Academia gatekeeps knowledge by using unnecessarily complex language, alienating formats, makes it so you have to be both dedicated and culturally familiar to understand it. Rationalist writing, by contrast, is extremely accessible
Feels like a similar vibe to elon and twitter
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there's a way that elon's relationship to running twitter feels hyper direct and transparent; there's no artifice of trying to keep the knowledge away from the peasant class. The downside of this legibility is that people feel more empowered to criticize!
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I wonder if this is part of why academia evolved away from transparency and legibility; the more you pull away from anybody being able to understand you, the more invulnerable you become; people can't easily tear you down if they don't understand what you're saying.
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Rationalists have a repertoire of specialised jargon.
LW has its own implicit formatting conventions, norms, background knowledge and unjustified assumptions, etc.
I think "rationalist writing is extremely accessible to the general public is wrong".
Cc: , .
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I think specialized jargon the way rats use it isn't the same thing as unnecessarily complicated language! When I read rat writing it feels like i'm learning a normal set of concepts, when i try to read academia it feels like it's trying to stab me in the brain with knives
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It's more nuanced than that. Academics need to cut out the shared knowledge of their group in order to keep their papers to one core new idea. There is a bunch of cultural pressure to appear professional and knowledgeable. But mostly words need to adapt to very specific ideas.
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That is your vibe as well…which is greatly appreciated. Keep up the good work.
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Technical fields can have better writers to disseminate information.
The choice of words is mostly just being more correct, a low context language would have a lot more verbage which would be detrimental to collaboration to those in the field.
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I have always thought this. I have never asked academics on this take but I would be curious what they say to rationalize this type of behavior.
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That's why summaries are usually comprehensive for the average reader. Jargon is good because it describes things the most directly for those familiar with the subject: aka the target audience.
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Just want to point out that there are examples how things don't have to be that way... and maybe shouldn't
