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Once you decide that you believe what you believe because you are very smart and almost always believe true things, and the things you believe just happen to be the true ones (I am being unfair but I think this is the psychological effect of this so-called rationalism) it's not a big leap to: everything I have to say is worth hearing.
> So why, then, does truth sometimes engender hatred? Why does the servant of God come to be an enemy of those who want a happy life, even though true happiness is joy in the truth? The reason must be this: Our love of truth is such that when we love something that’s not the truth, we pretend to ourselves that we we love is the truth. Then, because we hate to be proved wrong, we’re unwilling to be convinced that we’ve deceived ourselves. In this way, then, people hate the truth for the sake of whatever it is that they love more than the truth. They love truth when it shines warmly on them, and hate it when it rebukes them.
* Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, ch. 23 / sec. 34, https://wist.info/augustine-of-hippo/46880/
Oh God, that's why pastors keep giving long-winded sermons that are claim after claim after claim and without any argumentative structure (and divine inspiration stands in for self-belief in one's own intelligence)
The only time I was wrong was when I thought I was wrong
Can this truly be the reason? Aren't there infinitly many non-verbose writers out there who believe themselves to be correct just as much?
I suspect a reason for the length of rationalist writers is often rather that they value being objectively correct more than others. Length is just an attempt to be less wrong by including many aspects of a topic to paint as complete a picture as possible.
Additionally people often write what they like to read. It may be shocking to many, but some people may enjoy reading long form text that includes a lot of information that allows them to form their own thoughts. Just like some people enjoy noise music others would characterize as a frontal assault on human hearing. Those people would often find 90% of the music regular people enjoy mind-numbingly boring. Human taste is surprisingly diverse.
That doesn't mean that there isn't objectively bad rationalist writing (or objectively bad noise music). E.g. sometimes the train of thought is entirely missing and instead of building an argument it feels more like a lose pile of material that the author stumbled upon by chance in that specific order. If it is declared as that in the start, fine. If it pretends to be a great essay on the nature of $topic and then derails, that means the promise isn't kept.
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On the contrary - I found rationalist bloggers to be the most willing to change their mind in face of new evidence out of all groups of people I've ever met o the internet. Although HN commenters are a close second.
This so-called rationalist movement is better described as rationalisationist movement.
Such a great description of Rationalism: "I am very smart and I made up a methodology that is infallible therefore..."
It's like a secular IQ-Calvinist take on infallible religious authority.
An ingredient you're missing though is what I call "intellectual edgelording." All Rationalists don't do this, but it's endemic in the community and has helped give birth to things like neoreaction (monarchy is good actually), extreme "if anyone builds it everyone dies" AI doomerism, and has made them very open to things like "race science" and other "forbidden ideas THEY don't want you to believe!"
They'd never characterize it that way though. They launder it through "giving a fair hearing to ideas that are outside the normal Overton window" or similar framings. But if you look closely, the ideas they give that fair hearing to all have a certain kind of bent: edgy, elitist, or validating to their belief that intelligence can be reduced to a single scalar 'g' and this confers some kind of divine authority.
I think the AI doomerism might stem from this. If intelligence can be summarized by one scalar value than if we build something whose 'g' is on average much higher than ours, it will of course annihilate us. The other unexamined prior there is that intelligence is necessarily supremacy which is necessarily dominating or genocidal. Which leads back to why they fall so easily for fascist-adjacent and racist ideas.
The least charitable take I have on that line of thinking is: they at least secretly believe that lower-IQ people should all die, so they project that belief onto their hypothetical superintelligent AI. It would, of course, come to the same conclusion, right?
A big part is that the rationalist community has little respect for traditional philosophical arguments. Consequently they don’t really understand how to make an argument, in the sense of a formal logical framework that can be summarized and critiqued.
Instead they seem to take one premise and just run with it, and tens of thousands of words later, they think they’ve made some profound point.
I’d say that 99% of the rationalist essays I’ve read wouldn’t be given passing grades in an academic philosophy class on the topic.
Yes! There's often no clear thesis or argumentative structure, instead it reads like notes after a rabbit hole session, with little convincing involved.
I see comments defending them for considering "all viewpoints", but these are still a subset of perspectives they've constructed themselves. Good philosophy engages with a work in a way its readers would recognise, rather than arguing against a simplified set of beliefs and closing the book claiming victory.
Even in my brief stint with philosophy of biology, I saw concrete examples and actual positions discussed in the texts, while a lot of rationalist constructions seem to reduce what people believe to almost comical reductive strawmen. I'd say the verbosity often compensates for the lack of historical depth or understanding on the topic.
An example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple.... Its fictional opponent's inability to understand elementary explanations does much of the argumentative work.
Though sadly what I'm doing here is pretty much the same. Maybe the quantity the internet allows us to produce simply makes this form of argumentation more natural.
Academic philosophical arguments are enormously wordy. A bulk of points academic papers try to convey could be cut dramatically short, but then passing peer review would be challenging. Authors are thus incentivized to signal erudition through hard (analytic) or soft (continental) obscurantism. Being educated (read - socialized) in this environment would only hurt a person already predisposed to being too wordy.
This may not be the case for historical philosophical arguments. And while these are enormously influential from the standpoint of history of ideas, from the standpoint of a contemporary observer most of them contain trivial logical mistakes.
t. majored in philosophy
> traditional philosophical arguments
Can you share some good books/papers/posts that would be a good introduction to for this?
Agree with the author. Most rationalist material I've tried to read it's incredibly lengthy and frequently boring. It's also true that they are using verbosity and a certain academic style to hide the lack of precision and correctness. They are prolific writers, but not great.
It reminds me a bit of elaborate theological arguments that build up in denominational seminaries. The authors just have an obsessive compulsion to catalogue and resolve every minute detail, details that only really matter if you've already accepted many other dubious and compounding premises. IE, the articles are really for existing converts.
Ironically very similar to LLM output.
lol, Jordan Peterson comes to mind
This is basically a dunk piece. Scott’s and gwern’s posts are often long because they contain arguments, which ironically the author does not use, other to point to one gwern post. He says that rationalists substitute thoroughness for verbosity when gwern’s post does the exact opposite!
