There is one person whose writings seem of better quality to me than either yours or Eliezer's, and that's Yvain. What do you think his writing style is?

(To be clear, I enjoy what you and EY write, despite the style differences, especially when you are at your best.)

Another hypothesis that occurs to me is that people with short attention spans could prefer my more skimmable style. But I haven't tested this.

Speaking as someone with fairly serious attention deficit disorder, I find Eliezer's style (and Yvain's as well) is particularly good at holding my attention for long periods of time. Where a more bare-bones article would require me to use willpower to finish reading, I will tend to become hyperfocused (a less commonly recognized aspect of ADD) on one written in a style I find entertaining.

epiphany addiction

hm, that sounds bad.

just want to learn everything efficiently

hm, that sounds good.

To me, Paul Graham is approximately the apex of good writing for the internet. I'd always assumed the sequences had succeeded despite, not because of, EY's writing style. (I've wondered how many people were dissuaded from LW because they pick up things quickly, value their time, and were getting a frustratingly low insight/minute ratio from the Sequences.) It's interesting to hear that others disagree.

I'm somewhat worried that this problem might be even more widespread. For example, "show, don't tell" is the standard advice in writing guides, so I was intrigued to see my friend write:

There is another thing about "showing" that bugs me, and it's that very often, when I read guides and such about how to "show" rather than "tell", the only thing I see in those guides is that "showing" conveys different information than "telling". They create different scenes. And of course I have more problems with the scenes that "show".

When the scene is "shown", I have a hard time staying with the text and understanding what's going on. If I'm not told what a particular thing means, it starts just seeming nonsensical to me. The author (and many readers) might understand the tone of voice of a character whose line is written in a certain way, but I'm likely to miss it. And so I'll end up clueless as to the character's state of mind. Now, if I was TOLD exactly what the character's state of mind is, no problem. I might be bad at imagining certain emotions, but it's definitely easier to read exactly what it's supposed t

So, I'll say this. Eliezer's posts put the nail in the coffin of my Theism in the matter of a couple months. My mind had to wait to be told the story of how I could sit, ponder, and wonder for night after night and allow my entire mind to get on board with a major worldview shift. Each individual post assailed the narratives I was telling myself; without the conclusions given to me up front, I was able to travel the journey to the conclusion on my own, which ended up far more compelling than previously read arguments with a more explicit agenda.

That said, now that I find myself much closer to both of your worldviews, I find your posts much more efficient, and I more often recommend yours to others over Eliezer's. I do this because I expect more impatience on the part of others than I do in myself.

This is a problem I feel with Less Wrong in general, although I know little of what could be done. I often recommend posts to outsiders, only to receive little else than skepticism and comments at the styles or apparent agendas of the authors. "But the logic and evidence awareness make them unassailable!" does little to established narratives. Narratives which suggest tha... (read more)

Fortunately, you don't need a detailed model of which people prefer which writing style to encourage people to write posts on LW in a variety of styles!

Rather than "abstract stuff first, examples later" or "examples first, abstract stuff later" I prefer a hybrid approach: give as much of the abstract stuff as is necessary to motivate why you're looking at the examples (which may be no abstract stuff at all), then give the examples, then give the rest of the abstract stuff. The main application I have in mind is mathematical writing, where sometimes a definition is very hard to motivate without examples, but sometimes the examples are very hard to motivate without looking at a previously well-understood abstraction first. The problem I have with always giving examples first is that I often don't know what to do with the examples if they haven't been properly introduced: where, in the filesystem of my brain, should I be filing these things?

The stuff written by Eliezer that really stuck with me is the Sequences. The stuff written by you that really stuck with me are some of your instrumental rationality posts, like "How to Be Happy".

It's pretty clear to me that Eliezer's dramatic, storytelling style is better suited for a series of essays designed to radically alter the way the reader thinks about truth, beauty, right and wrong, etc. And it's pretty clear to me that your straightforward, just-the-facts style is better suited for posts along the lines of "here is what science suggests you can do to become happier/more productive".

Consider maybe the idea that different styles are good for different things, and perhaps you and Eliezer should choose things to write about based on your respective comparative advantages.

Do you prefer...

[pollid:538]

Do you read a lot of fiction?

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Your background?

[pollid:540]

Do you consider yourself to have an epiphany addiction?

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Bonus question

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I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that it wasn't until sometime last month that I realized that, obviously, different people prefer each style, and Eliezer and I were both falling prey to the typical mind fallacy.

Maybe say a little more about the evidence for this? Have you had conversations with people that confirmed this, or is it just coming from a strong prior?

I generally prefer the more direct {lesson, evidence}. I have on several occasions thought that Luke has implemented this well.

But - I think we have evidence that EY is a particularly good writer of narrative. While also getting the content across. The epiphany hit is pretty sweet too.

Embedding lessons in stories (like the Blue and Green) makes the mind labile to their content and makes it easier to hang on to the memory and to retell to others. I imagine it comes at the cost to extra thinking and writing time to package lessons so.

Is that cost worth the marginal effort? I'm pretty sure the answer is 'sometimes'.

When Eliezer has edited my writing, he's had a pretty good (gimlet!) eye for knocking out unnecessary adjectives, clauses, pushing for more specific examples, etc. So I find those sessions pretty helpful. Luke, have you had Eliezer edit your stuff to pin down what changes (and vice versa)?

Eliezer has been telling me I should write more like he does

What are his reasons for suggesting this?

I often can't even tell what his posts are saying.

I agree. Personally, I prefer your writing style. Eliezer's writings strike me as being excessively long-winded and imprecise. As other commentators have pointed out, his Sequences generally have a very low information-to-words ratio -- most people, I suspect, would be significantly better off reading the primary sources instead of spending time reading the Sequences.