Very interesting but I notice there was no real discussion of what you want to achieve by writing. Virtually all of those suggestions don't apply for some goals.
If I'm honest my true reason for writing is a combination of wanting to put my thoughts down cleanly and to feel I put down a rationally compelling argument something I disagree with is wrong. That is often in direct tension with writing well -- my ideal post is a cross between a proof and analogies to explain the proof. I'm never going to be Scott Alexander but I don't really want to be, I want to occasionally convince some academic types online.
Other people care more about audience but if your true reason for writing is to show how educated and intellectually fashionable you are (in a continental philosophy kind of sense) you absolutely *must* write in obscurintast prose, hedge everything in overly complex.
Of course I'm just talking now for my own sake so I'll stop but I do think it would be good for many people to do some deep thinking about their goals in blogging.
Not just blogging - all writing! The goal doesn’t have to be to reach a large audience, but if the goal involves reaching some particular audience, then writing in a way that convinces that audience to care about what you’re saying is essential.
I had this thought on the section about explainers. So much of my writing is essentially explainers - book reviews, encyclopedia entries, expositions of how conditioning in measure zero events works, etc. But I don’t see the troubles Scott mentions, because I know something about my intended audience, and what I think will be useful for them to know about this topic, and why that means that my exposition of these familiar ideas should take a different form from other expositions of these same ideas, and thus why this one should exist even though others do as well.
That is certainly true, but it depends a lot on your cost benefit analysis. I may tell myself I'm trying to convince people when I write online but at some level I know it's not super important that I do and I'm more interested in sharpening/thinking through my own views than reaching out to anyone else.
EDIT: On the subject of good writing, the rest of this comment could probably be replaced with: "Yah, but sometimes I like to drone on for my own benefit."
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Despite what it may seem, I am actually pretty good at writing when I invest enough time but I usually reserve that level of efforlt for journal submissions. I mean I do want other people to be convinced by the points I make but do I want it enough to put in the effort? Often I don't, especially since in many interactions (especially in comments) clarity of thought (as I see it) is in tension with reaching the reader.
For instance two of the most recent online debates I got into (that dog breed bans don't target the inherently dangerous breeds and that you can't just intuitively know stock prices are disconnected from expected profits) both ended up foundering at the point I said: both my hypothesis and your hypothesis predict the evidence you are citing so it can't be a reason to favor your theory. I still say that because I want to make the point clearly to some imagined audience even though I know if we've gotten to this point it won't work for those people. But I am at a particularly large competitive disadvantage in those situations -- I do find the abstract approach natural -- so it doesn't seem worth it.
A better version of myself would probably not care about those discussions at all but I think we often feel the need to impress the imagined audience of people whose opinions we want to care about in our heads whether they are there in real life or not.
Some writing definitely is more for one’s own benefit! My partner dislikes social media (including blog comments) because he thinks that’s all any of it is, and he doesn’t feel like in participating in anyone else’s talking for their own benefit.
I think it can be a totally valid reason for some writing, but it’s helpful to be clear what’s going on in what context.
There’s definitely a failure mode of teaching where a professor takes the time to spell something out “correctly” even though the details of the inductive proof that the number of parentheses in a well-formed formula is always even end up losing the students and prevent them from getting anything out of the rest of the class.
Who do you mean...but yes I left out my several sentence qualification that by continental philosophy I mean to refer to a certain style of philosophy that has been associated in popular culture with that term that is neither exclusive to or all of the philosophers who descend from the continental tradition. I'd say plenty of Hypatia pieces are continental in this sense even if they don't have that DNA.
But at the same time being obscurintast isn't just about big silly words and academicese. You can adopt a folksy vibe while being obscurintast.
I really mean to pick out the class of work characterized by the following (as a matter of degree) the use of terms and concepts which are largely understood by way of gist and without an attempt to explore the limits of the concept (eg does objectification include asking someone to stand on something for you, is it power if...). And which also deliberately tries to use terms which we feel we have a strong emotional or vibe understanding of even if not a cleae sense of the limits of application.
"Has the ability to" isn't just inflated phrasing — "can" carries a permission reading as well as a capability one, so the longer form sometimes does real disambiguation work. When the point is specifically about someone's range or capacity, collapsing it to "can" introduces ambiguity that wasn't there. The other five examples are clean and the advice is solid, but this one slightly undermines the list. Depends on context for what the blogpost was about, but not good as a standalone example.
For that matter, only one of the six examples is an actual passive voice. I realize Scott actually wrote "*like* the passive voice" but I've seen too much anti-passive advice from people who clearly don't know what passive is to be able to restrain myself here
I'd like to add the ten commandments and the seven deadly sins. Hm, the four-fold way? I think we're not the first ones to make fun of them either, Dante was ahead of us.
Re 15, I've often found it helpful to act like I'm responding to an argument where the obvious things have already been said and do interesting meta level twists on them.
Though this does conflict with the other common observation that what is obvious for you isn't obvious for other people.
"I’ve found it helpful to think of cliches as missed quest hooks - signs that you could have said something really unique and interesting here. What about “Avoid cliches with all the ferocity of Jim Cramer avoiding good stock picks”?
If you do this all the time, you’ll either end up cringe or the next Shakespeare, no middle ground"
This is The Last Week Tonight/Jeff Maurer approach. I like both, and this definitely leads to some good lines, but I think they'd be better off picking thier spots with this.
"In my own experience, GLP-1 medication doesn’t affect my experience of hunger."
This one still fails a few of your rules! It remains overly convoluted, hedges too much, and inserts you where you don't need to be. There is not one else who could have experience of your hunger. Also, all hunger is an experience. "GLP-1 medication doesn't affect my hunger." contains all the same information.
(Of course, the context might have preferred the version you did use, as you say these aren't ironclad rules.)
The phrase "in my own experience" signals to me that he knows it's unusual, or at least not universal, and that other people don't feel the same. Simply stating X wouldn't include that. If the context of the article was "my experience with glp1" then I would agree.
It does emphasize that it's personal, but I feel that's redundant with "my hunger". Leaving out the "my" would indeed make it ambiguous whether the reporting was based on studies or personal use, but so long as it's there, reiterating that his hunger is an experience he has had is logically unnecessary. It may in fact be necessary to forestall objections.
If you want to convey something about other people’s experiences, I think it is better to come out and say it, rather than trying to signal it with redundancy.
Example: “Studies report that GLP-1 medication reduces feels of hunger, but I know that’s not true for everybody because it’s not true for me. GLP-1 medication doesn’t affect my experience of hunger.”
That’s longer, but it’s also clearer and conveys more information.
The experience of hunger and how we experience that experience can be two separate concepts.
As in, you felt just as hungry but somehow it was more tolerable.
I don't have any history of this with hunger to report. But I remember, noting on another drug that while was still aware I was tired and sleepy, it was easier to ignore that feeling of tiredness.
"I've heard people say, 'GLP-1 medication doesn't affect my hunger but does affect my experience of hunger.' Not so for me. In my own experience, GLP-1 medication doesn’t affect my experience of hunger."
This is probably the most important thing beginner writers could do. For me learning to write was doing this over and over, again and again, until it became the second nature.
I suspect every experienced writer would give this piece of advice in some form, either having learned from someone else or stumbled upon it via convergent cultural evolution.
FR. Out of touch elite bloggers just assuming that I have an editor, clearly it’s over for me. This is why I cannot get good at writing untill capitalism is destroyed.
What's wrong with the 5-paragraph essay ? It's basically the same format as any scientific article. First you write the abstract: "this is what my paper will show". Then you list all the experiments you've performed and the data you've collected, and explain how all this work supports your claim: "this is what I have done". Finally, you summarize your conclusions: "this is how I know I'm right". Traditionally, scientific articles often mention potential future work in the conclusion: "this is what you can do to improve on my work" -- or, more cynically, "this is why you should give me money". What's wrong with that ?
I don't know much about literary analysis, but still, I'd set up the essay a little differently:
Opening: Who is the protagonist of Medea ? While there is some debate on the topic, I can show that Medea herself is the best candidate, as opposed to Antigone or Aristophanes.
Body: Identifying the protagonist of a literary work can be a contentious task. The term "protagonist" is typically define as the character who possesses properties foo, bar and baz (see references). However, in a complex work such as Medea, multiple characters can fit the definition to some degree.
Body: For example, X claims that the protagonist of Medea is Antigone, because of X1, X2, and X3.
Body: Alternatively, Y claims that it is instead Aristophanes, due to Y1, Y2, Y3 and Y4.
Body: I argue that both X's and Y's approaches are flawed, and Medea herself is the protagonist. Medea clearly fulfills criteria of M1, M2, and M3, much more so than yadda yadda yadda here's the technique I developed etc.
Conclusion: Thus, Medea is clearly the best candidate for the protagonist. While X's and Y's arguments do have merit, I have shown that Medea fulfills all the requisite criteria much more closely than Antigone or Aristophanes or indeed any other character.
Future work: The approach I have developed could be applied to other literary works, and if I had some of that sweet sweet grant money, I could in fact do so, thus conclusively settling all protagonist-related debates once and for all.
> "The protagonist of Medea is a matter of some debate. X person says it was Antigone, Y person says it was Aristophanes, but I'm going to take the sure bet, and say it was Medea. She was A, B, and has the tragic flaw of C."
> That's a decent opening paragraph, but it's not how you're taught to write one for a 5 paragraph essay. My opening paragraph there focuses on engagement, why you should listen to me -- that there is something of interest that I do actually have to prove.
I don't agree. I've read too many things that clearly stated they were going to refute some other opinion, their nemesis.
Probably satisfying for them, but I never encountered the nemesis opinion, don't know what it is, and don't care about internal turf wars in your department. Say what you think is accurate; don't wave your arm at the idea that, because your take is accurate, it's better than some other worse take that must not be named.
Since the beginning of time, mankind has sought to communicate in an effective way. However, not all forms of communication are equally effective. In this comment, I'm going to show that the five paragraph-essay is a bad way to communicate.
Primarily, the five-point essay format is boring, and if people are bored by your writing, why should they read it? It's not coincidence that the only people who regularly read five-point essays are teachers who are paid to read it. I'm not paid to read it, I have nearly infinite other things to read, if I'm bored by your writing, I'll probably go do something else and miss out on whatever thing you were trying to communicate.
Secondly, a fixed format is unnecessary for most communication purposes. It's useful for something like a scientific document where the 'legibility' of the format is more important than it being interesting or unique. You're reading a scientific paper for the result, not because you're looking to be entertained (exception: SIGBOVIK), so a "boring" format is not a downside. (Except that maybe this is part of why nobody actually reads scientific papers and so virtually all discourse is several levels detached from the actual evidence)
Tertiarily, the five paragraph essay is bad because it artificially constrains the form of the argument. You may end up inventing hypothetical points just to fit the format, or leaving out good points because they don't.