It’s easy to dismiss the argument with “lol nicotine bad”, but I think it’s good to examine studies on the addictiveness of nicotine when not smoked, and not assume it would be just like smoking. There are plenty of things that seem obvious but are not and it’s always good to be rigorous.
I think Scott in particular just really enjoys writing. He is very articulate and obviously just brimming with clever connections and turns of phrase. And he can generate a lot of words very easily.
When I was younger, sometimes I would just get carried away by the splendor and awe of it all and soak in the 25,000 word articles (or whatever they are.)
Today I would say that either he has fallen off a little, or I've just grown a little weary of the form, but I don't really get the same rush out of his writing anymore; and I notice more of the motivated reasoning and cheap tricks.
Still, sometimes I'll come across one of his posts and think 'damn, Scott's still got it.'
What the author here misses is that the verbosity is often a signal of work done.
It's like the "alternatives considered" section in a design doc or RFC: it shows you've thought through different approaches, considered trade-offs, etc. It's a little like showing your work combined with taking the reader on a journey.
Also literally the post he links to for "its bad actually" is a blog about how it's great and not very addictive and just has some tweets from people who apparently didn't pay attention to the nicotine gum/patch/pouch recommendation in gwern's post and instead started using various forms of tobacco. Very sloppy all around.
"The idea that something may be true, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited tradition is anathema to them"
This is reasonable though. Tradition and common sense suggest value perhaps more than rationalists think, but if tradition and common sense have value, there is an underlying reason.
Slate Star Codex's review of The Secret of Our Success, arguing specifically in favor of strong Chesterton's Fences, was voted #5 in the 2019 Best of LessWrong review. SSC's review of Seeing Like a State, presenting a similar argument and directly naming Chesterton, was a notable 2017 hit. "Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes" also argues in favor of maintaining traditional bright lines, hit 700 karma on LW, and is included in the "Best Essays of LessWrong" collection. "Schelling Fences versus Marginal Thinking" is a 2019 hit following these.
I apologize if this list of counterexamples ran too long.
There is also value in the abstract sense, meaning tradition can have value for the consensus and social understanding it causes.
Like, maybe Christmas as understood for Americans has no value. But the fact a Christmas exist does result in families getting together and provides a cohesive context for the winter season across pop culture, and that can have downstream value.
The term "Chesterton's Fence" comes to mind.
There's no harm in critically examining why a tradition is there (especially if harmful in other ways). But a lot of the time, "it's a long story" does actually have a reasonable story.
I feel like there is a big overlap between being against common sense and believing you are better / more intelligent (more "rational" perhaps?) than other people. For me, at least, gaining a bit of humility / being a bit more down-to-earth about being a person like everyone else has made me significantly more likely to just pick the common sense path as a default.
The problem with "secret esoteric hacks/techniques" is that other people are not NPCs and are in fact also trying to achieve their goals, and for any goal you can imagine, there are a million people who have put in way more effort into figuring out the optimal path.
If there's a secret method of becoming good at an instrument quickly, why don't music schools teach that? If there's an obscure way to run a 4 hour marathon without much training, why doesn't every training plan include that? The common sense approach is usually right on the inflection point of the 80/20 rule, where you get the easy, simple way to get decent results.
Of course, there are sometimes real constraints (i.e. popular apps like Duolingo are bad for learning a language, because most people who use it are not serious about becoming fluent and not willing to put in time) but even then, the reasonably effective answer is usually 1 layer below the surface (learn the basics through a textbook/course/online material, then just use the language a lot and actively study new vocab/grammar/concepts), not in some obscure rabbit hole.
I've seen rationalist adjacent tech twitter accept people who take openly awful ideas, and it seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate -- that is, if someone is willing to be verbose and pedantic enough to dissuade anyone from trying to argue against them.
Isn't this just the naturalistic fallacy?
Traditions can often encode good things, but they shouldn't be respected solely because they are tradition.
But even if we don't know the underlying reason, they are still valuable by dint of having survived for so long
I don’t think it’s reasonable. The age of an idea does not imply that it’s true, valuable, or good.
Of course there is tremendous value in many traditions. However, when the world is changing quickly as it is today, it is also very important to check in frequently with reality, to face facts, as it were.
Many people also use tradition as a cover for bias, bigotry, and bullying. When one has been on the other end of that, one learns to view blind tradition with a healthy dose of skepticism.
And yet, still, there is much of value there. Ironically it takes some wisdom to learn which is worth keeping and which is not.
When I think of rationalist blog posts, I think LessWrong and ACX. There is probably more to know. Across 46,000 posts on LW the average word length is 1,300 words as of May 2026. That doesn't seem too bad.
Regarding the varying degree of quality I wanted to note that this is a public forum where anyone is allowed to create an account and post public articles. Anyone is allowed to call themselves a "rationalist" if they want to. I wonder if most who read articles there and post occasionally do label themselves though. I know some who don't.
The Economist is so good in this respect.
A smart, very good writer will write something and get to the point quickly. Articles are mostly a page or less.
Writing like that respects people's time.
Many bloggers could do with writing things more briefly.
The author of this piece also makes a very good point that often long pieces go into weird corners of their own argument without thinking about their own assumptions.
When I open a general article and it starts with things like:
In a cold autumn in 1967, a barely awake scientist in the now defunct Institute of XYZ thought he'd go through his lab notes as he has done for the past 3 years since leaving the serene setting of the University of...
I immediately close it.
It's all about understanding the medium. The Economist makes a wide-ranging, newsstand magazine that isn't too far different of a medium than like a weekend Financial Times paper. I think blogs, or free-ish or frequently publishing substances, naturally slot into that kind of medium where you want to pack the most info and analysis into a deftly concise format.
If you want to write long form, please use a medium where that is naturally part of that medium. Quarterly magazines, books, full length investigative pieces, etc. An important part of WHY longer form writing works in those media is that the author is understood and expected to have devoted much more time and work into it, and doesn't output content so frequently. In other words, respect the axiom that the medium is also the message.
If I had more time I would have written a shorter essay.
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> Eliezer Yudkowsky's "sequences" are over one million words long.
This is a particularly weird example. The median post in the "sequences" is less than 1000 words long. The sequences are mostly a long series of individually very short blogposts.
