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."
All of the following are virtues in writing:
I think the EA forum writing tends to do okay on 1, well on 2, and okay-to-bad on 3.
Obviously being better at all of them simultaneously is the best outcome, but sometimes there's a tradeoff. Personally, I think clarity and precision are more important than accessibility. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make our writing more accessible (I endorse Emerson Spartz's list of tips), but I think it is just more important to be clear and precise, and we should be clear about that and happy that we're doing well at those things. And therefore I don't think the writing style here is bad, although it could be improved.
(Or, in the maxim I got taught: "When looking at your writing ask: 'Is it clear? Is it true? Is it necessary?")
Sometimes it's more important to convey something with high fidelity to few people than it'd be to convey an oversimplified version to many.
That's the reason why we bother having a forum at all - despite the average American reading at an eighth grade level - rather than standing on street corners shouting at the passers-by.