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thomblake comments on Should humanity give birth to a galactic civilization? - Less Wrong
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Comments (85)
I was not trying to be helpful to you, nor did I care about the specifics of what you wrote.
I was expressing disapproval at the general strategy of posting things that are unclear and then asking the readers to do interpretation for you. Rather, you should do the work of making your writing clear instead of pushing that work onto the readers. For any sort of utilitarian, at least, the benefit should be obvious - the writer is doing the work rather than hundreds of readers doing analogous work.
Academic communication style is different in Europe than it is in the US/Aust/UK. My understanding of the situation is that there's an expectation that it's the reader's responsibility to understand, not the writer's to be clear. In practice this means that writers in Europe are penalised for being too clear. (I can provide citations if need be)
Which I guess means that there should be some writing guidelines for people from non-English backgrounds, emphasising the importance of clarity. Or that there should be a workshop area on the site where non-natives can get advice on how to make their article clearer before they post it.
I don't doubt you, but I would be interested in seeing specific examples of this.
I suspect that this varies more by discipline than by physical area. In math for example not making things reasonably easy to understand is considered bad although there is a tension with a desire for succinctness. Even then, ambiguity that requires a reader to use context to resolve is considered very poor writing.
I agree, but sometimes a person does the best they can and it's just not enough. I think it's appropriate to downvote for poor writing, unless the content is compelling. The incompetent writer should ask for help pre-posting if they really care about being understood.
Short version: Yes.
Long version: Writing quality can be meaningfully compared along many axes. There are mechanical axes, like correct grammar usage, clarity of expression, precision, succinctness, and readability, all of which I found to be problems (to varying degrees) with this post. These are all (relatively) easy to improve by proof-reading, making multiple drafts, and/or asking others for editing help. Wei Dai's post performs well by all of those measurements.
There are also content axes, like originality, rigor, cleverness, evidentiary support, and usefulness. Hacking the CEV for Fun and Profit does pretty well by these measures, too. This post is a little better with content than it is with mechanics, but poor mechanics obscure content and dilute its weight, so I suspect that the points you were trying to make were underevalued, though not drastically so. Fixing up content is harder than fixing up mechanics; for some ideas, it is impossible. After all, some ideas are just wrong or useless (though this is usually far from obvious).
One writing technique I like and don't use enough: come up with lots of ideas and only explore the most promising ones. Or, as it is written in the Book of Yudkowsky, hold off on proposing solutions.
Err... 33 now. But that is because the content is very compelling. Posts pointing out why CEV<Humanity> is quite possibly a bad thing would have to be quite poor to get a downvote from me. It is a subject that is obvious but avoided.
I voted up your post even in its earlier revisions.
However, Wei Da's is far more novel and entertaining. I would have voted it up 3 times if I could :)
These are all questions I (and most thinking people, have considered before): "Would it be better not to exist at all, if existence is mostly suffering?" ("To be, or not to be?"). "If a deist-type god (not intervening after creation) created this universe and all its rules that imply the suffering we observe, was that a moral act?" "How much pleasure (and for how long) does it take to make it worth some amount of suffering?"
If there was much beyond that in your post, I may have missed it.