In conclusion, are you still reading this? Or did you get the joke I was making two sentences in and feel like your time was being wasted. (Maybe you're even thinking "slop" though I hereby solemnly swear that no LLM was involved in this comment) In the end, one thing is clear: learning about subatomic particles is part of what makes us human.
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In its defense, and why I think Scott is "drawn to it" - it's meant to be training wheels for the act of "having a point" and "finding reasons (more than one, but probably not a dozen) to support that point" and "communicating those reasons to a reader in a legible way" and those are all good things to learn and something that you can fail at ("have a point to make" is also the point of some of the other pieces of advice here)... but yeah, it's meant to be training wheels and not actually used in anger.
I think you might be interpreting the five-paragraph format a bit too strictly; I don't remember being taught that essays are supposed to have *exactly* five paragraphs; rather, they should start with the single-paragraph abstract, proceed to the body where your points are split into individual paragraphs for clarity, and culminate in the single-paragraph conclusion which drives the thesis home in the reader's mind.
> In the end, one thing is clear: learning about subatomic particles is part of what makes us human.
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but your conclusion should at least reference the abstract, and ideally logically follow from your argument in the body !
In my experience, you couldn't have less than 5 paragraphs, but if you wanted more body paragraphs, that was okay or even recommended. If you were given a word count, you might have even been able to get away with 2 body paragraphs if they were long enough.
If you're interested in SIGBOVIK, check out Tom7 who does video versions of his SIGBOVIK papers - "Harder Drives" (https://tom7.org/harder/) and "Badness 0" (https://tom7.org/bovex/) are two of my favorites. But the whole publication has some fun ones.
The scientific paper format is very dull and readers routinely skip to the part they’re interested in. It's good for publishing findings, but doesn't work for a blog post.
Style does, contrary to some opinions, matter. If you are writing a blog meant to thoroughly handle some subject and leave readers *more correct* than they were before, to actually be digestable AND digested, and so on, you need them to actually attentively read the whole thing.
More than that, from your point of view you want to be successful, respected, liked, etc.; people don't generally approach writing without wanting at least some of those things. Sometimes, you might be writing the best article on trees because you want to be paid, even.
Scott is giving advice to people who want some combination of the above, who are trying to be bloggers, more or less. Giving them the advice to use the most pedestrian, least interesting, most innoculated-against format (or not giving them advice not to use that) would be working against their interests. It's just not the most effective tool for the job, especially in a competition field where the next guy DOES have style and can wield it effectively in ways that surpass the utility of the 5-paragraph format.
Well for starters, scientific papers are boring and nobody reads them unless they really have to.
But more to the point, five-paragraph essays are a format that some topics might fall naturally apart into, but most don't. Do you really have exactly three points you want to make? And is each point really so simple that a single paragraph feels like the right amount to spend on it?
The other problem with the transparent telling-three-times. Repeating the main points in the introduction and conclusion is reasonable when you've got tens or hundreds of pages between them, but when there's less than a page of text between introduction and conclusion it feels gratingly repetitive -- too much skeleton and too little meat. If you want to repeat yourself thrice in a short space then you need to disguise what you're doing.
Scott likes to use slightly more than 5 paragraphs when making posts.
But the main issue i can think of is the 5PE doesn't fit well with his other advice. Eg mystery, conflict, humor. I have never enjoyed reading or writing a 5PE. Good posts flow more naturally. To me It's like the "six sided room". I'm sure an architect needs to learn that at some point, but plenty learn it naturally before leaving highschool.
With respect… I don’t actually read this blog for the writing or think it’s that great. I read Sam Kriss and Hunter S. Thompson for the writing. I read you for the ideas and analysis, which are exceptional
He hasn't written much fiction on the new blog, but if you aren't a longtime reader, I cannot recommend enough that you check the old blog, SlateStarCodex, under the Fiction tag.
Even some of his newer nonfiction stuff has been entertaining, though. I still sometimes think about the post on ivermectin, in which he says of one of the studies "I hope it one day finds its way back to its home planet".
Interesting. I think I get where you're coming from, but I also think one of the virtues of Scott's writing is how unobtrusive and unspectacular it (usually) is. I think he frequently produces inconspicuous little masterpieces of communication. In this light, it's really hard to separate style and substance.
I come from academic mathematics, where writing skill is *extremely* important. It takes an enormous amount of skill to communicate ideas which are, by definition, at the frontiers of human understanding. If you're reading a math paper and the writing sticks out, it's (probably) bad writing. If I'm trying to understand a difficult concept, and I have to wade through a New Yorker-style 3 act longform piece, let alone a Krissian descent into madness (I love those), I'm going to be pissed.
Something like Scott's "Meditations on Moloch" is a good example of great writing skill employed in the service of communication.
You made me think of Scholze's writing: luminously clear on the bleeding edge. When I don't understand Scholze, which is almost always within the first page, I can viscerally tell it's because my brain can't follow the reasoning, not because his writing is bad. It's almost like the antithesis of continental philosophy.
Fiction isn’t just about the writing either. Famously, Shakespeare’s stories aren’t particularly compelling, but his turns of phrase defined hundreds of years of literature. Re the John Rawls one… it was okay. Kinda gimmicky for me. If there’s anything I liked about it, it’s the novelty of the idea (implemented veil of ignorance in charitable giving).
It's not an American custom. It's an American belief unrelated to any actual practice. It's like homo-ousianism vs homoi-ousianism - there is no content.
(It's worse, in that the holy words do have a meaning and you could theoretically pay attention to that meaning, but you aren't supposed to do that.)
That's not right for the reasons other replies already gave. But you're right it's more commonly used in British English. And still more in most Continental writing. Largely because American culture is to be more direct about basically everything.
But notwithstanding that usage, when I'm editing British writers aiming at British audiences, I still mostly take it out. And they still mostly think the edits make it clearer.
The passive voice has its legitimate uses. Sometimes the object is the focus. Sometimes the subject is unknown. Sometimes making the subject a surprise is a good literary device. But usually usually readers want to know who's doing what to what thing. That's the natural order, and any other makes processing harder.
So be direct by default. Even if it's not how you or your audience speak. Because writing is very different from speech.
Adrian Mitchell wrote a positive version of 'This Be The Verse' many years ago. It's called 'This Be The Worst', although it should be called 'This Be The Reverse'. He left the coastal shelf part untouched, which reminds us that we can change the constraints at any time, even if keeping them in place is helpful. We, as mere mortals, can manage that.
That's nice, and much better than Scott's version (no offence Scott, I realise you're showing us uncompleted draft poetry that you decided not to finish in order to illustrate a very good point!)
"It deepens like a coastal shelf" is hard to beat with a rising simile, even without the constraint of needing to rhyme with anything in particular. Nothing rises with the silent, sudden, invisible enormity that the ocean deepens. Rising is all impermanent and showy, deepening is eternal and ineffable.
And "And have some cheerful kids yourself" is a much better ending than Scott's "And if you’re up for it, have kids" -- partially because it follows Scott's own advice and avoids unnecessary qualification and hemming and hawing.
Disagree on all points tbh. I don't want to argue about it, just provide a data point that shows it's a matter of taste.
I like Scott's ending and his rising simile better, and also Scott's original example of a mountain is a thing that rises with silent enormity. (I'll grant it's visible. Idk what you mean by sudden, since a coastal shelf forms gradually)
It was all through school in the '90's, along with the correlate that any opinion you had needed three supporting reasons. One really good reason, like "that's so expensive it's impossible," simply wasn't good enough, because that only gives you three paragraphs.
My teachers would allow us to split "that's expensive" into "a) that's too expensive for discretionary funding", "b) that provides no income to finance a loan", and "c) look at all the other stuff that's less expensive and better".
Well, mostly. And depending on how they felt about the student who handed in the paper. And they also didn't necessarily teach us how to do this, or tell us it was allowed.
But hey, perfection is so expensive it's impossible!
Did you write essays at all? Did teachers demand that they have an introduction and a conclusion? Then you've basically got a five-paragraph essay... having exactly five paragraphs isn't that important but it's the minimum respectable number of paragraphs and the maximum number that you can realistically hand-write in a one-hour exam so it turns into the default.
(I'm not sure if everyone else had to hand-write these damn things under exam conditions)
Sure, we wrote essays, but there was never even a specific demand that we write opening paragraphs that say what we're going to say, or closing paragraphs that say what we said. I would have rebelled if there had been. The only thing I remember the teacher saying is that you start a new paragraph whenever you change the subject, and I said, "But the whole essay is about the same subject."
Yes, I remember being taught about splitting it up into paragraphs and "when you start a new paragraph, write it like this" (e.g. leaving a space or indenting it, to mark the beginning of a new paragraph).
Nothing about "it must be five paragraphs and done like this, this and this".
No more did I, but that's probably because (1) I am a dinosaur (my secondary school English teacher recently died, God rest her) and (2) I am not American.
I sometimes see online discussions of American schooling and my jaw drops because it was nothing like what I experienced, but perhaps Irish schools are now like that, or more like that, because it's the 21st century, grandma!
To the point about clichés: Eliminating tired figurative language & turns of phrase makes your writing more interesting and evocative, yes, but the real thing to avoid is the conceptual cliché: assuming that X must be Y because you get repeated messaging from your social group / the media that X is usually Y. (Poor people are usually unhappy, crime is really bad right now, whatever it is.) Probably harder to remember in fiction / creative writing -- hopefully you are already in a critical headspace and committed to sourcing things as best you can when writing nonfiction or a piece of analysis -- but well worth keeping top of mind all the same.
As a good but lazy writer of yore, I read every line of this post with pleasure. I'm wondering, though (and this actually projects through to your whole blog, and the project of the ER/AR[?] community) - is this for writing as vocation or avocation? Day job or hobby? Obviously [lol] there can only be a few bloggers who blog successfully for money, full time. But who tf has time to put enough effort into writing that it becomes worthwhile to read if you also have a day job? And kids? And occasionally go camping or drinking? Just curious what you'll say.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but what are "popcorn lids" ? I know what those words mean separately, but not what they are referring to when joined together.
I believe they mean when you have a popcorn popping machine, where the kernels are put in a pot thing in the center, and as they pop they push open the lid (I'd say flap) of the pot and fall into the rest of the receptacle.
Relevant to the low hanging fruit, Palantir recently posted a 22 point "manifesto" that's aroused controversy and now threatens to cost it government contracts:
The thing about it is, the manifesto was mostly restating, word-for-word, what Palantir CEO Alex Karp already wrote in a book published last year. Someone should start reading and reviewing these books supposedly written by these oligarchs.
Two points against this: one is that this is sort of a "Tiffany Problem" - yes it's historically realistic to have a character named "Tiffany" in a story set in the middle ages, but if you actually do that, it's going to distract people from the story you're trying to tell (or the point you're trying to make).
And the descriptivist argument is that "data" is singular. Who cares what the latin roots are, you know it's singular because everyone puts the word "is" after it, and if dictionaries haven't updated to indicate that it's a singular word yet, give it enough time and they will.