Over a million words is significantly longer than the bible and it's treated as one work:
"There also used to be a practice on LW of telling newbies who weren't producing good content to come back when they'd read the sequences."
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EauwsXht4jrjTTE9m/reading-th...
His weirdo Harry Potter fanfic is 600,000 words long, which is the combined length of the first five real harry Potter books.
It isn’t really helping beat the allegations here that multiple people are trying to disprove the author’s argument with crappy math. Ok, how many of those posts are Grand Thoughts like the author is actually talking about and what is the average length of those? How about the median? Are there a bunch of “Decided to cut my hair today” tweet style posts mixed in with the Thousand and One Commandments?
> It turns out, actually, nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it, as you probably already obviously knew.
This is not the point, but I’m very confused by the link that is linked as evidence on that line? It doesn’t match the sentence it’s attached to
Link in question: https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/a-love-song-to-nicot...
Yeah. It's titled "a love song to nicotine" and 80+% of it is about the benefits of nicotine with a claim that "sublingual nicotine’s addictive potential feels low", but TFA links to the tacked-on twitter screenshots at the end. Not the point, but it does make one wonder. Though, to be fair, I only realised that the main body of the article existed when I accidentally scrolled back up "too far". Perhaps the author of TFA received the exact same link and made the same mistake as I initially did.
It is pretty funny that the premise of the article is "silly rationalist bloggers, with their long arguments, links to studies, evidence, debate" and then the "alternative" to that being presented is "here's a link to 4 tweets"
It takes skill and effort to condense knowledge.
"I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal in “Lettres Provinciales,” 1657.
I see this quote being thrown around a lot as if it supports the article's point, but this quote is just some of the most famously smart, skilled, and effortful people ever admitting even they cannot condense their knowledge that much.
I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.
so that's why Claude is so verbose
> adding layers of detail and nuance rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start or broadening their philosophical background beyond the collection of texts popular within their subculture.
Personally i think the world would be a better place if more of us added nuance to our arguments.
The problem part in that quote is “rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start”, not that they’re including nuance. Nuance can be a value add or it can be a distraction. It is not by itself virtuous.
The trick is to include a lot of nuance, details, and steelmanned arguments about little concessions and downstream, but to leave the key assumptions at the start largely unquestioned.
The reader spends 15 minutes reading what feels like a highly nuanced, deeply researched article. If you’re not paying close attention you don’t notice that some pivotal assumptions were spared from the nuance and steelmanning.
Rationalist bloggers aren’t the only ones who use this technique, but it is oddly common in rationalist blogs. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.
I think he just used nuance as a polite way to say meandering.
Personally I really wish authors would pack their 'nuance' into well-sectioned areas, maybe even collapsible (we have the technology!). I shouldn't have to skim several paragraphs just to understand the core of the argument.
Arguably, it's not a big problem if you already love the author and hang on to their every word. But as someone who is often just trying to get the gist of the idea, I find the rationalist writing style really tiresome.
How would it make it much better? Can you give me a nuanced argument and one that isn't nuanced so I can agree with you?
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While I agree with the author’s main argument, it seems weird to single out a blog post (the one from Scott Alexander) whose title includes “Much More Than You Wanted To Know” as being too long. I mean of course it is! It’s right there in the title!
That blog post is explicitly targeted at people who are looking for a nice calm evening of reading about a super weird “way out there” subject. It’s not meant to convince you of an argument quickly and effectively.
It’s a bit like complaining that the “1 pound hangover beater” hamburger at your local grease diner has too many calories.
> title includes “Much More Than You Wanted To Know”
This would be a fair complaint if it couldn’t also serve as a valid subtitle to the entire blog itself and not just a post. Admitting it in the title does not undermine the OP’s point about trying to obscure a poorly-framed argument.
My take from the OP was almost immediately, “Oh yeah, they never read Aquinas, et al”. Clearly that too comes from a fixed viewpoint, my particular Western Classics-style education delivered via US Catholic schools in the ‘80s, but I think there is a lot more honesty in any of old Tommy’s Proofs of God. You may agree or disagree with them, but pretty much anyone without any particular background or prior reading can immediately engage with them whereas the rationalists are doing all this navel gazing, or possibly glazing, around their feeling to make it so you cannot disagree because it’s set up to be a game of manners rather (have you read my other source I cited? How can you say that without reading this other link?) than an argument.
> It’s not meant to convince you of an argument quickly and effectively.
Part of the author's argument is that it doesn't do a good job of arguing at all, let alone quickly and effectively. It just inundates you with so many words and "facts" that people get bowled over by how "smart" it sounds.
To a degree I think it comes with the rational approach. If you want to be a rationalist, you need to consider many perspectives, and somehow bring in the nuance of as many of them as possible instead of ignoring the parts that don't fit your narrative. It's very easy to be brief with one-sided takes, but nuance is boring and lengthy. That of course doesn't mean that the authors conclusions and arguments will be correct in the end.
In Scott Alexander's case, it's because he's into ideas (e.g., eugenics) that most people find reprehensible, so he has to couch them in a lot of bullshit to make them more palatable, and to give himself some credibility.
That link is unlikely to be an unbiased accounting.
Speaking of long-winded rationalist blog posts, the evidence for that claim is this long, detailed, full-of-receipts accounting of David Gerard's use of RationalWiki (though mostly Wikipedia) to push his personal agenda in subtle ways while scrupulously following the rules to avoid being caught at it:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
IME they're usually the first thing you see when you get to the comments, so the really long essays are possibly a way to bore people into not getting to the comment section.
In UX, if it needs a long on-boarding, you probably messed up.
If it's so rational, why does it need to be over-explained?
I suspect it's the consequence of a depth-first search for truth, when reality is deep.
Imho narrative and metaphor and feeling hits more like the breadth-first mode. Lots of compression in pursuit of demarking a reality, whether or not everyone likes where a story does its compression. It takes visiting a lot places (and listening to how lot of signals bounce back) to drop a good metaphor, or craft a good story, that reaches and affects a large quorum of minds.
