Boy do I hate that roman numeral chapter style SA has popularized among his fans

Boy do I hate that roman numeral chapter style SA has popularized among his fans (https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/8lcigo/boy_do_i_hate_that_roman_numeral_chapter_style_sa/)

posted on May 22, 2018 06:50 PM by u/lobotomy42

That’s it. Here’s an example.

http://dendwrite.blogspot.co.il/2018/05/on-value-of-received-tradition.html

The post is fine, whatever. Mostly content-free. But man, does that

grate on my nerves.

Can anyone pinpoint for me what about it rubs me the wrong way?

u/AlexCoventry 20 points at 1527017296.000000

Uninformative section headers mildly annoy me because they’re lazy and force me to work harder to figure out the author’s point in sectioning the work there. Generally, I wish insight porn would get to the point faster. I realize why they’re teasing, but I’m just not into it.

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u/PerspexIsland 16 points at 1527017479.000000

Subheads, bullets, and easier F-scanning would risk revealing how trite most of this shit is.

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u/lobotomy42 15 points at 1527018195.000000

Yeah, I think the technique of "Hey I'm going to hide my thesis until the very end so you don't have time to notice my mistakes" is part of what's driving it.

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u/McCaineNL 14 points at 1527057550.000000

I'm often struck by how much happens in between. A lot of Scott's articles begin with a thesis and then end up somewhere completely different, I think because he actually loses track of his own assumptions 'for the sake of argument'. It's a common pattern in Rationalist articles, I've noticed, that it begins with some observation, then a bunch of wild inferential leaps are made 'for the moment', and the author then forgets that those things were just assumed and acts as if they were proven and we can build on them.

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u/caquilino 9 points at 1527093353.000000

> it begins with some observation, then a bunch of wild inferential leaps are made 'for the moment', and the author then forgets that those things were just assumed and acts as if they were proven and we can build on them. That's what I call "steel-wooing".

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u/Snugglerific 5 points at 1527117764.000000

Don't forget to start off with an extended thought experiment ([prefereably > 2,000 words](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1YmS_VDvMY)) that is either so abstract it's barely related to anything at all or is abstract but obviously a thinly veiled metaphor for some event or story everyone knows. (I forget if it was these colors specifically, but LW's blues and greens were some of the worst offenders.)

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u/PerspexIsland 9 points at 1527016875.000000

Blantantly jocking the style of a popular writer indicates that you haven’t paid your dues or done the necessary bleeding to find your own voice. You’re still just a fan.

It’s particularly irritating when you’re jocking a distinctive, quirky writer like Dave Eggers, DFW, HST, or even Scooter.

Edit: Not sure about the chronology here, but I associate Roman numerals with The Last Psychiatrist, a very quirky writer whose fanboys have created some of the most smug, pretentious garbage I’ve ever read.

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u/Shuwin 15 points at 1527032342.000000

Yeah, Scott definitely aped this from TLP. It's a great device if you're too lazy to come up with transitions or even section headers, and just want your writing to be a disjointed, overlong mess, resulting in your audience having to fill in your lazy gaps in thought, and then get mad at them and accuse them of taking you out of context when they fill in the gaps *the wrong way*. Seriously, it's great for that.

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u/PerspexIsland 11 points at 1527039057.000000

If you're stealing it, it's for you.^TM

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u/DELETED 6 points at 1527068826.000000

[deleted]

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u/PerspexIsland 2 points at 1527082519.000000

That's representative. I've always found Eggers insufferable, but that didn't stop a lot of amateurs from imitating him, at least when he was at his height of influence. (Early '00s.) At this point, he may be better remembered for [his passive-aggressive attitude toward his critics](http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977).

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u/zhezhijian 2 points at 1527104556.000000

I lasted for maybe five paragraphs of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." It's amazing how even when describing his mother's cancer he manages to be insufferable.

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u/PerspexIsland 1 points at 1527105085.000000

It's probably my least favorite thing I've ever read, and seriously damaged my friendship with the person who lent it to me. You didn't even get to the part where he desperately tried to get on *The Real World.*

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u/zhezhijian 2 points at 1527105335.000000

I just looked up the first chapter and I tried to pinpoint what was insufferable. I lost it at this: "And so the green fluid could not be left there, festering and then petrifying on the terry-cloth towels. (Because the green fluid hardened to a crust on the terry-cloth towels, they were almost impossible to clean. So the green-fluid towels were one-use only, and even if you used every corner of the towels, folding and turning, turning and folding, they would only last a few days each, and the supply was running short, even after we plundered the bathrooms, closets, the garage.) So finally Beth procured, and our mother began to spit the green fluid into, a small plastic container which looked makeshift, like a piece of an air-conditioning unit, but had been provided by the hospital and was as far as we knew designed for people who do a lot of spitting up of green fluid. " That last clause is trying to be funny, but it comes off as lazy. > It's probably my least favorite thing I've ever read, and seriously damaged my friendship with the person who lent it to me. I had to upvote you just for that.

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u/DELETED 5 points at 1527023885.000000

Roman numerals…Latin…language of Ancient Rome…Roman Empire, headed by…Caesar, first dictator of Rome…whose gesture was the Roman Salute…adopted by germany in the 1930s…by the nazis!

It’s like 7 degrees of Herr Bacon!

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u/Wegwerfkontobelegt 9 points at 1527066674.000000

Caesar was by no means the first dictator of Rome, but the first dictator for life. This is the sort of mistake only low-decoupling object-level conflict theorists make. You're not a low-decoupling object-level conflict theorist, are you?

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u/seeking-abyss 2 points at 1527093121.000000

I prefer to use horizontal rules ().

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u/DELETED 2 points at 1528343672.000000

Bro same. Evernote yields them when you type 3 asterisks

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