The pragmatic compromise is to avoid constructions which distinguish singular from plural. "According to the data" works either way. (Bonus points for not anthropomorphizing the data, too, I guess)
I don't find either of those reasons compelling. If people find it distracting to see a historically accurate name, then good on the author for challenging the reader and helping to make their model of the world more accurate. I won't say an author is wrong for choosing to use a different name, but I will push back as hard as necessary against someone who says an author is wrong for refusing to rewrite history to suit modern assumptions.
The second point is just "everyone else is doing it" in more words. Maybe I'd find it compelling if I didn't regularly see the singular form, datum, in my life (it's a term used in technical drawing), so in point of fact it would be difficult for me to "avoid constructions which differentiate the singular from plural" without losing precision and falling out of step with established technical language. As far as I'm concerned, the only singular Data is an officer aboard the Enterprise.
I certainly wouldn't tell somebody NOT to do that on the basis that it might not match the expectations of a modern audience. If the writing is intended to be historically accurate, it is counterproductive to make apologies. Same reason it's so grating that modern Jurassic Park movies go out of their way to make excuses not to put feathers on the dinosaurs--especially when the original was at the cutting edge of scientific understanding for its day.
Ultimately a reader's attention is a limited resource and you've got to pick your battles about where to spend it. And if your ultimate goal is to tell a story or communicate an idea, then distracting them with Ye Olde Tiffany's might be counter-productive to the overall goal.
That's not to say "never challenge the reader's existing ideas" - maybe it's important to the story or to you personally to challenge the readers' views on their perceptions of historical [fill in the blank here]. ... but if it's just trivia like "some people in the past were named Tiffany", well, it's not where I'd spend my powder.
Yes, agreed. I am a bit of a Luddite. I have to restrain myself from pointing out that an army that has been decimated has lost one part in ten rather than having been obliterated.
Your last “are” should be “is” because you are referring to the word “data”, not data itself. What you said would be like saying “the word ‘ducks’ are plural.”
Instead of "The data say..." you should obviously go with "Survey says..." which sidesteps pluralization ambiguity and is pleasingly alliterative, as well as priming your reader to read your essay in the voice of Steve Harvey.
My legal writing instructor hammered this into me in law school (I almost wrote "this was hammered into me in law school," which would have been embarrassing). Passive voice hides the ball by hiding the subject of the sentence. Using it means one of two things: either you're lazy and don't edit your work, or you're deliberately trying to obfuscate the facts of what you're describing.
> (I almost wrote "this was hammered into me in law school," which would have been embarrassing)
"This was hammered into me in law school" would have been a perfectly good thing to say as well. But it would have given me the impression that it was something you heard from a whole bunch of people at law school rather than something you heard from one person at law school.
It's certainly a better thing to say than "My professors, my fellow students, my class tutors, the Dean, and three particularly chatty lunch ladies hammered this into me at law school".
Of course. As always, context is everything. There's a reason the overlap in the Venn diagram of "good legal writing" and "good writing" is just a tiny sliver occupied almost exclusively by Antonin Scalia (pbuh). There are plenty of perfectly legitimate uses for the passive voice: softening a critical statement (as you said), times when obfuscation is appropriate for practical or literary reasons, emphasizing the object of the sentence when it is more important than the subject, or even for pure aesthetic reasons in poetic/literary/non-formal contexts.
For the type of straightforward writing for clarity most of us are trying to accomplish most of the time in places like this, however, I think avoiding passive voice where you can is a good rule of thumb. It is typically clearer, more concise, and more intelligible than the alternative, and most of us are probably not skilled enough prose stylists that removing this specific tool from the toolbox would be a net negative.
The person whose subjective experience is the topic of this sentence has difficulty parsing non-convoluted passive voice examples, and thus found enlightenment with this technical example. Gratitude was expressed.
I speak Hungarian, which has practically no passive, and it forces an entirely different kind of thinking. For example "this website is under construction", while being used, is considered an ugly mirror translation from English and German and not really idiomatic. So you try "we are constructing this website", but then you realize there are two problems, who is the we, and why should anyone care what you are doing? So eventually you settle on "this website will be online around June 2026", because that is what people are actually interested in.
I wanted to agree with section 7 in particular. I am a synthesizer, but I make it work by reading a ton of econ papers, especially ones unpublished and on the frontier, and bringing this to the audience. It is interesting because you cannot trace the exact genealogy of ideas, and thus you will learn something. If someone only reads blogs, then they will come across as totally tasteless.
Another suggestion that came to me while reading this is that if you're someone like Scott Alexander whose posts will be read for many years, it might be wise to avoid dated references that aren't part of your main subject. It might be a bit less fun for current readers, but it will be clearer to future readers. Think of the children!
For example, "they’ll start asking Jerome Powell to raise the literary interest rate." could have used "the Fed" rather than the name of someone whom most readers will probably not remember years from now.
Or it'll make your writing serve as a fun time capsule for the sorts of geeks who are likely to be reading this sort of thing. H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds comparing the tripods to milking stools, the WWII bomber defensive gunner training video explaining the problem of inherited velocity using the example of throwing a newspaper from a moving bicycle, basically all of Mark Twain.
It could almost be a corollary of "Write what you want to write": exist in your own time, and if the best reference for your readers becomes a headscratcher in 150 years, well, you can chuckle as you look down from heaven and see people go on whatever passes for a wiki walk in a century and a half.
After all, the floppy disk save icon and "rolling down" the windows both work just fine even today.
The last time there was an identifiable Head of the Fed whose name-check I'd reliably catch in casual passing would have been *checks banknotes* Alan Greenspan. Could be pushed to recall Janet Yellen or Ben Bernake with some prompting, but I didn't spend much of the Obama years thinking about macroeconomic policy (too busy living in its detritus), so those personages weren't sticky in the same way. Though in fairness, this is mostly due to the Commander in Briefs constantly Streisanding his enemies, rather than any exciting developments with the Prime Rate.
Although there is nonzero merit in timelessly future-proofing one's writing for the <s>AI training data</s> ages, more often than not it comes across as a deliberate and somewhat annoying tic. Our experiences are anchored in a specific slice of time, and it's weird to have no contemporaneous nods - particularly where levity is concerned, since that hinges on shared context without a bunch of tedious setup. Like who's to say even the main precipitating subject, Inkhaven at Lightcone, will exist many years from now? But it'd be a poor use of runway to start off this listicle with "recently, I felt like writing a meta-post due to some unfulfilled spiritual obligations to a local writing workshop..." or whatever. I extend that sort of courtesy to FdB, since meta-craft is one of his main irons in the fire, but it's not really what I read Scott for. (Outside of fiction or satire, as other comments have pointed out, his main writerly power is just the consistent dogged application of More Dakka.)
Writing a vicious attack on Lightcone post pros and cons:
- Cons: the only inkhaven 1 participant not invited to join inkhaven 2 for a week (very sad)
- Pros: Scott Alexander says I have the true blogger spirit
(To be clear, though, the post was not intended as a vicious attack. I felt a duty do write it (and publish it immediately) for the reasons described in it. I don’t think Lightcone Infrastructure are making the world worse on net, or that nobody should donate to them; only that there are doing some stuff badly, that people should be very careful when dealing with Oliver Habryka and be aware of his policies, and that there is information that, for some people, would change their mind about donating to LI.)
Somewhat so with Oliver Habryka, not really otherwise. (Though you’d need to ask other people whether it was awkward for them.)
One experience, though a lot more funny than awkward, was one the residents coming up to me after I made the post and saying that it’s a shitty thing to do as a guest. I asked them if they’ve read the post (as it contained an explanation for why it was written and published at that point), and they replied that they have not. This immediately teleported me into the “I haven’t read Pasternak but I condemn him” situation as Pasternak, which somehow never happened before!
I saw a name starting with "F, r, e" and followed by "don't hurt me" and somehow started expecting to read Freddie duBoer responding to the many people apparently wishing for his death.
Am I getting pranked? One of Scott’s recent posts included a sentence that started with “obviously” and was not obvious at all. At least, tons of Americans would consider it trivially rebuttable by means of newspaper headlines seen by the entire anglophone world. And now he says not to use the word “obviously”?
And just a few months ago he did a post (or part of one) about how terrible Scott Adams’ wild hyperbole was, followed up by a post lampooning Trump which was full of wild hyperbole. I can’t make sense of it.
I keep thinking there has to be a Straussian esoteric reading somebody smarter than me is putting together the puzzle pieces of.
“Still, the 2028 presidential election is a toss-up, and it’s obvious that neither party can get away with crazy things like openly shooting opposing senators or shutting down opposing newspapers.”
I read this as "It's obvious to both parties that they can't get away with it" rather than "It should be obvious to the reader that they can't get away with it".
Not only can they not get away with it, they _obviously_ can't get away with it, which means they won't try. If they non-obviously couldn't get away with it then you'd have to worry that they might try, thinking they could get away with it.
So yes, it's a very different use of the word obviously.
Yes, this is how I read it as well. 'Obviously' carries load-bearing information *about the beliefs of the parties*, which is relevant to the meaning of the argument.
> No words like “obviously”. Either it’s obvious to the reader, in which case there’s no need to say this, or it’s not obvious, in which case it’s insulting
One of my favorite jokes is about the math professor who during a lecture says "...and from here the answer is obvious", to which a student raises their hand and asks "Sorry, is that actually obvious?". The professor stops, looks at the blackboard and thinks for a minute... five minutes... ten minutes... finally he exclaims, "Ah ha! It *is* obvious" and then he continues with his lecture.
As I see it, the purpose of "obviously" is to avoid your audience feeling talked down to when you explain something they already know, but which would be awkward to cut from the text altogether.
16. If you use non-standard abbreviations that omit punctuation to save keystrokes and raise a speed bump for some readers, omit them when they're superfluous. E.g., "This is to the credit of my readers and community (ie you)."
No; "ie" without periods and a terminating comma, which has been Scott's rendering for a while, is non-standard. My comment did violate at least one of the rules enumerated in the post in that my nominal point that "(you)" was sufficient was secondary to what motivated the comment.
Now I finally understand why, despite Scott introducing ie, eg, cf, and ht to my regular lexicon, I always feel that slight sense of universal wrongness that indicates some prescriptivist rule has been broken, somewhere, somehow. The the the of two-letter abbreviations. Gonna have to be more careful with those going forward, now that the confusion has been noticed.
Scott writes: "many discussions of Freddie deBoer start 'I’m a huge fan of Freddie, even though I disagree with everything he says, and find him personally abrasive, and his topics are unoriginal and repetitive, and I hate him, and I hope he dies.'"
That's clearly exaggeration for effect - I don't hate Freddie or wish him ill, and I think he has some actual expertise around education, but yes, his primary appeal is that he's a lovely stylist and his secondary appeal is that he's very cranky, so when he is criticizing something I don't like, I enjoy it.
Maybe Freddie should start a podcast or a writing seminar with Kevin D. Williamson. I'd give it a try.
