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talisman comments on Mind Control and Me - Less Wrong
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It's much more than peer pressure. Eliezer, along with the other authors, use a confident, rhythmic, almost biblical style, which is very entertaining and compelling. You don't just learn deep things with EY, you feel like you're learning deep things. Robin Hanson's thought is incredibly deep, but his style is much more open, and I would guess you find his writings not to have this property.
Robin and Eliezer have debated writing style over at OB, and I highly recommend you read that debate, Patrick.
You should also, in my opinion, be very cautious about this feeling; there's a reason that religious writings have this style, and I would bet you would be less able to find logical gaps in something written in this style. I had a similar set of experiences as an adolescent Randian.
I should note that if I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for "deep truths" that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style.
Please make a top-level post on this. Not because it needs any more explanation, but because everyone needs to see it, and I need a detailed and official-looking version of it to link all of my friends to (especially those who are teachers).
This is a significant point. Even granting as accurate every charge levelled at Eliezer's writing (and at Yvain, who has adopted much the same style, and many other people outside this community), it's not obvious that there's anything inherently wrong with it.
In particular, I think Robin often does his arguments a disservice by deliberately presenting them in a way that hinders their uptake.
To be clear, my comment above isn't meant to be a "charge"! Among other things, Eliezer is exceptionally gifted at making ideas interesting and accessible in a way that Robin isn't at all. I'm looking forward to his book coming out and changing the world.
I personally love his stuff, and think it's great 1) for people that are completely new to these ideas; 2) for people that are fairly advanced and have the ideas deep in their bones.
For people in between, I sometimes feel like his writing presents too much of a glide path---answers too many questions for the student, guides the reader too unerringly to the answers, presents a polished surface that makes it hard for inexperienced learners to understand the components of the thought process and learn to do the same themselves.
After a couple years on LW I feel I have no such hole anymore. Just stopped categorizing beliefs as deep or undeep. I'm grateful to you for that.
I wish I could vote this up more than once. Humans are emotional creatures -- and wannabe-rationalists who believe they shouldn't be emotional are DOUBLY so.