing so we write lengthy posts, while often doing research to validate our positions with charts, screenshots, Wikipedia articles, news sources, etc. It’s as much about convincing ourselves as it is other readers, hence why we go for longer posts based on real world experiences. One plot twist subjective to me: my lengthy posts are also about quelling my brain, in a very real sense. It is the reader, and if I do not get everything out of my head about that topic and onto “paper”, it will continue to dwell and gnaw on the missed points in perpetuity. Thus, 5k posts about things like the inefficiency of hate in Capital or a Systems Analysis of American Hegemony, just so I can have peace and quiet in my own head by getting it completely out of said head.

collinmcnulty 1y ago
As someone who similarly writes to think, I found a lot of insight from this video [0] from the University of Chicago. Long story appropriately short, he recommends writing something twice: once for yourself and once for the reader. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
- stego-tech 1y ago
  That approach has helped me immensely in my communications, but less so for blog posts. I think it’s because I’ve fully internalized writing in my downtime as writing for myself first, and I just like longer, in-depth reads as a personal preference.

divan 1y ago

I wish it was a skill easy to learn but it's not.

disambiguation 1y ago

I mean it's their blog, the writing is just as much for them as it is for you.

edent 1y ago

The problem is, unless you expand every point then some jerk on HN will nit-pick your "logical fallacies". I find myself writing longer and more defensively because lots of people don't understand nuance or subtext. Forget hyperbole or humour - lots of technical readers lack the ability to understand them. Finally, editing is hard work. Revising and refining a document often takes several times longer than writing the first draft.

mvdtnz 1y ago

Strategery is the most extreme example of this. He has interesting things to say but boy does he love the act of actually _saying_ them.