In Reference to "Consequentialism Need Not Be Nearsighted"
Let's start with the word Simple. It's in the first two words of the opening sentence of your post. Remove it, please don't use it again. You've just set up the entire post to automatically fail a percentage of readers who will be (now) emotionally impacted by failure to understand any section of your post. Even if it is understood after a moment or hours reflection, the self-shame brought on by this single word will reduce your chances to gain positive karma.
This word is used four times. This may be four times too many.
Next, you've used an example that 'many' saw through. What is many, how did you decide many have done this? by what cause do you have to decide that the people who post replies indicating they saw through it are the majority?
Why put in reflections (or praise) to a segment if it's going to exclude a large portion of your audience, you seem to be limiting the article to those who've already succeeded at finishing your previous article.
In your fifth paragraph you introduce names, Defectbots and CliqueBots. This information is used once in the footnotes. It's not really useful and shades the article by personalizing it. When Kibitzing is off and no names are beside the post, this seems to be a little...wrong. Your personalization of the article destroys the detachment of it's content, making it more about you and less about the content, this could narrow the field of people
So, in conclusion. to me, when you are writing, I am excluded because I have not immediately grasped everything in your article at once, I am excluded for a second time for not reading your previous article (And then, not seeing the catch on it straight away) and finally, for a final exclusion for caring about the content and not about you.
I hope this has helped.
Yeah, my idea of the audience must have defaulted to the people I interact most with here, and they're kind of the top contributors, so that caused a big distortion. I won't do that next time.
I've written quite a lot here since Less Wrong started up, but I've started to suspect that my writing style is holding me back. Most recently, I wrote two sequences that seemed to garner widespread agreement on content/significance/originality but didn't really seem to excite anyone, which is a pretty clear signal that my style has been hobbling my ideas. So, as I'd promised to do (albeit a few weeks later than I'd expected), I'm trying to improve myself as a writer, and I need your help.
I'm declaring Crocker's Rules on the subject, and I'd like help with both diagnosis and treatment. Let me know, as precisely as you can, what's problematic in my writing, or what you think the root causes might be, or what you think might help me to fix my issues. I'll list what I've thought of so far in a comment below (so that you can make your own suggestions without anchoring issues).
Links to my recent major posts:
Consequentialism Need Not Be Nearsighted
Qualia sequence: Part I, Part II, Part III
And now an odd counterexample: I wrote this post quickly for Discussion, without thinking too much or editing at all, and then it got promoted and was received enthusiastically. That may just be the subject matter, or it may signify that the time I spend editing posts makes them worse...