Because they know that quantity is a substitute for quality. If you write enough words about something, no matter how nonsensical your actual arguments are, people tend to assume you know what you are talking about. If someone points out a flaw in one of your arguments you just say "well you aren't addressing all my other arguments"
It's gish gallop
> In any case, what is missing from this endlessly verbose rationalist writing style is wisdom. Wisdom involves discretion: an intuition for what ideas are and are not worth seriously pursuing, and the ability to determine what does and does not need to be said. This community, broadly speaking, does not seem to value wisdom as a trait at all; the idea that something may be true, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited tradition is anathema to them.
I haven't heard the term "rationalist blogger" before, but surely, not assuming tradition is correct is sort of key to the "rationalist" part?
> I haven't heard the term "rationalist blogger" before, but surely, not assuming tradition is correct is sort of key to the "rationalist" part?
It's autistic / adhd hyperverbosity. Rationalists are a social group of neurodiverse people and attract neurodiverse people as a result.
> adding layers of detail and nuance rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start
This is a fundamentally neurotypical assumption. NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience, so they splay out all the detail to compensate. Earlier in their lives they tried 'just interrogating the one or two assumptions' but because they are not able to infer context nobody understands them because they are off the mark. They also enjoy diving into a huge amount of detail and exploring every nook and cranny to potentially find something new.
Autism is often associated with bottoms-up communication, start with the details, then the big picture will emerge. I.e., https://autisticphd.com/theblog/what-is-bottom-up-thinking-i...
Which I find is the lesswrong-style to a T: here are all the details, literally all of them, and then we'll find our way to the point together, eventually.
> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience
Or they understand that this “shared context” is a myth that doesn’t exist in reality. Plenty of situations where everybody just nods “yea, right” and then walks away with a different idea because they’ve been looking at it from a different perspective/set of assumptions.
> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience, so they splay out all the detail to compensate
I would say this is fascinatingly true of AI as well, and probably one of the reasons I (and maybe other ND folks?) work with it so well, cringey slop word choice aside.
I was joking a few years ago that if the AI was trained on the internet, the corpus included massive overrepresentation with ND style writing.
Autistic misunderstand each other as much as they misunderatand neurotypical people.
eh?
I have ADHD and I tend to be the total opposite
I skip over details because my short term memory is bad and I work in extremely abstract abstractions all the time
I have a hard time fleshing out work presentations past like 10 minutes. I figure things get boring. to be honest... maybe that's accurate and nobody's listening past 10 minutes.
The author doesn't seem to have considered that this might just be a matter of taste.
I personally find this kind of overly verbose blog post enjoyable to read (even when, as in the case of Scott Alexander and the internet rationalists, I disagree with a lot of the substance).
Same reason I like A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, Admiral Cloudberg, Perun (Youtube), and various other long form content blogs and channels. These could all get to the point much faster, but that's not what they're trying to do.
For me - the nerdy deep dive + relatively low information density + analytical style makes for a pleasurable reading / watching experience.
Coincidentally I was thinking about this topic earlier today. It seems that we train students to write in the worst way possible, by giving arbitrary word counts as benchmark for completeness.
I suppose letting students turn in 3 sentence essays may not be a better option, but it at least it doesn't encourage students who engage with the assignment in good faith to turn a high-quality six paragraphs into six pages.
Having a well-defined rubric is better than having a minimum word count or page count. If they can meet all the rubric's requirements in 3 sentences then so be it.
Grading in writing has always felt nonsensical to me. When I didn't get a perfect score in math, the teacher could point out what I did wrong and how I would have been able to do it right.
None of the people grading my writing ever even attempted to do that. The grade existed separately from my writing and served no purpose of education.
I once turned in a five sentence essay that covered about a single page. The person next to me in class turned in five pages, but ultimately got the same grade as me. That's when I realized how stupid it all was.
The alternative is to "turn in a good paper" which is not quantifiable and thus anathema to the modern Taylorism inspired world of education. If the student can't agree, it's a problem and so word count it is - can't argue with basic math.
Most of the time the benchmark word count isn't any more than six paragraphs to begin with. And putting out more words means more practice, which is valuable in a school setting.
It's pretty remarkable to see 'I don't like them, therefore their arguments are all terrible' in action, but it's so rampant in this comments section it's genuinely sad. Every single argument against rationalists can be leveraged at academic philosophers too.
Sign of the times.
"Back in my day", HN felt more signal than noise. Oh there was flaming and name calling, but there was a lot less of what you point out: simple outgroup dunking.
Yeah this was one of the stupidest comment sections I've read on this site in recent memory, and these days the commentary here is definitely not high-brow. Most of the comments were just "I don't like rationalists so they're stupid." I think there's plenty of very obvious, fertile critique one can make against rationalists but there's so little of that here in this comments section that it makes me quite sad.
I've been reading stuff from the rationalist community for a long time. Here's some related comments that might be helpful:
* Writing to think -- writing about a subject to understand it better -- is a common technique in online rationalist circles
* I often just throw long (esp rationalist) essays at my LLM text summarizer script to see if they would be something I'd like to read. It works well for me
* Rationalism the subculture, rationalism the skill, rationalism the subject, rationalism the mindset, etc, all seem pretty distinct. This comment is more for the comments here (mftch)
* Inducing a trait from a few examples to a whole group (esp a long tailed (ie diverse) group) is usually a bad idea. Exposure is often a good remedy for that. (mftch)
* It might just be me, but it seems that both the online rationalist community and hacker news comments cultures have evolved a lot in the last few years (mftch)
As a philosophy major, I can confirm that the field generally rewards those who make good arguments for bad ideas, and that for reasons that I never fully understood, texts always seem to be far more verbose than necessary.
Philosophy also tends to rattle on. I think part of it is that if the ideas are not that strong and seem obvious or wrong if stated briefly you can make it look more significant by lengthening up.
See Hobbes, Calvin https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/ac...
A lot of academics are bad writers, philosophers included. In my opinion, philosophy is actually far from the worst offender. If you read philosophers who are good at writing and actually have something to say (e.g. Bertrand Russell, Thomas Nagel, Susan Wolf) they can be short and illuminating.
