Is it really necessary all this verbosity to convey ideas? I feel like all this sugarcoat is just to excesively protect people's feelings, a tendency that is spreading everywhere lately.
They were not talking about couching every fact or snippet taught in physics class getting couched in all this extra "sugarcoating". They were talking about the kind of conversations that almost never go well at all - they're trying to improve the odds of an interaction convincing someone to change their polarized viewpoint from 0.01% to 0.03%.
For that use-case, obviously there's value in exploring different techniques, given the typical technique (scream at them and then block them) doesn't work well at all at actually changing their mind.
The most rational thing someone can do is accept the reality that acknowledging feelings and emotion are a pre-requisite to problem solving.
Often, I see people arguing straw or steel with either their limited view of the oponents position or with the basic asumption that their oponent is an idiot or malicious.
And agreed about the nature of many disagreements coming down to context and facts. My comment is aimed at people who seem to insist that other posters don't understand their context or have all the facts, when they actually do and yet continue to disagree.
You see it to a lesser extent in software and math too though - just look at any mathematical article on wikipedia. The "dynamic programming" article is a good one for this.
I'm not sure this is a new problem.
Non fiction books often pad out very little info into an entire tome simply because that’s one of the few ways you can make money from your idea.
But this doesn’t apply just to economics. The most egregious of this are books about programming languages and architecture if you ask me.
In philosophy and elsewhere, a good author might write a lot but still be concise. That’s just because they have a lot to say. Or they need more examples.
This article wasn’t even that verbose. I don’t see how what he said related to star man though, but that’s a different topic.
By the lingo, I assume the author is at least tangentially associated with the online rationalism thing, Slate Star Codex and Yudkowsky and effective altruism and all that.
By their standards, this is a damn haiku.