posted on February 27, 2022 09:35 AM by
u/textlossarcade
90
u/DELETED111 pointsat 1645960959.000000
Whenever I read something by this guy I feel like I have to re-read
it 2 or 3 times to get what he’s saying, only to then realize it wasn’t
worth reading at all. He has this weird style of writing where he takes
simple statements and turns them into clumsy constructions that are
difficult to parse and are full of rationalist neologisms. This
particular Tweet is not the best example but it’s something I’ve noticed
about his style of writing.
He likes the long meandering sentence that covers the whole thought instead of breaking it up into digestible chunks. To spend entirely too much time on this thought:
> Today some of my readers and I became the first to discover an entirely new hazard of prediction markets. We were spoiled on a tv show episode we hadn’t seen yet because the prediction market emailed us that our bets on a plot development had resolved.
I think anyone could write clumsy sentences like that on their first try but Rationalists just have a characteristic inability to self-edit, which is a combination of their characteristic inability to see anyone else's point of view and their characteristic inability to find the flaws in their own interpretation instead of rationalizing those flaws.
Or maybe it's because they spend all their free time reading giant text walls by poor writers who don't have editors, blogs not books, so they just absorb that style of clunk.
It evolved from the general internet nerd style where any incomplete or inexact statement is not only an error, but a sign of low moral rigor. It leads to people structuring sentences that cover every detail.
Small brain: it's to "sound smarter" 🙄
Galactic cerebrum: vocalizations and markings on some surface that can be transmitted optically ( i would say paper, but then wouldn't that exclude digital paper?) must be interpreted by the convolutional-like networks in the human brain, first through low level pattern recognition then recursively to abstract notions (really this is concurrent but i need to simplify some of the detail to get the point across).
The organicity of these neuronal networks will show itself as they encode and decode through association *in vincem* precision. Whenceforth aspects of the symbolic signal orthogonal to its core content may impress a change on the mental state of its reciever (and, of course, the originator too) perhaps this should be called the*presentational aspect* of the message.
Subcultures with a singular value (but not exclusively such) suffer a suboptimal "Nash equilibrium", if you will, where the *pretence* of upholding the value will, in practice, result in more social "wins" than the values themselves; alliteratively i dub it the pretentious poser problem (P³).
This P³ is perhaps particularly prominent (P⁵) when presenting adherence to your value is easy and determining true adherence is hard (taking a cue from cryptography we could conceivably formalize P⁵ by requiring a "fast" algorithm for presenting the façade of adherence (say order n); however, simultaneously requiring all known "algorithms" to detect true adherence to be slow (say probabilistically polynomial time) (at first i considered using "scare quotes" around the word algorithm, under the logic that the human brain is full of heuristics to speed some computations but struggles with others that would seem simple from a computational standpoint; however, with the advent of machine learning and the coming of the singularity we will soon have the ability to actually run these algorithms to determine who of our community members are merely pretentious posers, truly leaving P⁵ only to the cases no known fast algorithm exists))
Although rationality can be objectively defined and examined eg utilizing formal logic systems, we today still filter the majority of our information through our less than rational human cerebrum, perhaps giving too much weight to some of these aforementioned heuristics, in particular our emotional responses to the presentational aspects of a message.
Is it of truly any wonder then that a community of technophiliacs (technoeroticates?) based entirely on a belief in rationalism (and therefore by extension the perception of intellect) would write this way?
You got it. [Check out this Facebook post](https://i.imgur.com/hHEl1KD.png). The first paragraph is almost entirely a single sentence. It's not too difficult to read but now imagine that same paragraph packed with phrases and terms coined by himself or some other rationalist. I think that's why I very quickly give up reading anything by him.
On a side note, the Facebook post I've linked is hilarious, how the guy shamelessly praises his own works...
You dont seem to get it, but long meandering sentences with a lot of introspective looking side tangents, combined with funny anecdotes, interesting intellectual realizations, and more (just as done in 'surely you must be joking mr feynman') just make you look intelligent, clever and interesting, and (I digress) it helps if you also put in some relateable things, like being spoiled.
Could also just be some form of adhd or bad writing however.
So EY thinks he's a good writer *because* he did well on the SATs?
Also it's kind of cute that he thinks his writing *unlike other people's* isn't totally cliche as though his stupid harry potter fanfic consists of good characters and not a bunch of self inserts and total cliches insert eye roll
I started writing in the simplest sentences possible. It really does make a difference. Has anyone ever had an editor say "wow, that sentence needs to be more complex"?
That's a really good skill to have. I find that my first attempt at writing something results in a long, convoluted sentence that I then have to break up, clarify and disambiguate. As the other user (Epistaxis) said, it's easy to write long clumsy sentences on first try, but you have to edit them to make them digestible. If you can skip straight to the simple sentences, you save yourself a whole lot of editing time.