His posts on AI are infuriating (oh, the goalposts you'll move!), but I still can't quite bring myself to cease reading them entirely. At least the swipes at Matt Yglesias are mostly back to being good-natured ribbing. Reading takedowns of things you like because they nevertheless persist in being entertaining or even thought-provoking: a rare skill, great niche to cultivate. It's even more notable for things I'm completely ambivalent about, like sportsball, where I don't even understand half the jargon, but it's often a fun ride to see The Ringer or whomever get taken down a peg anyway. If someone could write a beautifully compelling paint-drying post, it'd definitely be Freddie.
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship."
"When you demand even the flimsiest of details, nobody’s written a good blog post even on the ultra-controversial topics that everyone talks about every day."
Eh, careful. The real answer is usually "Steve Sailer covered this exhaustively in 2003 but no one will admit to having read it."
You must be new to Scott’s writing. His old posts on Raikoth are all about how Scott’s imaginary ideal society is founded on the pursuit of Truth and Beauty.
Scott is an atheist, but he also believes in beauty and goodness. I believe he takes a very intuition-y view of lots of things, including more out there ethical scenarios.
I learned the "runway" trick from YouTube, where it's super easy for someone to click away if they're bored. You always need to give them at least an excuse to keep their attention on your work.
My favorite sentence: "The fruit is so low-hanging that it’s burrowing tiny fruit boreholes until it dissolves into molten plant matter somewhere near the Mohorovicic discontinuity."
And now, moving on to being as openly one-up-oriented as a good 3/4 of the commenters, here are a coupla variants of Scott's variant of the Larkin poem:
Man passes ecstasy to man
As opened doors and torn-off lids
Step through and master all you can
Then open futures up for kids
It pretty well captures my view, but it lacks the lightness of Scott's poem, and I'm not sure I actually like it as much.
Wanna feel depressed? Here's the grimmest variant I can come up with, way worse than Larkin's:
1. Williams’ Style: Towards Clarity and Grace shows writers how to construct paragraphs that tell clear “stories” (even when they aren’t overtly narrative). Highly recommended. Buy a used copy with the yellow cover (or another > 10 year old version), not the new expensive co-written “textbook”: https://www.amazon.com/Style-Clarity-Chicago-Writing-Publishing/dp/0226899144
2. Claude has become an invaluable editor for my writing. I ask it to suggest areas for improvement in a draft. When I am stuck or unsure about a passage, I ask its advice. By offloading the cognitive effort of conceiving possible next steps, it helps me get to my choices much more quickly. It does not supply my prose: I stand behind every word.
I think part of the problem is that these workshop participants mostly want someone to teach them how to be excellent advanced writers, but what you think they actually need is to learn how to be good beginners. Beginners need to learn how avoid cliches, the passive voice etc.
A man wants to sell more fish so he sells his little cart and buys a store. Above the store he puts a sign that says "fresh fish sold here daily." Then a kibitzer shows up and says "why write 'daily'? Surely if it's fresh it has to be new that day." So the man paints over the word "daily." Then another kibitzer says "why 'here'?" Surely the sign means that the store is here." So the man paints over the word "here." Then a third kibitzer asks why he wrote "sold" since just "fresh fish" implies it's being sold. So the man paints over the word "sold." A fourth kibitzer comes by and says "why 'fresh'? Would people think you are selling them old fish?" So the man paints over the word fresh. A fifth kibitzer arrives and says "you hardly need the word 'fish' up there, we can smell you from blocks away." So the man finally takes down the sign.
A few days later another kibitzer comes from out of town and asks, "you have such a nice business here but you haven't done any advertising. Why not put up a sign?"
The concept is not culturally specific at all, the only thing that makes this version especially Yiddish is the liberal use of the word 'kibitzer'
As a Jew, I think the Turks can have this one if they want, but next time there's a folktale of uncertain origin it should be our turn for cultural ownership. :)
Kung Fu parable is actually, I think, why I was never a very good blogger. It's sort of like you spin two wheels, one of which determines your ability to write, and one of which is much heavier and more cumbersome to spin but determines what you have to write about. I'm good at the first wheel and not so good at the second.
Would anyone care to describe improvements they've made in their writing?
I can think of changes I've made relatively recently. I started using comma splices before the m-dash (actually double n-dashes) became a mark of AI.
I used to add my emotions in parentheses, but now, presumably as a result of more self-assurance, I don't.
I don't have samples of what I wrote back when for comparison.
I've got some limited ability to imagine an audience. A lot of the time I'm writing for the past self who didn't yet understand what I'm writing about.
Looking at them now, I see the rhythm is considerably different. The m-dash is staccato, while the comma is smoother. I could have said legato instead of smoother-- but that might have been less likely to be understood.
I actually just want to say that I find your writing style in this comments section quite unique and refreshing. I'm not sure what you have but it's a sort of...raw directness...I'm not sure if that's the best description, but it feels unusually straightforward and honest. Hardly anyone actually writes like you do.
Declaring your emotions sounds like it's part of that and something I support. I think I do that myself now and then.(e.g. I'll say something like "your comment is causing me strong disgust which I'm attempting to keep at bay" which I think is a lot better than "your comment is objectively disgusting" or not acknowledging the disgust but having it manifest very obviously). It's a lot harder to do this for positive emotions because they usually feel affected or artificial to me (e.g. "that was very helpful" and equivalents).
'No hedging. “It seems to me that possibly snow might be the sort of thing that is white, although other people might presumably differ”. No! Go to the mountaintop until you can write “Snow is white”. Then, when you leave the mountain, at least you’ll write some normal healthy hedge like “Snow is probably white” instead of some godforsaken sentence with eight nested layers of hedging.'
Bad mountaintop. Absolutely not.
No matter how intricate the origami of qualifiers and epistemic calibrations might get, it can never be as awful as strong, declarative statements on nuanced, complicated questions.
As for the thing that was hit by Bob, I still think "As for the thing that Bob hit" flows better. Part of that is just the rhythm of it: "As for the thing that Bob hit, it lay in the house that Jack built."
>“Just one more question: where do you get your enemies?”
And thus began the denouement of the single longest Columbo episode ever filmed.
Am I the only one to have thought that rhyming ____ with kids here was a great idea before finishing the section? I found it a good way to conjure the pure, unmaterialized potential of making a new human ab initio... Anyway, the bid bit: indeed better than a mountain, a sunrise.
Re: #12, this is why sometimes the funniest rounds in cards against humanity happen during the last hands, when everyone agrees to stop drawing cards and play till everyone's hand is empty.
That said, if you really want a kick to the ego wrt how funny you are, put a rando in every round alongside everyone's chosen card. It often does surprisingly well
I think it can help people to figure out what makes them comparatively unique compared to most people to hammer that edge in their writing.
If someone is a high agreeableness worrier, then diligent and well-researched pieces about the impact of crime policy on GDP might be a good avenue for them. If they are really relational and sensitive, then they could maybe go all in on emotionally leveling Knausgaard-style confessional articles. People high in schizotypy could maybe stand to emulate aspects of how TLP used to write. People with underdeveloped self-concepts could play that up: circling controversial arguments, major life contexts, emphasizing that they can see all angles of the situation while being able to commit to none. My problem with most aspiring writers is that they don't differentiate themselves enough: the writing comes off as being written by a generically educated person, without a ton of cues present as to what makes this person's way of seeing things unique.
I also think longer articles are usually better than shorter articles. A lot of aspiring Substackers write really short posts: by the time you have begun to immerse yourself in the writer's perspective and interpretive frame, the article ends.
I have to say I'm confused about the spinner even knowing that there's a battery and motor. The force is internal, so how does that work with conservation of angular momentum? And what is the force applied exactly? And where was that angular momentum stored in the battery - did the electrons spin in a certain direction?
Ask Claude Opus 4.7 Adaptive! (Or honestly any vaguely frontier model at this point.) I have a degree in physics and ask the models physics questions regularly as a private benchmark. Models would have been unreliable on questions at this level 6-12 months ago; now it's a layup.
(But some key things to realize are that you're holding it, so the spinner isn't a closed system, and that the angular momentum doesn't come from the battery.)
Here's the model's answer. (Briefly: there's a flywheel inside spinning in the opposite direction, so the total angular momentum is actually decreasing with friction all the time as the shell continues to spin at the same speed.)
The spinner is almost certainly a **LIMBO**, made by Fearless Toys — a motorized spinning top that raised over $1M on Kickstarter/Indiegogo. It contains a processor that controls a motor spinning a mass in the counter direction, powered by a rechargeable battery that lasts roughly 4 hours, though one unit famously ran for 27 hours, 9 minutes in 2018 for a world record. There are also DIY versions and clones floating around.
Now the physics, which is actually the more interesting part of the tweet's puzzle:
**The key mistake is treating the spinner as a closed system.** It isn't. The tip is in contact with a table, and the shell is in contact with air. Those contacts are external, and they carry torques. Once you notice that, conservation of angular momentum stops being mysterious — the spinner's total angular momentum *does* change over time because of external friction, and the battery+motor's job is to compensate.
**What the motor actually does.** Inside LIMBO there's a flywheel (rotor) that spins in the opposite direction to the visible shell. A motor applies equal-and-opposite torques to these two parts (Newton's third law, applied internally). So the motor pushes the shell one way and the internal flywheel the other way. The motor cannot create angular momentum out of nothing — it can only transfer it between parts it's bolted to.
**So where does the shell's sustained angular momentum come from?** Two sources, working together:
- Air drag and tip-friction continuously drain angular momentum from the shell to the Earth.
- The motor continuously "refills" the shell's angular momentum by pushing against the internal flywheel, which as a result spins faster and faster in the opposite direction.
The total angular momentum of the whole device (shell + flywheel) is actually *decreasing* the entire time — it's flowing out through tip-friction into the Earth. But the visible shell stays spinning because the motor is pumping negative angular momentum into the hidden flywheel, which spins up. That's why it eventually stops even with battery left: the flywheel hits its terminal speed (back-EMF limits motor torque), or the battery dies, and then there's nothing left to counter the friction.
**On your battery question: no, the electrons aren't spinning in a preferred direction.** A battery stores chemical potential energy, not angular momentum. What the battery provides is *energy*, which the motor dissipates as work against bearing friction, air drag, and the tip's friction with the table. The angular momentum on the spinner's axis was never in the battery — it's being continuously transferred to and from the Earth through the contact point. The Earth's rotation changes by an unmeasurably tiny amount each time you turn the thing on.
**The force applied, concretely:** it's a magnetic torque between the motor's stator (rigidly attached to the visible shell) and the motor's rotor (the internal flywheel). Energy flows battery → current through coils → magnetic torque → mechanical work on both parts. Angular momentum flows shell ↔ flywheel through the same magnetic interaction, and shell ↔ Earth through the tip.
The tweet's "test" is nice because the failure mode is exactly what you'd expect: people can reason fluently about air resistance, bearing quality, material science, etc., but they don't question the premise that this is a passive object. "Spinner" triggers a schema, and the schema doesn't include a battery.