By the way, there's a big divide between continental (European) and analytic (Anglosphere) philosophy. The Calvin and Hobbes joke is poking fun at postmodern continental philosophy (or literary criticism or gender studies) but most analytic philosophy is not like that.
Or there is a lot of nuance and long history of arguments behind concepts like free will, consciousness, realism, emergence. You can't simplify the arguments without glossing over a lot of detail. Philosophers prattle on because they're responding to all that. They're aware of the various objections to their position.
Longer = more important
Also most people on lesswrong are likely on the spectrum and are used to needing to overexplain themselves because neurotypical people rarely give them the benefit of the doubt.
So that's where Claude's verbosity comes from.
Not sure about the verbosity but that's probably where the useless and annoying claudisms come from, they are rewarded by (rationalist adjacent) users because they feel good about understanding the jargon and it reinforces the feeling of communicating with a superior alien intelligence (and that oneself is also somewhat superior for being able to understand it).
So the length is load-bearing?
Good writing takes effort.
Clarity - grace - style ... is not taught. Passable text is good enough.
No editor - plus a peer group who create bloated text.
Here is my favorite text on how to write clearly: https://www.amazon.com/Style-Ten-Lessons-Clarity-Grace/dp/03...
I really hope good writing makes a comeback. I really appreciate everyone who takes the time and effort to write well.
That really is a fine book, it brings back good memories.
However, I don't think this article is really complaining about style. Scott Alexander has great style, the clarity/grace people would find much to love about him.
The complaint is about the length of his writing, and the content, ie focusing on endless arguments as opposed to honoring prior traditions.
A lot of rationalists seem to believe that prolixity is a sign of intellectual effort.
I don't know if nicotine is good for you, but I've enjoyed all the parodies at https://morewrong.lol/
This is an amazing site
> Pascal’s Mugging and Why I Gave an Escort My Son’s College Fund
Hehe, that got a chuckle out of me, it's a bit like that HN parody site.
That has some serious n-gate vibes (http://n-gate.com/)
I’m an avid less wrong reader, but this is incredible
How come I hadn't already seen that? Thank you.
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> blogger Gwern explained that nicotine, actually, is not addictive
following the link:
> My take away is that there is addiction
At least thanks for writing a short blog post!
The verbosity of the entire post can be condensed down to just this bit:
> verbosity is a substitute for thoroughness
Clearly OP author is far too wordy as well!
Expressing yourself succinctly takes both intelligence and courage.
The idiot rambles on and the coward hides behind a wall of text that would be exhausting to refute.
We are all one or the other occasionally.
From the article:
Consider when blogger Gwern explained that nicotine, actually, is not addictive, and is good for you, as long as you don't smoke it, over the course of 9,000 words, with over 100 references. It turns out, actually, nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it, as you probably already obviously knew.
The second sentence is a link to a Substack essay, which has two screenshots of two individuals self-reporting “nicotine bad” on Twitter, one of whom smoked it.
By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.
Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”, I find that I agree with his claim that extra words don’t make his articles better, and I would extend this to say that fewer words would make them better still, with perfection achieved when the number of words reaches zero.
> The second sentence is a link to a Substack essay
The author of the second essay here! It's a pro-nicotine one — the OP just linked to the very end of it. Moreover Gwern himself reviewed my essay during Inkhaven (https://www.inkhaven.blog/), a 30-posts-in-30-days program.
I asked Gwern explicitly if he ever feels responsible for getting some people addicted to nicotine. His answer was something along of the lines of: “No, I explicitly warned people that (1) vaping/smoking is addictive and (2) if you ever was addicted to nicotine, even sublingual nicotine is enough to get people addicted”.
I do think it's important to warn people that they should be careful with the substance and watch their usage, so I included the screenshots in my essay!
Yes, I hate to admit I am/was someone that assumed nicotine is bad, but Gwern's article is fascinating and well researched. This was a poor hill to die on for this article.
I don't have a horse in the "is nicotine good/bad" race, but having lots of references and being argued to death isn't a proxy for being true. Gwern is a former wikipedia admin so peppering everything with references and going line by line, usenet style, to demolish someone's argument is his bread and butter. That just makes him an excellent rhetorician in the online community of people who relate to this argumentative style (typically people who read wikipedia a lot), not a source of truth. When it comes to fields I know a bit more about it's pretty easy to see through the irrelevant citation gish gallop.
(To clarify the Gwernpost, nicotine isn't primarily addictive but habit forming. So for instance if you get your nicotine from cigarettes you end up habituated to smoking cigs, and so on. But you can use it to habituate to anything else as well.)
Ironically, the Substack essay which was linked to is titled "A Love Song to Nicotine" and is all about how the author enjoys using nicotine for productivity boosts, and doesn't feel like he experiences many downsides to using it.
> By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.
> Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”
Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you. I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view, especially when "interrogating" in this context would mean spending dozens of hours of my life going line-by-line through each reference and trying to understand the context of a field which, frankly speaking, neither me nor the author of the article have any business trying to evaluate. The only winning move is not to play.
I love the rationalist blogosphere but agree with this 100%. I was actually having a very similar thought this morning (specifically about the book reviews in the ACX contest and how they seem to keep getting longer).
A problem with long articles is there are so many important topics to be informed about today, and if I spend an hour on one, then I don't have time for others.
What irks me the most about rationalists is their inability to acknowledge their own biases. The nicotine article linked was a series of citations linked by some commentary in between where the author immediately dismissed any sources that opposed their beliefs while backing their points with studies that had the same or worse methodological issues. A bit too much nitpicking to my taste, and a bit too much reliance on hiding behind seemingly scientific language.
The rationalist community seems great at rationalizing their bias, not at rational or critical thought. They will argue their way into anything - but that makes them good debaters or writers, not good thinkers.
Some arguments about future predictions seem like a sci-fi fan base nerding about their favorite stories, but without any self awareness.
You get a nerds wet dream: nerdy stuff and ego boost. But very detached from reality.
i think there is room for word vomit overexplaining every little nuance, detail, and caveat as a style of writing especially if one is trying to be through and “rational”, but I think it takes much more skill to condense the meat of a subject
Because a short, precise conclusion would only give you negative feedbacks. Too many viewers and critics jump to argument without much thinking.
Writing in defensive style is a tactical choice.
