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dclayh comments on Of Gender and Rationality - Less Wrong
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Agreed. I know that when I'm talking with philosophers I tend to use their special prepositions ("On X's view...", "Y consists in...") to sound more in-groupy and thus give extra weight to my arguments.
On OB/LW this primarily takes the form (started by Eliezer, I think) of embedding a link to a previous article in every other sentence, which certainly comes off as intimidating, at least to me.
That's interesting -- I quite enjoy that convention, and feel like it makes the site more penetrable to newcomers. To me, the purpose of the links seems to be "if this sentence seems to follow from the last, keep reading. If I seem to have made an unsupported leap, you may profit by following the link."
It's nice for reading, yes (although it does mean that reading one Eliezer post can quickly turn into eight tabs' worth of previous posts), but when it comes to writing a post (or even a comment), I feel like if I don't have a bunch of references I'm leaving myself open to accusations of "Oh, that point was addressed here, here, and here. Try doing some reading."
Which might not be a bad thing, necessarily: it's certainly not too productive to be constantly going over the same ground as MrHen says below, but it certainly does affect what I choose to write.
I spent a lot of happy afternoons this way last year (didn't get much done on my quantum problem sets though)
Ah, this I totally get. I think this might be a good function for the welcome thread -- you could just leave a comment saying "hi, I'm thinking about writing something about X -- is there anything I ought to be reading first?"
I imagine that some of this task will be handled by the wiki or the tags assigned to each post.
That being said, I have little problem with someone talking about a topic that was broached seventy times previously as long as it either adds a new perspective or is a decent summary or launching point for people not there during the past discussions.
That being said, having "little problem with" may mean I will not read it because I consider the topic saturated.
When Eliezer does it, I interpret it as a desire not to repeat himself. When other people do it, sometimes my first impression is that the person is implying they are better-read and more knowledgeable, i.e., that they're trying to signal superior status by implying "I have been here longer and know more," as well as implying a stronger in-group affiliation, by the amount of work they've done to dig up appropriate scriptures and link to them.
The tone of the non-linked portion of the comment of course makes a big difference, of course. "Have you read XYZ? It seems to me like what you're saying contradicts point Q; how would you address that?" would be a lot different than some of the comments I've seen that look like trying to win an argument by the volume of their citations.
I think I see it as something between you two. I sometimes see it as "I agree with these articles so these articles agree with me." This probably qualifies as a weird form of appealing to authority.
To make it fit better with your view, "If I put my article in a list of their articles I am like them."
The charitable side of me thinks of it as tracing someone's train of thought backwards. "Oh, so that's why they were thinking about this subject."
Yup - especially when the linked-to post doesn't actually support what they were trying to say. I sometimes see it as a form of thought-stoppage.
I get link fatigue when read LW/OB. But I think it's unavoidable. It has to be done for at least two reasons:
There's a lot of conceptual "bittage". As the writer, you not only have to close the inferential gap between new concepts, but close it for every new word. That's a lot to explain (and to see, if a new reader) at once.
The medium of blogging wasn't designed to visualize information of this depth.
And that means heavy link back.
Yeah, my philosophy classes had a lot of people who would skip over discussions by using a well-known name. This is similar to what Andrew's You don't need Kant post was talking about.
That being said, the other extreme is not terribly useful, either. I have trouble remembering philosopher's names because the arguments and logic are more interesting and I never bothered associating it with the person who was speaking. As it turns out, I spend a lot of time going over ground that has already been covered because I did not learn the shortcut term.
This could be seen as a counter-point to my comment above.