7 comments

  • throwawayy6767 42 minutes ago

    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.

  • senderista 2 hours ago

    So that's where Claude's verbosity comes from.

      throwawayy6767 39 minutes ago

      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).

  • ai_critic an hour ago

    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.

  • vrganj an hour ago

    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.

  • eimrine an hour ago

    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.

      defrost an hour ago

      The complaint is about the lack of writing skill:

        Nearly every blog post I have read in this ecosystem, even the rare one that contains some good ideas, is painfully long and extremely tedious.