Journalism has been infected with a style of stream of consciousness random anecdotes. Apparently many go for that. I don't. I read a few paragraphs, start to get agitated, and recall "When you talk like this I can't help but wonder - is there a point?" Verbal fog of this kind is a good sign of a poorly thought out idea, in my experience, or no particular idea at all. But if you blow enough smoke, you can obscure what's happening until the end of the article. For some, that's ideal - passing the time and "justifying" a little check next to "I read an article; I'm a smart and informed person".
If the goal is communication, terse is good. The more concise and streamlined you can make your message, the easier it is to see the relationship between the parts and grok it.
What helps on longer arguments is to give the reader a roadmap of where you're going, why you're going, and how you plan to get there. That roadmap gives the reader motivation to read, and sign posts so he can know keep track of far he's come along the trip.
Particularly on the internet, you'd better be prepared to motivate a different type of reader with a payoff, and keep him motivated by showing him along the way that you're continuing to make progress toward that payoff for him.
Some people want to pass the time with a soothing ride through the fog, but I think this list has fewer of those types and more of the latter types. We want a payoff, and will move on when we don't see one coming.
I like posts that are concise and to the point. Posts like that maximize my information/effort ratio. I would really like to see experienced rationalists simply post a list of things they believe on any given subject with a short explanation for why they believe each of those things. Then I could go ahead and adjust my beliefs based on those lists as necessary.
Sadly I don’t see any posts like this. Presumably this is because of the social convention where you’re expected to back up any public belief with arguments, so that other people can attempt to poke holes in them. I find this strange because the arguments people present rarely have anything to do with why they believe those things, which makes the whole exercise a giant distraction from the main point that the author is trying to bring across. In order to prevent this kind of derailment, posters tend to cover their arguments with endless qualifications so that their sentences read like this: “I personally believe that, in cases X Y Z and under circumstances B and C, ceteris paribus and barring obvious exceptions, it seems safe to say that murder is wrong, though of course I could be mistaken.” The problems with such excessive argumentation and qualification are threefold:
By contrast, terseness makes posts more readable and makes it less likely that the main point is misunderstood. So if we as a community could just relax the demand for argumentation and qualification somewhat, and we all focussed on debating the main points of posts instead of getting sidetracked, then perhaps experienced rationalists here could write nice and concise posts that give clear and direct answers to complicated questions. Instead, some of the sequences are so long and involve so many arguments, counter-arguments and disclaimers that I feel the point is lost entirely.