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TheOtherDave comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong
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Thank you for providing examples -- that makes it much easier to understand what you're proposing.
If those are examples of writing that just-meets the target threshold, then I agree with you completely that the writing on LW -- especially in comments, like what you were replying to initially -- completely fails to even approach that threshold.
I also estimate that most contributors here would have to devote between one and two orders of magnitude more time to even get in the same ballpark as the threshold.
Any suggestions as to how that work might be incentivized? How does plain talk become high-status on LW?
Sure.
1b. If I can't find any, lower my standard of "plain enough" and try again.
Perhaps also, find examples of otherwise good posts that are not plain talk and attempt to paraphrase in plain talk. We need some protocol to mitigate offense, though.
Yeah, that's tricky. For example, I considered pointing out that a plainer-talk version of "Any suggestions as to how that work might be incentivized?" might be "How do I encourage people to do that?" but wasn't sure how that would be taken.
In general, the sentiment we want to convey seems to be, "That was interesting, informative, and precise. Here's an attempt to make it more approachable:"
No, I deserve that.
Though one good thing about this approach is that if other people don't consider my plaintalkified version of X to be superior to X, and I do, that can be very educational... I may discover, for example, that what I consider to be virtues of plain talk aren't universal and I've been other-optimizing all along.
I don't suppose you've considered becoming a bad-ass Iron-Age hoplite?
Considered.