Assuming I am a rationalist (I honestly don't like this word, it's more of a self-identifying label; if not it is just saying something really trivial. But yet these people, probably only on LW, decide to call them so, so let's use that word) and is writing to others on this forum, I would assume that they have the same mindset and peer review standard as mine, so I would not write with defensive mindset emphasized.
Because a defining feature of those people is confusing the appearance of seriousness with seriousness itself, just like they confuse their ideological preference with rationality.
As one young philosopher put it, wisdom is a moral choice. It is a decision to only speak about what you truly know; and that is very little. E. g. most of us do not truly know the Earth is a sphere; we only "know" this from a hearsay and that is not it.
Any movement that names themselves after how right they are is suspect.
Similarly movements who use catchphrases for this, like when Kier Starmers centrist version of Labour started calling themselves "the adults in the room" - it gave away their entitlement to lead.
"Rationalists" can't be wrong - it's in the name, any one disagreeing is just irrational.
> It turns out nicotine is addictive and bad for you
links to a substack post confirming the benefits Gwern wrote about, and acknowledging the risks Gwern acknowledged
Probably not universally true, but good writing is a skill regardless.
And maybe they are "too long" in the same way that Lean proofs are "too long"? I have no idea - I don't read either very often.
However, often I don't care how verbose a piece is if it can hold my interest. For example, the late Umberto Eco wrote some of my favourite pieces. He was a philosopher (among other things), and many of them - notably of the "post-modern" - are known to be particularly verbose.
Here's a particularly relevant one: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
Because they need to rationalize everything.
There is the effect that it takes more words to say something new in a way that is convincing than to say something your audience already believes.
> It seems to me that, in this community, verbosity is a substitute for thoroughness...
Not only in that community. I see it a lot at my job too, waffling and loudness as a substitute for knowledge, skill and diligence. I think maybe plato wrote something about this in the gorgias
It's a thing called logorrhea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logorrhea
Logorrhea is a symptom of ADHD, schizophrenia and traumatic brain injuries.
I wish there was a much greater stigma against providing unsolicited, almost certainly non-professional medical diagnoses of third parties like you have done.
Whatever the faults of internet rationalists, suggesting that they have a mental health disorder is incredibly anti-social behaviour.
I think rationalist blogs are often useful for self improvement. It's like a lot of religious thought, if you take it too seriously you'll go insane but in small doses it makes you better
While notionally my interests align very well with lesswrong, I am seldom able to make it through the length of a post without losing interest.
I don't think you can ever identify why someone is going to prattle on for days on a topic. Could be they're trying to convince themselves as much as those around them.
the same reason a greasy used car salesman goes on an on and on.
Because it's difficult to condescend a little, especially when you're smarter than everyone else.
If we buy information by paying in reading time, the ideal deal would be maximum information for no reading time.
Sounds unachievable? Doesn't mean we shouldn't go there!
A big part of this will be in-group signalling. Humans always do this, starting at the school playground. They adopt the habits of what they consider to be their in-group. It is why so much of the material (blogs, essays, comments on blogs, etc) come across as infuriating to the average reader.
In my opinion, verbosity is often used to swamp an argument, so brute forcing correctness. Just so I can swipe the ~~insult~~ critique more broadly, you often find the same on philosophy forums. You won't get engagement if you try to distil their arguments down to more concise points that are easier to debate or refute. You need to use the in-group signalling of lengthy posts, complicated language and appeal to authority.
(Just so you're aware, I'm aware, this is going to really annoy some people, nevertheless, I believe it is true).
are you really asking? modafinil.
The reason all the rationalist posts are so long is that they are on drugs. Nootropics.
It’s not getting better with AI. I’m 100% with the author on wisdom. LLMs don’t seem much to exhibit the benefit of experience in their outputs
TLDR: Because reality is way more complex than any of its representations.
--
If person rationalist they
> prioritizes explicit reasoning, logic, and evidence over intuition, tradition, or emotion.
By sticking to this principle one has to describe every cause-effect, every idea from their speech. Reality is way more complex and detailed than any of it's representations. So rationalist can keep detailing and grounding everything they touch in their speech, and then ground grounds and so on. Sticking to rationalist values you have to write more and ground more.
By cutting corners of explanation and reason rationalist's claims they becoming less rationalist and less acceptable by the group, thus less popular. So the more you're rationalist, more popular you are more you have to write. It's natural way of things.
--
Irinically the complete rationalism isn't achievable because Gödel's incompleteness teorem.
> There will always be true statements about symbols that the system can write down, but cannot prove or disprove using its own rules.
They, we all have to draw a logical/grounding line somewhere, either by choice either by incapacity.
A lot of times, it feels like reading the Talmud.
First, it has a canon, every rationalist ends up referencing Yudowsky, arguments frequently refer back to earlier ones, and to make matters worse, by shorthand ("Molochs", "The Litany of Tarski", "conflict vs mistake theory")
Like the Talmud, rationalists like to use extreme hypotheticals to test principles. The contrivance of the situations is the point, as if stress-testing a rule by applying it to extreme situations to distil it to a single variable problem.
Both writing traditions keep opposing arguments in full. The Talmud records minority options and the full log of disputes that went for centuries. Rationalist's steelmanning is basically the same.
It is not surprising that Yudkowsky is Jewish and grew up Orthodox. A lot of other very important figures are also Jewish like Scott Alexander, so, it is plausible that they brought a lot of the disputation-as-study and commentary-on-commentary traditions with them and set the tone for the community.
Of course, I am not directly comparing the Talmud to Rationalist writing. The Talmud is ultimatelly a legal document, its hypotheticals feed a system that tells people how to act, compressing centuries of legal precedent, this is by nature dense, and this density makes it hard to read more than simply verbose. Rationalist blogs are often long due to a lack of professional editing.
It’s another red flag. I don’t read “rationalist” blog posts but I’ve seen verbosity before. It’s a pseudo-intellectual effect. It’s a kind of propaganda method. You talk and write very long and convoluted. No one really understands you but they assume you know what you’re talking about and tend to buy what you sell. Of course this requires a “community” praising the person who talks a lot. Otherwise no one would read/listen to them.
