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Comment by jahaja | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm breaking the rules of "good" argumentation described in that article/essay now, but I'm yet to see anyone that links to "slatestarcodex" or similar "rationalist"'ish site, link to an article that is not an absolute massive scientificy sounding wall-of-text.

Since this is basically the exact opposite from what I remember reading - correct me if I'm wrong - in "On Writing Well", I've started to assume that their core discussion/argumentation technique is actually a kind of attrition warfare - to tire the opponent out.

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Classify SSC as philosophical musings, with a vague basis in science. If philosophical musings aren't your thing, and they are not most people's thing, it isn't going to appeal to you. SSC posts are generally "the sausage being made", not a nicely-digested final product such as you might get in a school course.

I mean this as neither defense of SSC nor an attack on SSC. It is simply an explanation of what it is, and an observation that you may simply not be in the target audience.

Fair enough. This seems to be a good view of it.

The reality is that it's bad science and even worse philosophy. This stuff, like frankly all the rationalist nonsense, suffers from very highly motivated reasoning. The author isn't asking questions he's already decided on the answers and is now looking to justify his ideology. I suspect this is why rationalists are very careful to avoid actual philosophers. Philosophers make short work of this sort of simplistic thinking.

People who really want to understand, say, the meta-ethics of modern democracy and debate are much better of reading Plato, Foucault and Rawls. Then you'd understand that sophism cannot be so easily dismissed because it is in fact pee pure sophism to say that certain arguments are "social shaming" and therefore not good arguments. The entire construction here -- the assumption that there is a single right answer to every argument and it can be arrived at if both sides are just reasonable enough and set aside their social biases -- is, as Foucault would show, a highly suspect assertion born of a very privileged position. People who seriously buy in to these sorts of simplistic models are going to have a bad time. Try having a "rational" debate with a Jewish person about whether all Jews should be exterminated. You might dismiss the response as "social shaming" and accuse them off being "triggered" and emotional... but such a victory won't buy you much.

Despite the book title, there is no single form of "good writing": different readers prefer different things. For example, some people really like thick fantasy novels in the style of Robert Jordan.

I would be interested to see a survey of the reading speed of people who like/dislike SSC. It could be that the fans tend to skim texts and read more words per minute, so the posts don't feel as long.

Scott likes to give "epistemic" ratings to his essays to solve this very problem. They range from "basically complete speculation" all the way to "pretty darn sure." It would be nice if he were more consistent with them, though.

This SSC article is basically a, "I'm not judging you but you're acting in bad faith if you don't accept my values as fundamental" summary.

And that's a lot of SSC. It's not "based" in science, nor is it based in "good writing." Often times its articles devolve into something that is almost self-fisking and difficult to follow.

I think though that finding ways to succeed at public arguments is an interesting discussion, and it encourages you to define "success" in ways other than "dominate and browbeat people by turning them into ideologically fetishized foils." Much of this discourse is aimed at denigrating this, but that's ultimately a quiet appeal to the status quo and the least rational, most passionate opinions. Often times denormalization of those opinions is it the best way to combat them, if they need combating.

A great example of this is repeating (in a tired voice) "No on cares but you" when someone goes off on a rant about how transexuals are "mentally ill." Repeating that this is a value judgement and not a universal axiom is a very effective tactic, because it refuses to accept the hidden premises that having such a conversation in the first place implies (i.e., that it's open for debate in the first place).

Or maybe to get real precision in very complicated things, you have to prioritize some things over "writing well," which is partially about making things easy for the reader. What if some things are just complicated enough that they can't be elucidated well in a short space? Some stories need a book, not a newspaper article.

I've found that this is not the case more often than not. But I'm no expert.

While the writing on Slate Star Codex could be more concise, I do enjoy a lot of the ideas presented.

A couple of style changes would have a much larger impact on the reading experience. As is there are about 115 characters per line and a narrow line height. Bumping the paragraph size to 16px and the line height to 1.6 makes the article dramatically less tiresome to read.

If you publish long-form content, typography is incredibly important. For long articles like this 65-80 characters per line is the sweet spot.

I feel like "or similar" is not fair. I don't know how much you've read of SSC vs. pattern matching it to related blogs, but I really enjoy his writing while I can't stomach most wall-o-text posts. He actually has a post on writing advice [0], which I liked, since his style resonates with me, but which I guess would be more like "things to avoid" for you!

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/

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