Generally, good writing comes from having a variety of sentence lengths. Talented writers can even manipulate sentence length to convey extra meaning. It’s quite impressive.
It reminds me a bit of how Jordan Peterson writes. My theory is tat he’s trying to construct arguments that’s are easy to misunderstand. That way if someone does get mixed up he can say, “clearly you’re not on my level.”
Okay, maybe that’s a bit too cynical. He might just be a bad writer and unwilling to edit these types of posts/comments.
This "swallowed a thesaurus" style is normally a pretty good indicator that my student has no idea what the fuck they're talking about and are about to get a poor grade. It's larping as an academic without realising academics (usually) value clear precise language. I see it a lot in 1st year undergraduates that mistakenly believe they already know everything and don't really need to be there.
I recall him mentioning somewhere that he could rewrite some particular thing so that people with lower IQ could understand, if he wanted to. So you're just not smart enough to understand it, sorry about that!
I feel like they have an urge to try to be excruciatingly precise and absolute in their writing. it's like a math equation translated to English. it reminds me of my writing, actually. fortunately I don't get paid to write.
He’s never realized that metadata reveals things about the data (EG
when a best-of-3 game series wraps up after only 2 games, or from the
number of pages left in a book)?
Eliezer, upon seeing the mother of a soldier in a war film start weeping at the sight of officers delivering a message, before reading it: "wow, new infohazard."
Inspired by the recent posts on film commentary (by racists), and antimemes about the shape of angels I had a movie hot take but dont have a good relevant place to drop it.
[Anyway, event horizons engine is a captured fallen angel.](https://youtu.be/DgwprntqqmE) (searched for it and im def not the first to think of this).
Ah yes the revolutionary prediction markets now you can bet on tv
shows. (And good luck anybody who worked on those shows is gonna make
bank. Which is a bit more of a hazard than >!spoilers!<).
Right? You might get away with betting on an unscripted show with a live finale, like Survivor, but imagine the person who would bet on Survivor. Betting on how Westworld or whatever turns out, though? lol. rofl.
It does create a way to fundraise for the studios next project. Make a tv show with a twist, extract money from the Rationalist betting market, fun the next twisty series.
1. Write a TV series, with a protagonist expressing a Rationalist-friendly "science hero" worldview. Have them toss around the right code phrases in their dialogue to get the community's favor.
2. Bet against the hero on the prediction markets that you've name-dropped in the show as one of said code phrases.
3. The series' big twist is that the plot's main problem isn't something that can be Bayesed out of, and/or the hero doesn't have the political/social skills to make their solution work in the real world.
4. gold-plated Lambos for days
Did I mention that we're turning every frame of the show into an NFT?
(Can't believe nobody's done that one before. It's only a matter of time, I guess...)
Kind of already exists in the form of animation cels: technically everybody who has a copy of the movie has all the frames, but only this original frame of animation is the genuine article
Even then there’s a far more natural conception of worth. Key frames would be more valuable than tweened frames with squashed and stretched characters, except to specific kinds of fans/collectors
this tweet only exists because the spoiler warnings were removed from
Wikipedia in 2007, so nobody still alive even remembers what those are.
A tragedy
So I’m right - the reason these dopes never talk about sports betting
is that they haven’t done any actual research about the largest and most
established prediction market out there. A major miss like that would be
embarrassing to some, but I predict (and I’d even consider putting some
money on it!) that this will have no impact on Yud’s thinking.
Whenever I read something by this guy I feel like I have to re-read it 2 or 3 times to get what he’s saying, only to then realize it wasn’t worth reading at all. He has this weird style of writing where he takes simple statements and turns them into clumsy constructions that are difficult to parse and are full of rationalist neologisms. This particular Tweet is not the best example but it’s something I’ve noticed about his style of writing.
He’s never realized that metadata reveals things about the data (EG when a best-of-3 game series wraps up after only 2 games, or from the number of pages left in a book)?
Ah yes the revolutionary prediction markets now you can bet on tv shows. (And good luck anybody who worked on those shows is gonna make bank. Which is a bit more of a hazard than >!spoilers!<).
this tweet only exists because the spoiler warnings were removed from Wikipedia in 2007, so nobody still alive even remembers what those are. A tragedy
he is a “First!” poster irl.
So I’m right - the reason these dopes never talk about sports betting is that they haven’t done any actual research about the largest and most established prediction market out there. A major miss like that would be embarrassing to some, but I predict (and I’d even consider putting some money on it!) that this will have no impact on Yud’s thinking.