I’ve seen this tactic in politics and media, to sway public opinion (into something against public’s interest and against basic common sense). I’ve seen with charismatic leaders and followers of religious cults. They talk a lot, write thick books but say little of value. I’ve seen this with people selling Ponzi schemes.
I think the common theme is they have to go against the common sense and have to weaken defense mechanisms of the target. But they have no real arguments that can be summarized clearly in a few sentences. Such arguments would be easy to understand and refute.
Most blog posts could be a tweet.
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Pharmaceutical stimulant/eugeroic use is one contributing factor.
It's called the bullshit firehose. It's designed to make you give up arguing, because who has the time? Unfortunately, naturally trusting people are often ensnared.
why lot word when few word do trick?
this should be a rule for everyone but the finest wielders of language.
It's a mix of bad writing ability, contrived arguments (coming up with weird hypotheticals or simulating what an opponent would say), cargo-culting rationalist thought leaders (Yarvin, Scott, Yudkowsky, gwern) and the concealing of unsavory ideas.
There's also a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass - when all your friends are way too online and probably also rationalists and much of your identity and status is tied to online posting, you invest a lot in cultivating that social identity and signaling to your community, even to a degree that would look unhealthy to normies.
Yarvin is about as anti-rationalist as you can get.
Obscurantism as a form of deliberate concealment is definitely a large part of it, and adds weight to the idea that rationalism is essentially a post-modern take on libertarianism.
This is embarrassing, I studied philosophy and worked as a researcher in the discipline for more than 20 years, and I've never heard of "rationalist blogs." Of course, I know what "rationalism" would be as an old philosophical tradition. I also call myself an anti-irrationalist (which is different from rationalism in the sense I know).
Can someone explain to me what "rationalist blogs" and the "rationalists" behind them are? (Of course, I could use Google but I'd like to tap into HN's crowd intelligence in this case.)
I’m not sure what this “rationalist” thing is but I think almost every blog entry is too long. Half the posts on this site are too long, get to the point. I have actual books to read by people that wrote their works 100 years ago, why would I spend an hour reading something that was written in San Francisco last week?
I don't think its just rationalist blogs who do this. Authors don't realise how little time people have now and catching anyone's attention is a miracle. These examples for the nicotine aren't the best though. Gwern's articles are long because he includes literally every thing he can possibly find on a subject. They're not meant to be like short summaries but more like evolving wikipedia articles.
If you read what gwern says on nicotine its far more nuanced than "nicotine is fine, use nicotine." He does acknowledge that frequent use leads to tolerance. But tolerance is not the same as addiction. I think also if you're going to try argue against his post (which is thoroughly researched) then you ought to do better than just set up a strawman and say he's wrong....
I’m not trying to argue against his post. If I was, I would devote more than two sentences to it. I’m trying to argue that it’s too long
Alternatively the question is why the author of that
opinion piece has nothing more to say.
This is true. The Preacher says,
“Do not be rash with your mouth, And let not your heart utter anything hastily before God. For God is in heaven, and you on earth; Therefore let your words be few. For a dream comes through much activity, And a fool’s voice is known by his many words.” -Ecclesiastes 5:2
"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.
Answer a fool according to his folly (some translations "as his folly deserves"), lest he be wise in his own eyes." - Proverbs 26:4,5
I think part of what's happening is that the bad ideas and bad reasoning get diluted among 9000 words and 100 references. It's hard to put your finger on one sentence and say "here's where you're wrong", because the conclusion does not (obviously) rest on any one sentence. It rests more on the volume of words.
But "proof by volume" is not actually a thing. (I mean, it's a technique that can be effective in practice, but logically, it's not valid whatsoever.)
How do you answer something like that? If you try a point-by-point rebuttal, you're going to be into it 9000 words yourself (at least), and it is rarely worth it. I think that's "don't answer a fool according to his folly".
"Answer him as his folly deserves" is less clear to me. Is that to just flat out say that his ideas are foolish? Is it to give a concise one-paragraph statement of why his conclusion is folly? I think the latter is preferable (if you can). I mean, the rationalist is just going to claim that you haven't engaged with his arguments, though you can reply "no I didn't; your conclusion is so wrong that I don't need to engage with how you got there". And the concise rebuttal may be helpful to bystanders.
Because r >> g. These people don't need to work and need to find some outlet for their efforts since the labor market cannot compete with their current investment returns.
Because they have autism
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
I think it's pretty simple. To prioritize concision, you need to value other people's time more than stroking your own ego. A lot of "rationalists" are just people who, more than anything else, think they are smarter than other people and desperately need to prove it. This naturally means they don't respect other people's time and it naturally leads to voluminous prose.
On an internet where almost every atypical person can find a niche to fit their oddities, rationalism is one of the bubbles for people who are strongly inclined toward (and have the time for) very long, clever-sounding essays. Pretty much everything else is downstream of that bias, so there's no real prospect of improvement.
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I'll give you a hint: the truth is usually very simple.
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
Aristotelian physics is simpler than Newtonian physics, which is simpler than either relativity or quantum mechanics, both of which will probably turn out to be simpler than whatever theory we come up with that somehow encompasses both.
Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis is shorter than On the origin of species, which in turn is shorter than the shelf-full of books you would need to cover all the details Darwin didn't know about.
The truth does generally turn out to be simpler than its alternatives, when you fill in all their details and add the epicycles you need to make them consistent with what we actually observe. In some sense that's how we recognize the truth: it's what you don't need to keep making increasingly implausible excuses for.
But it's not reliably "very simple" if that means "short blogpost length at most", and things that purport to be that simple often turn out to be simple only in appearance. (Like saying "a witch did it", which in some sense can explain anything, and for the exact same reason explains nothing until you've filled in lots of details about what witches can do and how, at which point it stops looking like a good explanation for anything.)
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The simplest truths are the hardest to prove/explain.
Why do americans insist on using philosophical terminology to mean its opposite?
Not as long as the sales pages for e-books.
They just keep going on and on. I wondered why. I think it's because at every point, the person either stopped and bought, or... they're still reading so... you may as well hit them with MOAR and MOAR!