These are fire. This community yet again confounds me. Since man's posted it out here, that means LightHaven benefit is literally the people you meet and they've l whatever famous Substackers care to show up
(steelmanning the case, the strawman is that the mandem drop 4k for the privilege of being forced to write one blog post every day)
> Write the Traditional Five Paragraph Essay on a distant mountaintop for thirty years. Then, when you come down, please please please write something else.
I think this principle applies to many domains. The most creative musicians in the world spent years learning all the standard technique, but that's not how they become famous. Same with athletes with unorthodox styles or rare skills, like Magic Johnson. "You have to understand the rules to know when to break them" is cliche, but true.
"the English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty"
I seriously don't see this. Consider how the word "liberals" could mean anything from the mostly apolitical managerial-professional class to social democrats, even socialists (Chomsky the anarcho-communist was often called one, or at least someone liked by liberals).
Consider the vague meaning of "welfare" esp. "corporate welfare", consider the really vague meaning of "democracy" which half the time means "republic" or rule of law or human rights or whatever you want it to mean.
"government" means the actually elected President half the time, and half the time the career bureaucrats at various agencies, so that it is possible and in fact common for conservatives to like the President and hate the government.
"feminism" can mean anything from Martha Nussbaum's wonderfully precise 14-item sexual objectification checklist to "men are bad amirite".
"atheism" can mean anything from not giving a damn about religion to considering it the root of all historic evil.
"queer" sometimes includes cis, "normie" looking gay guys, sometimes not.
Most of the world has political parties whose policies you can guess from their name, e.g. social democrat, liberal, christian democrat or conservative. America not, although originally "democrat" used to mean a kind of left-populism and "republican" used to mean limited government, it is no longer true in any sense. Nor does the liberal media like the NYT ever had the same kind of explicitly political mission statement as say The Guardian. They are just sort of liberal by osmosis and fashion, not an explicitly stated political project.
"mental health issues" range from "stressed out mood" to "barking mad". "autism" ranges from "rigid engineer type thinking" to "chewing furniture, non-verbal". Then there are those people for whom "christian" means "protestant". "white" sometimes means "WASP". it is utterly unclear whether Rahul Gandhi is white or not. half-black is sometimes black (Prez Obama).
the "rich" in "tax the rich" can range from dentists to Elon Musk. "the poor" seem to have sometimes really fucken big cars. "fat" in body poz discussions can range from not exactly like a fitness model to flat out immobile.
Yes, I agree. You can sense it when you enter a patch of insincerity in prose. It's as though the patches have a different texture or smell. But I'm sure that applies to written communications in other languages too, and isn't a special property of English. (But I doubt Scott thinks it's only English language insincerity that turns the litmus paper red.)
If you don't have enemies, why are you even learning kung fu?
Seeking out enemies just to use kung fu is perverse. And while you might need to defend yourself at some point, that's not enough to justify truly dedicating yourself to the art.
If you don't have ideas, why even learn to write?
Seeking out ideas just to use your writing skills is perverse. And while reasons to write do come up organically from time to time, that's not enough to justify truly dedicating yourself to the craft.
Yes, it is preverse to learn the art just to beat up someone. But I guess most people learn writing to express themselves first, and to develop writing as a general intelligence/skill. Seeking "enemies" to put what they learned into hands-on practice, to sharpen thinking, avoid fallacies... seems legit. "Enemies" is a strong word, it would be more reasonable to use "sparring partner" or "interlocutor".
The "Say the thing you want yo say" is what stands out to me the most in your writing. Although I'm not interesting enough to have a blog myself, it positively influenced the way I think. Similar dishonesty can happen i one's thoughts too, and it takes effort to notice it.
>Each of the next three paragraphs presents one piece of evidence for your thesis. The first sentence of each is a topic sentence: “The first piece of evidence that the quark is large comes from particle accelerators”. Then several sentences describing what you mean and why this is true. Next paragraph. “The second piece of evidence that the quark is large comes from theory.” And so on.
This doesn’t seem quite right. Each paragraph presents one argument in support of the thesis; a paragraph can include several pieces of evidence. Here, the first topic sentence should be something like, “Experimental data indicates that the quark is large.” And then, examples of that experimental data: “In Smith (2017), experimental subjects were 20% more likely to fall down the stairs when a quark was placed in their path than when a golf ball was placed in their path. This implies that quark is larger than a golf ball, which is quite large relative to other subatomic particles.”
>I ask my mentees questions like: What is your thesis? How does this paragraph here support the thesis?
Re the latter, back when I was teaching high school, I had some success with the following method: I advised students that the first sentence after each topic sentence should be, “This implies that my thesis is correct because ____________.” If they can’t fill in that blank, then something is wrong. They need to alter either their thesis or their topic sentence.
The same process applies each time they cite a fact. The next sentence should be, “This implies that my topic sentence is correct because ____________. If they can’t fill in the blank, then again there is something wrong. Either the topic sentence needs to be changed, or the fact does not belong in that paragraph.
Finally, re the quark hypothetical, it really helps students (and writers) if they define their terms. Eg, what does “large” mean. Above, I implicitly defined “large” relative to other subatomic particles, but I should do that in my introduction. I found that that was helpful to students because it helps them with the process of logically connecting their arguments and evidence to their thesis. Eg: If the thesis is that the war in Iran is immoral, well, what does immoral mean? It is much harder to explain “the strike on the school implies that the war is immoral because _____” than it is to define immoral as, eg, insufficiently valuing human life and then arguing “the strike on the school implies that the Administration did not sufficiently value human life because it could have been avoided with minimum effort.” (NOTE: I am not stating that any of those statements are necessarily true, but rather that they are logically coherent. And getting students to consistently write in a logically coherent manner is a major win).
PS: FWIW, I also find that, when debating someone, asking them, “and that fact demonstrates your argument because _____” can be rather effective in getting them to clarify their claims.
Thank you for this. I wish I could have applied to inkhaven but as a parent of young children and a demanding job I can’t afford to at this stage of life…but this advice will tide me over!
> One of the Inkhaven posts, When The Heck Did Hammurabi Actually Rule? starts with: [snip]
> This has conflict - the conflict between the different sets of dates. It has mystery - why are the dates so precise? This was a good use of this post’s runway, which kept me reading further.
Well, I agree with the point. But I was sadly disappointed by the post itself; it's a "longform" effort, but the answer is "the dates are specific because (1) we have documents specifying that Hammurabi reigned for 42 years; and (2) they are relative to the astronomical behavior of Venus - we can identify a few specific candidate years, but we can't pick out one of them as better than the others."
So this is a post with a good introduction and content that aspires to waste as much of your time as it thinks it can get away with. It's a simple question with a simple answer, provided by an author who really, really wishes the answer was more complicated.
This has been bothering me for a few days now: why did you pick "ecstasy" there? It makes it sound like a hyperactive drug rave instead of the image matching the rest of the poem of calm, wholesome happiness. Do I just have a weird emotive hook for "ecstasy" here or am I misreading the vibe.
I have the same reaction. But I can’t think of an alternative that works better. “Happiness” is just a way less tasty word than “ecstasy,” same way “sadness ” is weaker then “grief.” Something about making an adjective into a noun by adding “ness” gives it a manufactured quality. “Joy” seems like the best word to me, but it doesn’t have enough syllables. “Comfort” is sort of an under-reacher. I’ve wondered whether “man passes happy on to man” would work.
>No words like “obviously”. Either it’s obvious to the reader, in which case there’s no need to say this, or it’s not obvious, in which case it’s insulting.
I agree with the second sentence but disagree with the first. You don't want to say "obviously" about your main point, or any of the primary supporting arguments, but it might be useful as part of your axioms or an immediate corollary that's not especially profound on its own, but is relevant or supporting someway of the actual important parts. Maybe you're trying to prove that B is true, A is widely known and uncontroversial, and the crux of your argument is establishing the logical chain A->B. So you go "obviously A, and here are X,Y,Z are detailed reasons why the proposition A->B is true, therefore B". By saying "obviously A" you're saying that you're not going to go into time establishing it, but you expect the reader to already believe A or quickly figure it out. And if they don't believe A they're not your target audience and should go read something more basic establishing A. And depending on how blunt you are and what A is, insulting people who don't believe A might be a feature not a bug.
Your solution of "there's no need to say this" might apply in some cases, but sometimes it's useful context. If you just say "X,Y,Z -> B" out of nowhere it might not be clear why X,Y,Z are even relevant since you haven't mentioned A. An astute reader might figure it out, but road-mapping and providing background context can be useful.
This post made me realize how important bad writing is for survival of society.
Just imagine the world, where nobody uses cliches, and the phrase "avoid cliches like a plague" is therefore never used. Then the next plague comes, but the need to avoid it isn't cemented in collective memory anymore and everyone dies.
there, I found it. Here’s your missing section: “Profread.” Everyone understands making typos, because everyone makes them. And with LLMs, it’s almost proof that you wrote the piece yourself. And yet…
Everyone is also ever so slightly irritated by typos. One or two typos are little more than the proverbial pebble in one’s shoe that is discarded after a few steps. But suppose we can’t remove it—our hands occupied, our legs propelling us from danger, or our shoes glued to our feet. Each passing step sours our mood, adds injury to insult.
With very few bloggers do I find myself at the end without some annoyance, some irk, some *judgement*. You are one of the rare exceptions. In the age of LLMs, this should be, yet sadly isn’t, a triviality.
Regarding untangling your sentences…there’s a popular series of military sci-fi novels* whose author has a predilection for sentences like “It wasn’t as if they didn’t have a plan for this.” Grating once you notice it, and perhaps part of the reason why the books are so long.
The discipline on mountaintop for 30 years really seems like reinventing the Shuhari principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari). Learn the rules until you master the meaning behind them at which point you can start breaking them.
"Raises up, like auction bids" is excellent. You are right to be proud of it. The fact that there are reflexive contrarians trying to improve on it in the comments provides a 16th lesson about properly discounting feedback.
Most writing advice is really just instructions for how to be palatable to people who don’t want to be challenged. Actual good writing makes someone uncomfortable at least once.
It doesn't seem intended to be, maybe GrimMoar just had things to say about cliches and took your comment as a prompt to say it.
Very interesting but I notice there was no real discussion of what you want to achieve by writing. Virtually all of those suggestions don't apply for some goals.
If I'm honest my true reason for writing is a combination of wanting to put my thoughts down cleanly and to feel I put down a rationally compelling argument something I disagree with is wrong. That is often in direct tension with writing well -- my ideal post is a cross between a proof and analogies to explain the proof. I'm never going to be Scott Alexander but I don't really want to be, I want to occasionally convince some academic types online.
Other people care more about audience but if your true reason for writing is to show how educated and intellectually fashionable you are (in a continental philosophy kind of sense) you absolutely *must* write in obscurintast prose, hedge everything in overly complex.
Of course I'm just talking now for my own sake so I'll stop but I do think it would be good for many people to do some deep thinking about their goals in blogging.
