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erratio comments on Should humanity give birth to a galactic civilization? - Less Wrong
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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.