komponisto comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

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Comment author: Rain 18 March 2010 02:27:53PM *  2 points [-]

EY's posts undermine 1) significantly, it seems to me.

Of his most recently posted articles: Undiscriminating Skepticism scores at a Flesch-Kincaid grade level 17 and a Gunning Fog index of 17.9, You're Entitled to Arguments is at 16 and 17.8, and Outside View as Conversation Halter is at 14 and 14.5. Note that a score of 15+ is considered academic writing by these measures. Tests of his recently upvoted comments show scores ranging from 7 to 20.

Here's the Flesch-Kincaid calculator I used, and the Gunning Fog calculator. I would be surprised if other measures of readability, and tests of his other posts, did not show it to be academic-level writing.

Comment author: komponisto 18 March 2010 06:03:15PM *  4 points [-]

Of his most recently posted articles: Undiscriminating Skepticism scores at a Flesch-Kincaid grade level 17 and a Gunning Fog index of 17.9,

"Undiscriminating Skepticism" -- why, that's ten (10) syllables right there in the title! My head is already spinning!

Seriously: tests like those do not control for the content or subject matter of the writing. There exists, furthermore, a significant subset of the (adult!) human population who would consider a phrase like "undiscriminating skepticism" itself to be difficult and unusually abstract. Needless to say, tests which heavily weight the judgements of such people are not very useful for the purpose of judging "readability" in most contexts here.

If you want to judge the readability of LW posts, I suggest spending some time reading typical articles published in academic journals.