And while I can safely ignore what you say about "explaining" and "persuading" and continue to contribute to the community because I have a rich model of what is and is not acceptable to the community, it likely pushes newer folks away from writing things that, on the margin, would be better if they were a little more persuasive because then they would be writing to get me to believe something rather than trying to actively avoid thinking about how the reader might respond to what's written and writing in response to what that model of the reader suggests needs to be written to get them to update. I bring this up because although I've never been called out for writing "persuasively" in the LW 2.0 era, I literally think of everything I write as a kind of persuasion-an attempt to say words that will cause the reader to have beliefs of roughly a certain kind after reading my words. Now there is some difference of intent of the author between what you might call a persuading-mode and an explaining-mode, I see you put "explaining" and "persuading" in quotes to denote your perhaps non-standard use, and perhaps you do this to imply you mean something more like what I'm suggesting in terms of authorial intent, but I suspect we can find more specific terms of the kinds of things that are in and out. The same is true if we try to reverse the situation, because what is persuading other than explaining something so well that the reader agrees with you, even if your "explanation" is unconventional in terms of what we often think of as explication. That is, all writing is persuasive writing. This is tangental, but since you brought it up, I find the distinction you try to make between "explaining" and "persuading" weird, because what is "explaining" but persuading the reader to believe something, and the extent to which you've successfully explained something is the extent to which you've persuaded them to take up the same belief you have that the evidence and conclusions you draw from it are as you presented them. Raise your hand if you think bullet points are fine? Terrible? Great? Any particular types of posts you prefer reading bullet-style, and types of posts you think fare poorly if not written in prose? I am curious what the LessWrong userbase thinks about them overall. I asked a couple more people, and they said "I dunno, bullet points seem fine. My brain keeps trying to collapse the bullets like they're code." "I dunno man it's just really hard to read.But unnumbered bullet lists are just hard to parse." "I like numbered arguments, since that makes it easier to respond to individual points.If you include bold words, readers might not bother reading the non-bold words, and miss nuance. They're harder to read straight through.It's easy to think you've communicated more clearly than you have, because you didn't bother writing the connecting words between paragraphs.It turned out a couple people on the LessWrong team reacted very negatively to bullet points. I had assumed this was a common experience, and that it was in fact a weakness of humanity that we didn't have better, more comprehensive bullet-point tools.īut, alas, Typical Mind Fallacy. In the transition from bullets-to-prose, posts can go 2x-3x as long (or, when I go to write a short bullet summary of something I wrote in prose, it turns out to be much shorter, and the prose mostly unnecessary) I think LessWrong would be better if more people wrote more unpolished things to get early feedback on them, and bullet lists are a nice way to signal that something is still in development. I like this for other people's posts as well, since it feels more playful, like I can be part of their early generation process.
Bullet lists make this easier to keep track of. When I'm first thinking about something, my brain is jumping around and forming connections, developing a model at multiple levels of resolution. It's easier to hash out early stage ideas.
You can pick out and refute points, in a way that can be harder with meandering prose.
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