It’s because the point isn’t actually to convey the idea
It’s to do the practice of rationalist blogging
I think it comes from their culture "growing up" in hostile parts of the internet (twitter, Reddit, HN, etc) and so having to hedge every statement with excruciating delineation of edge cases and precise scoping lest some sneering POS leave drive by comments that twist their words into some straw man that the local majority will be against.
Basically it's a defense mechanism against adversarial HN commenter type behavior that's been cargo culted a couple times over and doesn't actually service it's original purpose anymore and is just a group signaling mechanism.
They are insecure and want to appear smart, and think long writing == smart.
To be contrarian isn't to be a "free thinker", it's to be led around like a dog on a leash. You're just a reactionary saying the opposite of an actual opinion.
If I had to wager, I'd say both of those points stem from being bullied in school more often than not.
they get paid by the word
adderall
god, i thought i was the problem
> Eliezer Yudkowsky's "sequences" are over one million words long.
The sequences are really books made up of chapters (blog posts). Most of those posts are relatively short.
They are also very repetitive. When I started reading it (back in 2015 I think?) I thought that they had some interesting info, but needed a good editor to remove at least 60% of the material; many chapters argued the exact same point as the previous chapter, with a slightly different analogy. Also many are responses to other blogs of the time, which also isn't interesting to read in a book since you don't have any context. Very tiresome to read.
Because, although the arguments might make sense in an abstract, detached way, they're very often against 'gut feel', and for good reason.
Therefore they use a kickstarter or aliexpress style torrent of argument and features to try to cudgel you into agreement.
Gish gallop. Harder to argue with.
What, exactly, is the point of this post, and especially the point of it on HN? It appears to be a rant directed at 2 people on the internet that has nothing to do with tech.
I mean an obvious reason is that people tend to write rationalist blog posts if they're really into overanalyzing things and if you're into that you're likely to write a lot about what you're overanalyzing.
I might want to think of myself as a rationalist but I don't want to be ideated that way.
I'm more than happy to be badged a secular humanist and I am led to beleive they overlap but I see differences.
What really shits me is how many rationalists are basically mansplaining tiresome pedants. And, hyper argumentative.
Most of them are too smart to have brief thoughts, but not smart enough to have succinct ones.
There's also rhetorical advantage in spewing so much stuff that you snow your reader under a blizzard; what's worse, some of that tends to be true.
I think it's just the blog version of gish gallop. They just say a bunch of stuff that sounds smart to people who don't have much knowledge in certain areas, so much that it'll take too much effort to rebut, in hopes that you stop thinking about it and just accept their arguments. I only just heard of that Eliezer Yudkowsky guy the other day, and when I looked him up I stumbled upon a reddit thread where he makes a fool of himself talking about probabilities. So I wouldn't trust a single thing that guy says. https://www.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/2bazyc/comm...
Also I think the name "Rationalist" is kinda funny. Reminds me of that Antifa meme, "we're the anti bad guy squad, and our opponents are the bad guys! Everything we do is justified because we fight bad guys obviously!" Except these guys are the Rationalists. Everything they do is rational, and if you don't agree with them, then you're irrational obviously.
This post is too long to read. Tldr?
"Brevity is the soul of wit."
Rationality is mostly absence of bs, so when you sit down to write about it, you are most likely already a person who produces too much words on any subject.
When one is “full of shit” as they say, the shit needs to spill out somewhere.
It’s called a gish gallop. Rationalists are masters at bullshitting, and the best way to do that is to say so many things that people can’t really devote the time to proving you wrong. If they do try, they counter with even more words until you give up. Rhetorically it’s where they feel most comfortable.
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Personally, I often write long responses when making a contrarian point. The reason is because people have been heavily conditioned to believe certain things and making a contrarian point requires you to provide an alternative interpretation for all of their many beliefs around the subject.
Every contrarian idea has to dismantle layer upon layer of existing beliefs to even be considered plausible. Many people will discard it outright because of how much it goes against their worldview.
The worst part is that people have also been conditioned to believe that long, detailed explanations are the result of delusions built up in social media 'echo chambers' or 'conspiracy theories' based upon fake news. LLMs will typically act as though they are concerned for your mental health if you provide a valid rebuttal to all of their points in such a discussion; they will say "Note what you did, you've made your argument unfalsifiable..." And I have to point out that its own mainstream version is also merely a narrative and also unfalsifiable and backed by even less evidence. The discussion has to be evaluated from first principles, taking into account empirical evidence, trends and incentives.
Incentives are much more important than simplicity of arguments to estimate accuracy. People will go to great lengths to obtain rewards and avoid punishment. Often, reality is complicated, not simple. Occam's razor generally isn't correct these days. Perhaps it was at one point in the past; those were simpler times.
From my own life experience and behavior, there are no simple explanations for anything I did or what happened to me; so I don't see why simple explanations are valid for anyone else. Occam's razor is essentially part of Hollywood's conditioning; conditioning people to people map their lived experiences into simple movie-like narratives.
> nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it
meh, this is legitimately disputed today, for example as there are less smokers today lung cancer has gone down but Parkinson's disease has gone up, suggesting nicotine does have some cognitive benefits
It's because you read too slowly.
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Rationalism is for people who have the reading skill. If someone prefers short videos, it means that the doors of rationalism is closed for him.
The post's clearest claim is that rationalists "lack wisdom" and makes a circular argument - posts are too long because they lack the wisdom to make shorter posts, and the evidence for the lack of wisdom is the length of the posts. It says nothing useful or with predictive power. Another claim is that they didn't read an article by Scott Alexander, they didn't have much to say about it, and somehow conclude that makes them wiser, or a better writer, or superior in some vague way.
I may as well ask why so many replies, and responses to rationalist posts are empty posturing, sneering, ad-hom attacks, and writing so much while being so insubstanial. That post could be replaced by Bart Simpson bashing a saucepan shouting "I AM SO GREAT" and it would be no less informative.
> "even the rare one that contains some good ideas"
"Tee hee lols, cutting insight from superior mind, zing, burn, am I so great, or am I so great? I hope you feel wiser for reading my wisdom. Imagine how much worse this would be if I committed that sin of 'adding detail and nuance'. Also I'm not going to do the one thing I said they should do - interrogate the assumptions I made at the start."
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