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If you think writing more words will be more persuasive, just... write more words?

The test already incentivises being persuasive! If writing more words would do that, and the incentivised human persuaders don't write more words and the LLMs do, then I think it's fair to say that LLMs are more persuasive than incentivised human persuaders.

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Sure. I am not contesting that LLMs are more persuasive in this context. That basic result comes through very clearly in the paper. Its not as clear how relevant this is to other situations though. I think its quite likely that humans given the instruction to increase word count might outperform LLMs. People are very unlikely to have practiced the specific task of giving advice on multiple choice tests whereas LLMs have likely gotten RLHF training which likely helps in this situation.

I always try to pick out as many tidbits as possible from papers that might be applicable in other situations. I think the main difference of word count may be overshadowing other insights that may be more relevant to longer form argumentation.

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