Not just blogging - all writing! The goal doesn’t have to be to reach a large audience, but if the goal involves reaching some particular audience, then writing in a way that convinces that audience to care about what you’re saying is essential.
I had this thought on the section about explainers. So much of my writing is essentially explainers - book reviews, encyclopedia entries, expositions of how conditioning in measure zero events works, etc. But I don’t see the troubles Scott mentions, because I know something about my intended audience, and what I think will be useful for them to know about this topic, and why that means that my exposition of these familiar ideas should take a different form from other expositions of these same ideas, and thus why this one should exist even though others do as well.
That is certainly true, but it depends a lot on your cost benefit analysis. I may tell myself I'm trying to convince people when I write online but at some level I know it's not super important that I do and I'm more interested in sharpening/thinking through my own views than reaching out to anyone else.
EDIT: On the subject of good writing, the rest of this comment could probably be replaced with: "Yah, but sometimes I like to drone on for my own benefit."
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Despite what it may seem, I am actually pretty good at writing when I invest enough time but I usually reserve that level of efforlt for journal submissions. I mean I do want other people to be convinced by the points I make but do I want it enough to put in the effort? Often I don't, especially since in many interactions (especially in comments) clarity of thought (as I see it) is in tension with reaching the reader.
For instance two of the most recent online debates I got into (that dog breed bans don't target the inherently dangerous breeds and that you can't just intuitively know stock prices are disconnected from expected profits) both ended up foundering at the point I said: both my hypothesis and your hypothesis predict the evidence you are citing so it can't be a reason to favor your theory. I still say that because I want to make the point clearly to some imagined audience even though I know if we've gotten to this point it won't work for those people. But I am at a particularly large competitive disadvantage in those situations -- I do find the abstract approach natural -- so it doesn't seem worth it.
A better version of myself would probably not care about those discussions at all but I think we often feel the need to impress the imagined audience of people whose opinions we want to care about in our heads whether they are there in real life or not.
Some writing definitely is more for one’s own benefit! My partner dislikes social media (including blog comments) because he thinks that’s all any of it is, and he doesn’t feel like in participating in anyone else’s talking for their own benefit.
I think it can be a totally valid reason for some writing, but it’s helpful to be clear what’s going on in what context.
There’s definitely a failure mode of teaching where a professor takes the time to spell something out “correctly” even though the details of the inductive proof that the number of parentheses in a well-formed formula is always even end up losing the students and prevent them from getting anything out of the rest of the class.
the kung fu parable addresses that, I think
"But why do I want to defeat my enemies?"
Continental philosophy absolutely does not need to be obscurantist. Many continental philosophers write in very plain language.
Who do you mean...but yes I left out my several sentence qualification that by continental philosophy I mean to refer to a certain style of philosophy that has been associated in popular culture with that term that is neither exclusive to or all of the philosophers who descend from the continental tradition. I'd say plenty of Hypatia pieces are continental in this sense even if they don't have that DNA.
But at the same time being obscurintast isn't just about big silly words and academicese. You can adopt a folksy vibe while being obscurintast.
I really mean to pick out the class of work characterized by the following (as a matter of degree) the use of terms and concepts which are largely understood by way of gist and without an attempt to explore the limits of the concept (eg does objectification include asking someone to stand on something for you, is it power if...). And which also deliberately tries to use terms which we feel we have a strong emotional or vibe understanding of even if not a cleae sense of the limits of application.
"Has the ability to" isn't just inflated phrasing — "can" carries a permission reading as well as a capability one, so the longer form sometimes does real disambiguation work. When the point is specifically about someone's range or capacity, collapsing it to "can" introduces ambiguity that wasn't there. The other five examples are clean and the advice is solid, but this one slightly undermines the list. Depends on context for what the blogpost was about, but not good as a standalone example.
For that matter, only one of the six examples is an actual passive voice. I realize Scott actually wrote "*like* the passive voice" but I've seen too much anti-passive advice from people who clearly don't know what passive is to be able to restrain myself here
I noticed this as well and I'm glad someone less lazy than I am pointed it out.
This is a great format and I wish more people would write like this: mental tapas.
15 reasons you'll love listicles - number 6 will surprise you!
How to ensure I will not read your article...
I do miss surprising listicles, but Scott has a nice tasting menu here.
Humans have always enjoyed listicles. Consider the 7 Wonders of the World.
I'd like to add the ten commandments and the seven deadly sins. Hm, the four-fold way? I think we're not the first ones to make fun of them either, Dante was ahead of us.
Re 15, I've often found it helpful to act like I'm responding to an argument where the obvious things have already been said and do interesting meta level twists on them.
Though this does conflict with the other common observation that what is obvious for you isn't obvious for other people.
"I’ve found it helpful to think of cliches as missed quest hooks - signs that you could have said something really unique and interesting here. What about “Avoid cliches with all the ferocity of Jim Cramer avoiding good stock picks”?
If you do this all the time, you’ll either end up cringe or the next Shakespeare, no middle ground"
This is The Last Week Tonight/Jeff Maurer approach. I like both, and this definitely leads to some good lines, but I think they'd be better off picking thier spots with this.
"In my own experience, GLP-1 medication doesn’t affect my experience of hunger."
This one still fails a few of your rules! It remains overly convoluted, hedges too much, and inserts you where you don't need to be. There is not one else who could have experience of your hunger. Also, all hunger is an experience. "GLP-1 medication doesn't affect my hunger." contains all the same information.
(Of course, the context might have preferred the version you did use, as you say these aren't ironclad rules.)
It's also redundant; you say it's "my experience" twice.
The phrase "in my own experience" signals to me that he knows it's unusual, or at least not universal, and that other people don't feel the same. Simply stating X wouldn't include that. If the context of the article was "my experience with glp1" then I would agree.
It does emphasize that it's personal, but I feel that's redundant with "my hunger". Leaving out the "my" would indeed make it ambiguous whether the reporting was based on studies or personal use, but so long as it's there, reiterating that his hunger is an experience he has had is logically unnecessary. It may in fact be necessary to forestall objections.
If you want to convey something about other people’s experiences, I think it is better to come out and say it, rather than trying to signal it with redundancy.
Example: “Studies report that GLP-1 medication reduces feels of hunger, but I know that’s not true for everybody because it’s not true for me. GLP-1 medication doesn’t affect my experience of hunger.”
That’s longer, but it’s also clearer and conveys more information.
The experience of hunger and how we experience that experience can be two separate concepts.
As in, you felt just as hungry but somehow it was more tolerable.
I don't have any history of this with hunger to report. But I remember, noting on another drug that while was still aware I was tired and sleepy, it was easier to ignore that feeling of tiredness.
"I've heard people say, 'GLP-1 medication doesn't affect my hunger but does affect my experience of hunger.' Not so for me. In my own experience, GLP-1 medication doesn’t affect my experience of hunger."
> 15.5: Just say the thing you want to say
This is probably the most important thing beginner writers could do. For me learning to write was doing this over and over, again and again, until it became the second nature.
I suspect every experienced writer would give this piece of advice in some form, either having learned from someone else or stumbled upon it via convergent cultural evolution.
I learned it from Sasha Chapin then saw it in Sergei Dovlatov's book “The Suitcase” (1986), which prompted me to write an essay about it “Writing Hack: Write It Just Like That”: https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/writing-hack-write-it-just-like-that
Damn, this is a useful and valuable post. Thank you
Not just useful, I would even describe it as damn useful- ... damn use- wait what the
Someone clearly has no editor.
FR. Out of touch elite bloggers just assuming that I have an editor, clearly it’s over for me. This is why I cannot get good at writing untill capitalism is destroyed.
What's wrong with the 5-paragraph essay ? It's basically the same format as any scientific article. First you write the abstract: "this is what my paper will show". Then you list all the experiments you've performed and the data you've collected, and explain how all this work supports your claim: "this is what I have done". Finally, you summarize your conclusions: "this is how I know I'm right". Traditionally, scientific articles often mention potential future work in the conclusion: "this is what you can do to improve on my work" -- or, more cynically, "this is why you should give me money". What's wrong with that ?
I don't know much about literary analysis, but still, I'd set up the essay a little differently:
Opening: Who is the protagonist of Medea ? While there is some debate on the topic, I can show that Medea herself is the best candidate, as opposed to Antigone or Aristophanes.
Body: Identifying the protagonist of a literary work can be a contentious task. The term "protagonist" is typically define as the character who possesses properties foo, bar and baz (see references). However, in a complex work such as Medea, multiple characters can fit the definition to some degree.
Body: For example, X claims that the protagonist of Medea is Antigone, because of X1, X2, and X3.
Body: Alternatively, Y claims that it is instead Aristophanes, due to Y1, Y2, Y3 and Y4.
Body: I argue that both X's and Y's approaches are flawed, and Medea herself is the protagonist. Medea clearly fulfills criteria of M1, M2, and M3, much more so than yadda yadda yadda here's the technique I developed etc.
Conclusion: Thus, Medea is clearly the best candidate for the protagonist. While X's and Y's arguments do have merit, I have shown that Medea fulfills all the requisite criteria much more closely than Antigone or Aristophanes or indeed any other character.
Future work: The approach I have developed could be applied to other literary works, and if I had some of that sweet sweet grant money, I could in fact do so, thus conclusively settling all protagonist-related debates once and for all.
> "The protagonist of Medea is a matter of some debate. X person says it was Antigone, Y person says it was Aristophanes, but I'm going to take the sure bet, and say it was Medea. She was A, B, and has the tragic flaw of C."
> That's a decent opening paragraph, but it's not how you're taught to write one for a 5 paragraph essay. My opening paragraph there focuses on engagement, why you should listen to me -- that there is something of interest that I do actually have to prove.
I don't agree. I've read too many things that clearly stated they were going to refute some other opinion, their nemesis.
Probably satisfying for them, but I never encountered the nemesis opinion, don't know what it is, and don't care about internal turf wars in your department. Say what you think is accurate; don't wave your arm at the idea that, because your take is accurate, it's better than some other worse take that must not be named.
Since the beginning of time, mankind has sought to communicate in an effective way. However, not all forms of communication are equally effective. In this comment, I'm going to show that the five paragraph-essay is a bad way to communicate.
Primarily, the five-point essay format is boring, and if people are bored by your writing, why should they read it? It's not coincidence that the only people who regularly read five-point essays are teachers who are paid to read it. I'm not paid to read it, I have nearly infinite other things to read, if I'm bored by your writing, I'll probably go do something else and miss out on whatever thing you were trying to communicate.
Secondly, a fixed format is unnecessary for most communication purposes. It's useful for something like a scientific document where the 'legibility' of the format is more important than it being interesting or unique. You're reading a scientific paper for the result, not because you're looking to be entertained (exception: SIGBOVIK), so a "boring" format is not a downside. (Except that maybe this is part of why nobody actually reads scientific papers and so virtually all discourse is several levels detached from the actual evidence)
Tertiarily, the five paragraph essay is bad because it artificially constrains the form of the argument. You may end up inventing hypothetical points just to fit the format, or leaving out good points because they don't.
