Epistemic status: around that of Descartes' (low)
I am not a native English speaker. Despite that, I've had my English skills in high regard most of my life. It was the language of my studies at the university. Although I still make plenty of mistakes, I want to assure you I am capable of reading academic texts.
That being said: a whole lot of posts and comments here do feel like academic texts. The most basic/heuristic check: I found a tool to measure linguistic complexity, here https://textinspector.com/ - so you can play with it yourself, if you'd like to. Now, I realize that AI Safety is a complicated, professional topic with a lot of jargon. Hence, let's take a discussion that, I believe, should be especially welcoming to non-professionals: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kuqgJDPF6nfscSZsZ/thread-for-discussing-bostrom-s-email-and-apology
I could make some Python project and analyse lingustic complexity of a whole range of posts, produce graphs and it sure would be fun and much better, but I am a lazy person and I just want to show you the idea. I mean to sound extremely simple when I say the following.
There's a whole lot of syllables right there.
Most of the comments here do feel like academic papers. Reading them is a really taxing exercise. In fact, I usually just stray from it. Whether it's my shit attention span or people on a global scale are not proficient English speakers, it is my firm belief that ideas should be communicated in an understandable matter when posssible. That is, most of people should be able to understand them. If you want to increase diveristy and be more inclusive, well, I think that's one really good way at attempting so.
This is also the reason for the exact title of the post, rather than "Linguistic preferences of some effective altruists seem to be impacted by a tendency to overly intellectualize."
Michał -- thanks for this reality check.
If EA wants to be genuinely, globally inclusive, we need to remember that many of our members learned English as a second language, and that it's important for us all to write as clearly as possible.
According to sources like this, about 400 million people worldwide are native English speakers, but over 1.2 billion have learned to read English as a second language. So that's about a 3:1 ratio of non-native to native speakers. This is worth bearing in mind when native-speaking people (like me) are writing on EA forum, and potentially being read by many non-native speakers.
It's also important to reign in our natural tendency to IQ-signal through displaying our vocabulary size, capacity for complex grammar, and subtlety of verbal reasoning. These can make us sound smart to people with similar levels of English fluency and domain expertise, but they inhibit our ability to communicate with wider audiences.
Ah right, I had that thought but wasn't sure, makes sense!