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."
Generally disagree with this. Overall, I think the EA forum norms are fairly good in terms of writing style and quality, but I might even be inclined to push in the other direction.
After being bombarded with modern American writing advice since University, I've recently become disillusioned with the simplifying, homogenising trend of internationalized English, in favour of a language that borrows from the best of our linguistic traditions.
I find that the short-sentence, short-word, bullet point style of writing encourages you to skim, while more flowing and elegant language forces the reader to read aloud, and to follow the cadences of the speaker, which promotes a very different state of mind for reading and absorbing information.
To quote from
the opening passageChapter 2 of Utilitarianism by JS Mill:“A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable; we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, as appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it; but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong that nothing which conflicts with it could be otherwise than momentarily an object of desire to them.”
Utterly impossible to skim, and what a joy to read!
But... The most common and advocated style here is exactly skimmable bullet points, while prose is many times frowned upon. And the only richness of language used is jargon. This is the opposite of what you say you want.
Also, like Ada-Maaria, the long quote was... (read more)