In conclusion, are you still reading this? Or did you get the joke I was making two sentences in and feel like your time was being wasted. (Maybe you're even thinking "slop" though I hereby solemnly swear that no LLM was involved in this comment) In the end, one thing is clear: learning about subatomic particles is part of what makes us human.
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In its defense, and why I think Scott is "drawn to it" - it's meant to be training wheels for the act of "having a point" and "finding reasons (more than one, but probably not a dozen) to support that point" and "communicating those reasons to a reader in a legible way" and those are all good things to learn and something that you can fail at ("have a point to make" is also the point of some of the other pieces of advice here)... but yeah, it's meant to be training wheels and not actually used in anger.
I think you might be interpreting the five-paragraph format a bit too strictly; I don't remember being taught that essays are supposed to have *exactly* five paragraphs; rather, they should start with the single-paragraph abstract, proceed to the body where your points are split into individual paragraphs for clarity, and culminate in the single-paragraph conclusion which drives the thesis home in the reader's mind.
> In the end, one thing is clear: learning about subatomic particles is part of what makes us human.
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but your conclusion should at least reference the abstract, and ideally logically follow from your argument in the body !
In my experience, you couldn't have less than 5 paragraphs, but if you wanted more body paragraphs, that was okay or even recommended. If you were given a word count, you might have even been able to get away with 2 body paragraphs if they were long enough.
Only comment I read in full in this whole comment section. Now I am going to google "SIGBOVIK". 5/5 would recommend.
If you're interested in SIGBOVIK, check out Tom7 who does video versions of his SIGBOVIK papers - "Harder Drives" (https://tom7.org/harder/) and "Badness 0" (https://tom7.org/bovex/) are two of my favorites. But the whole publication has some fun ones.
This was one of the most structured and easy to read comments that I've ever read on this blog! I disagree with the content, though.
The scientific paper format is very dull and readers routinely skip to the part they’re interested in. It's good for publishing findings, but doesn't work for a blog post.
This
Style does, contrary to some opinions, matter. If you are writing a blog meant to thoroughly handle some subject and leave readers *more correct* than they were before, to actually be digestable AND digested, and so on, you need them to actually attentively read the whole thing.
More than that, from your point of view you want to be successful, respected, liked, etc.; people don't generally approach writing without wanting at least some of those things. Sometimes, you might be writing the best article on trees because you want to be paid, even.
Scott is giving advice to people who want some combination of the above, who are trying to be bloggers, more or less. Giving them the advice to use the most pedestrian, least interesting, most innoculated-against format (or not giving them advice not to use that) would be working against their interests. It's just not the most effective tool for the job, especially in a competition field where the next guy DOES have style and can wield it effectively in ways that surpass the utility of the 5-paragraph format.
Well for starters, scientific papers are boring and nobody reads them unless they really have to.
But more to the point, five-paragraph essays are a format that some topics might fall naturally apart into, but most don't. Do you really have exactly three points you want to make? And is each point really so simple that a single paragraph feels like the right amount to spend on it?
The other problem with the transparent telling-three-times. Repeating the main points in the introduction and conclusion is reasonable when you've got tens or hundreds of pages between them, but when there's less than a page of text between introduction and conclusion it feels gratingly repetitive -- too much skeleton and too little meat. If you want to repeat yourself thrice in a short space then you need to disguise what you're doing.
Scott likes to use slightly more than 5 paragraphs when making posts.
But the main issue i can think of is the 5PE doesn't fit well with his other advice. Eg mystery, conflict, humor. I have never enjoyed reading or writing a 5PE. Good posts flow more naturally. To me It's like the "six sided room". I'm sure an architect needs to learn that at some point, but plenty learn it naturally before leaving highschool.
My Grade 8 Social Studies teacher, the wonderful Mr. Hemingway, told us to structure our reports thus:
Tell me what you're going to tell me.
Then tell me.
Then tell me what you've told me.
With respect… I don’t actually read this blog for the writing or think it’s that great. I read Sam Kriss and Hunter S. Thompson for the writing. I read you for the ideas and analysis, which are exceptional
He hasn't written much fiction on the new blog, but if you aren't a longtime reader, I cannot recommend enough that you check the old blog, SlateStarCodex, under the Fiction tag.
Even some of his newer nonfiction stuff has been entertaining, though. I still sometimes think about the post on ivermectin, in which he says of one of the studies "I hope it one day finds its way back to its home planet".
Interesting. I think I get where you're coming from, but I also think one of the virtues of Scott's writing is how unobtrusive and unspectacular it (usually) is. I think he frequently produces inconspicuous little masterpieces of communication. In this light, it's really hard to separate style and substance.
I come from academic mathematics, where writing skill is *extremely* important. It takes an enormous amount of skill to communicate ideas which are, by definition, at the frontiers of human understanding. If you're reading a math paper and the writing sticks out, it's (probably) bad writing. If I'm trying to understand a difficult concept, and I have to wade through a New Yorker-style 3 act longform piece, let alone a Krissian descent into madness (I love those), I'm going to be pissed.
Something like Scott's "Meditations on Moloch" is a good example of great writing skill employed in the service of communication.
In other words, Scott is a great technical writer.
It's almost comical how misleading that description is for "Meditations on Moloch". Technical writing makes me think of instruction manuals.
It's a beautiful piece.
You made me think of Scholze's writing: luminously clear on the bleeding edge. When I don't understand Scholze, which is almost always within the first page, I can viscerally tell it's because my brain can't follow the reasoning, not because his writing is bad. It's almost like the antithesis of continental philosophy.
Bruh you don't like the fiction either? Even the recent fiction is fantastic. How about the Buddha/John Rawl recent post
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/being-john-rawls?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true&_src_ref=google.com
Fiction isn’t just about the writing either. Famously, Shakespeare’s stories aren’t particularly compelling, but his turns of phrase defined hundreds of years of literature. Re the John Rawls one… it was okay. Kinda gimmicky for me. If there’s anything I liked about it, it’s the novelty of the idea (implemented veil of ignorance in charitable giving).
I find the advice to avoid passive voice to be a strictly American-English custom.
It's frustrating as a Brit to have MS Word try and correct what is standard British usage.
"Never use the passive where you can use the active" was one of Orwell's six rules from his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language": https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ Though that's less strong than "never use the passive at all", and Orwell was only giving advice for some types of writing.
It's not an American custom. It's an American belief unrelated to any actual practice. It's like homo-ousianism vs homoi-ousianism - there is no content.
(It's worse, in that the holy words do have a meaning and you could theoretically pay attention to that meaning, but you aren't supposed to do that.)
That's not right for the reasons other replies already gave. But you're right it's more commonly used in British English. And still more in most Continental writing. Largely because American culture is to be more direct about basically everything.
But notwithstanding that usage, when I'm editing British writers aiming at British audiences, I still mostly take it out. And they still mostly think the edits make it clearer.
The passive voice has its legitimate uses. Sometimes the object is the focus. Sometimes the subject is unknown. Sometimes making the subject a surprise is a good literary device. But usually usually readers want to know who's doing what to what thing. That's the natural order, and any other makes processing harder.
So be direct by default. Even if it's not how you or your audience speak. Because writing is very different from speech.
Adrian Mitchell wrote a positive version of 'This Be The Verse' many years ago. It's called 'This Be The Worst', although it should be called 'This Be The Reverse'. He left the coastal shelf part untouched, which reminds us that we can change the constraints at any time, even if keeping them in place is helpful. We, as mere mortals, can manage that.
Here it is in full:
They tuck you up, your Mum and Dad.
They read you Peter Rabbit, too.
They give you all the treats they had
And add some extra, just for you.
They were tucked up when they were small,
(Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke),
By those whose kiss healed any fall,
Whose laughter doubled any joke.
Man hands on happiness to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
So love your parents all you can
And have some cheerful kids yourself.
- Adrian Mitchell
That's nice, and much better than Scott's version (no offence Scott, I realise you're showing us uncompleted draft poetry that you decided not to finish in order to illustrate a very good point!)
"It deepens like a coastal shelf" is hard to beat with a rising simile, even without the constraint of needing to rhyme with anything in particular. Nothing rises with the silent, sudden, invisible enormity that the ocean deepens. Rising is all impermanent and showy, deepening is eternal and ineffable.
And "And have some cheerful kids yourself" is a much better ending than Scott's "And if you’re up for it, have kids" -- partially because it follows Scott's own advice and avoids unnecessary qualification and hemming and hawing.
"It widens like the sky itself" hits a similar note, although it's inferior to the original.
Disagree on all points tbh. I don't want to argue about it, just provide a data point that shows it's a matter of taste.
I like Scott's ending and his rising simile better, and also Scott's original example of a mountain is a thing that rises with silent enormity. (I'll grant it's visible. Idk what you mean by sudden, since a coastal shelf forms gradually)
I never in all my schooling came across the concept of the five-paragraph essay. Perhaps it hadn't been developed yet in the 1970s?
It was all through school in the '90's, along with the correlate that any opinion you had needed three supporting reasons. One really good reason, like "that's so expensive it's impossible," simply wasn't good enough, because that only gives you three paragraphs.
It was bad at the time and it's worse now.
My teachers would allow us to split "that's expensive" into "a) that's too expensive for discretionary funding", "b) that provides no income to finance a loan", and "c) look at all the other stuff that's less expensive and better".
Well, mostly. And depending on how they felt about the student who handed in the paper. And they also didn't necessarily teach us how to do this, or tell us it was allowed.
But hey, perfection is so expensive it's impossible!
Did you write essays at all? Did teachers demand that they have an introduction and a conclusion? Then you've basically got a five-paragraph essay... having exactly five paragraphs isn't that important but it's the minimum respectable number of paragraphs and the maximum number that you can realistically hand-write in a one-hour exam so it turns into the default.
(I'm not sure if everyone else had to hand-write these damn things under exam conditions)
Sure, we wrote essays, but there was never even a specific demand that we write opening paragraphs that say what we're going to say, or closing paragraphs that say what we said. I would have rebelled if there had been. The only thing I remember the teacher saying is that you start a new paragraph whenever you change the subject, and I said, "But the whole essay is about the same subject."
Yes, I remember being taught about splitting it up into paragraphs and "when you start a new paragraph, write it like this" (e.g. leaving a space or indenting it, to mark the beginning of a new paragraph).
Nothing about "it must be five paragraphs and done like this, this and this".
No more did I, but that's probably because (1) I am a dinosaur (my secondary school English teacher recently died, God rest her) and (2) I am not American.
I sometimes see online discussions of American schooling and my jaw drops because it was nothing like what I experienced, but perhaps Irish schools are now like that, or more like that, because it's the 21st century, grandma!
