Comment on Advancing Certainty

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:45:24 GMT

Here's one - "scoffed and sneered, in capital letters"

Hm...that comment did sound like a scoff or sneer to me ("I offer $50 to the AK defense fund..."), and capital letters were in fact used.

and elsewhere you used "gasped" to refer to one of my own comments

What if I had used "balked" instead?

A more subtle one is the profusion of hyperlinks

This one surprises me. The use of hyperlinks to simultaneously provide convenient references and subtly convey conversational nuance has always been for me one of the more enjoyable aspects of Eliezer's writing; I probably learned it from him.

More generally the post advances too many distinct ideas; I'd try to say the same thing in fewer words.

Yikes. This is bad advice for me, since I already obsess about this, and as a result write very little. (I have a hard time allowing myself to just "write what's in my head".) If this is anything like a widespread view, I may have to seriously reconsider whatever plans I may have had of top-level posting in the future.

("You should fly faster when your instruments are good" seems to be the thrust of the whole post.)

I like this figure of speech; I wish I had come up with it.

Still more subtle, you are selective in the objections that you choose to respond to.

That's probably the case with everyone, though, isn't it? Given the constraints of time and attention, it seems hard to avoid this.

Discuss