To the point about clichés: Eliminating tired figurative language & turns of phrase makes your writing more interesting and evocative, yes, but the real thing to avoid is the conceptual cliché: assuming that X must be Y because you get repeated messaging from your social group / the media that X is usually Y. (Poor people are usually unhappy, crime is really bad right now, whatever it is.) Probably harder to remember in fiction / creative writing -- hopefully you are already in a critical headspace and committed to sourcing things as best you can when writing nonfiction or a piece of analysis -- but well worth keeping top of mind all the same.
>Eliminating tired figurative language...
Hmm...
Headline:
'fly like an eagle' hospitalized - their physician said they collapsed from extreme exhaustion, condition guarded but stable
As a good but lazy writer of yore, I read every line of this post with pleasure. I'm wondering, though (and this actually projects through to your whole blog, and the project of the ER/AR[?] community) - is this for writing as vocation or avocation? Day job or hobby? Obviously [lol] there can only be a few bloggers who blog successfully for money, full time. But who tf has time to put enough effort into writing that it becomes worthwhile to read if you also have a day job? And kids? And occasionally go camping or drinking? Just curious what you'll say.
I wasn't a fan of "auction bids." The valence is wrong: prices going up is sometimes good but sometimes bad!
So I thought about it for thirty seconds and came up with something better.
Man passes ecstasy to man
It rises up like popcorn lids!
Enjoy your time here while you can
And if you’re up for it, have kids
Maybe this is a stupid question, but what are "popcorn lids" ? I know what those words mean separately, but not what they are referring to when joined together.
Am I just a weirdo because I have never made popcorn that way ?
No you're probably just young enough to have grown up in a world with microwave ovens.
I believe they mean when you have a popcorn popping machine, where the kernels are put in a pot thing in the center, and as they pop they push open the lid (I'd say flap) of the pot and fall into the rest of the receptacle.
I should also add that "flying squids" also rise up sometimes. Heh.
It rises up like horny tits? Heh. Ahem. It rises up like a flock of tits. Better?
Relevant to the low hanging fruit, Palantir recently posted a 22 point "manifesto" that's aroused controversy and now threatens to cost it government contracts:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/palantir-manifesto-uk-contract-fears-mps
The thing about it is, the manifesto was mostly restating, word-for-word, what Palantir CEO Alex Karp already wrote in a book published last year. Someone should start reading and reviewing these books supposedly written by these oligarchs.
"Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive." Commence pearl clutching! Deranged supervillain spotted!
Words don't mean merely their literal definition. Cf. "Black Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter."
And who gets to decide what they mean? Why, of course, our betters at The Guardian and their distinguished friends!
I must defend "The data say" because it is increasingly rare that people recognize that data are plural.
Two points against this: one is that this is sort of a "Tiffany Problem" - yes it's historically realistic to have a character named "Tiffany" in a story set in the middle ages, but if you actually do that, it's going to distract people from the story you're trying to tell (or the point you're trying to make).
And the descriptivist argument is that "data" is singular. Who cares what the latin roots are, you know it's singular because everyone puts the word "is" after it, and if dictionaries haven't updated to indicate that it's a singular word yet, give it enough time and they will.
The pragmatic compromise is to avoid constructions which distinguish singular from plural. "According to the data" works either way. (Bonus points for not anthropomorphizing the data, too, I guess)
I don't find either of those reasons compelling. If people find it distracting to see a historically accurate name, then good on the author for challenging the reader and helping to make their model of the world more accurate. I won't say an author is wrong for choosing to use a different name, but I will push back as hard as necessary against someone who says an author is wrong for refusing to rewrite history to suit modern assumptions.
The second point is just "everyone else is doing it" in more words. Maybe I'd find it compelling if I didn't regularly see the singular form, datum, in my life (it's a term used in technical drawing), so in point of fact it would be difficult for me to "avoid constructions which differentiate the singular from plural" without losing precision and falling out of step with established technical language. As far as I'm concerned, the only singular Data is an officer aboard the Enterprise.
I certainly wouldn't tell somebody NOT to do that on the basis that it might not match the expectations of a modern audience. If the writing is intended to be historically accurate, it is counterproductive to make apologies. Same reason it's so grating that modern Jurassic Park movies go out of their way to make excuses not to put feathers on the dinosaurs--especially when the original was at the cutting edge of scientific understanding for its day.
Ultimately a reader's attention is a limited resource and you've got to pick your battles about where to spend it. And if your ultimate goal is to tell a story or communicate an idea, then distracting them with Ye Olde Tiffany's might be counter-productive to the overall goal.
That's not to say "never challenge the reader's existing ideas" - maybe it's important to the story or to you personally to challenge the readers' views on their perceptions of historical [fill in the blank here]. ... but if it's just trivia like "some people in the past were named Tiffany", well, it's not where I'd spend my powder.
In descriptivist terms, data isn't singular, it's a mass noun like furniture or advice.
Usually I'm not a fan of giving in to popular linguistic trends, but mass noun "data" is just a more useful word these days.
Yes, agreed. I am a bit of a Luddite. I have to restrain myself from pointing out that an army that has been decimated has lost one part in ten rather than having been obliterated.
Your last “are” should be “is” because you are referring to the word “data”, not data itself. What you said would be like saying “the word ‘ducks’ are plural.”
You're correct; given a do-over I would write "the word 'data' is plural".
There is irony in being caught in such a mistake.
Instead of "The data say..." you should obviously go with "Survey says..." which sidesteps pluralization ambiguity and is pleasingly alliterative, as well as priming your reader to read your essay in the voice of Steve Harvey.
Curious if you are similarly unbending with “agenda.”
The passive voice is often confusing when used in technical writing.
"The cable shall be installed in the cable trench."
(By who? The contractor reading the work description? Or will the contractor arrive on site to find the cable has already been installed?)
vs. the intended:
"Install the cable in the cable trench."
My legal writing instructor hammered this into me in law school (I almost wrote "this was hammered into me in law school," which would have been embarrassing). Passive voice hides the ball by hiding the subject of the sentence. Using it means one of two things: either you're lazy and don't edit your work, or you're deliberately trying to obfuscate the facts of what you're describing.
"Mistakes were made."
> (I almost wrote "this was hammered into me in law school," which would have been embarrassing)
"This was hammered into me in law school" would have been a perfectly good thing to say as well. But it would have given me the impression that it was something you heard from a whole bunch of people at law school rather than something you heard from one person at law school.
It's certainly a better thing to say than "My professors, my fellow students, my class tutors, the Dean, and three particularly chatty lunch ladies hammered this into me at law school".
The obfuscating can be used humanely, as a way of softening a critical statement.
Of course. As always, context is everything. There's a reason the overlap in the Venn diagram of "good legal writing" and "good writing" is just a tiny sliver occupied almost exclusively by Antonin Scalia (pbuh). There are plenty of perfectly legitimate uses for the passive voice: softening a critical statement (as you said), times when obfuscation is appropriate for practical or literary reasons, emphasizing the object of the sentence when it is more important than the subject, or even for pure aesthetic reasons in poetic/literary/non-formal contexts.
For the type of straightforward writing for clarity most of us are trying to accomplish most of the time in places like this, however, I think avoiding passive voice where you can is a good rule of thumb. It is typically clearer, more concise, and more intelligible than the alternative, and most of us are probably not skilled enough prose stylists that removing this specific tool from the toolbox would be a net negative.
The lotion was put in the basket.
The person whose subjective experience is the topic of this sentence has difficulty parsing non-convoluted passive voice examples, and thus found enlightenment with this technical example. Gratitude was expressed.
But it's appropriate if the intended audience is not necessarily the person who must lay the cable in the cable trench.
I think "shall" is an unclear verb though, which is why it fell out of use apart from a few contexts.
We took "shall" and "must" to be mandatory, whereas "should" was weaker - more like "recommended".
I speak Hungarian, which has practically no passive, and it forces an entirely different kind of thinking. For example "this website is under construction", while being used, is considered an ugly mirror translation from English and German and not really idiomatic. So you try "we are constructing this website", but then you realize there are two problems, who is the we, and why should anyone care what you are doing? So eventually you settle on "this website will be online around June 2026", because that is what people are actually interested in.
I wanted to agree with section 7 in particular. I am a synthesizer, but I make it work by reading a ton of econ papers, especially ones unpublished and on the frontier, and bringing this to the audience. It is interesting because you cannot trace the exact genealogy of ideas, and thus you will learn something. If someone only reads blogs, then they will come across as totally tasteless.
Another suggestion that came to me while reading this is that if you're someone like Scott Alexander whose posts will be read for many years, it might be wise to avoid dated references that aren't part of your main subject. It might be a bit less fun for current readers, but it will be clearer to future readers. Think of the children!
For example, "they’ll start asking Jerome Powell to raise the literary interest rate." could have used "the Fed" rather than the name of someone whom most readers will probably not remember years from now.
Or it'll make your writing serve as a fun time capsule for the sorts of geeks who are likely to be reading this sort of thing. H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds comparing the tripods to milking stools, the WWII bomber defensive gunner training video explaining the problem of inherited velocity using the example of throwing a newspaper from a moving bicycle, basically all of Mark Twain.
It could almost be a corollary of "Write what you want to write": exist in your own time, and if the best reference for your readers becomes a headscratcher in 150 years, well, you can chuckle as you look down from heaven and see people go on whatever passes for a wiki walk in a century and a half.
After all, the floppy disk save icon and "rolling down" the windows both work just fine even today.
The last time there was an identifiable Head of the Fed whose name-check I'd reliably catch in casual passing would have been *checks banknotes* Alan Greenspan. Could be pushed to recall Janet Yellen or Ben Bernake with some prompting, but I didn't spend much of the Obama years thinking about macroeconomic policy (too busy living in its detritus), so those personages weren't sticky in the same way. Though in fairness, this is mostly due to the Commander in Briefs constantly Streisanding his enemies, rather than any exciting developments with the Prime Rate.
Although there is nonzero merit in timelessly future-proofing one's writing for the <s>AI training data</s> ages, more often than not it comes across as a deliberate and somewhat annoying tic. Our experiences are anchored in a specific slice of time, and it's weird to have no contemporaneous nods - particularly where levity is concerned, since that hinges on shared context without a bunch of tedious setup. Like who's to say even the main precipitating subject, Inkhaven at Lightcone, will exist many years from now? But it'd be a poor use of runway to start off this listicle with "recently, I felt like writing a meta-post due to some unfulfilled spiritual obligations to a local writing workshop..." or whatever. I extend that sort of courtesy to FdB, since meta-craft is one of his main irons in the fire, but it's not really what I read Scott for. (Outside of fiction or satire, as other comments have pointed out, his main writerly power is just the consistent dogged application of More Dakka.)
And thus have lost all personality. The connection to current events is what makes it engaging.
Writing a vicious attack on Lightcone post pros and cons:
- Cons: the only inkhaven 1 participant not invited to join inkhaven 2 for a week (very sad)
- Pros: Scott Alexander says I have the true blogger spirit
(To be clear, though, the post was not intended as a vicious attack. I felt a duty do write it (and publish it immediately) for the reasons described in it. I don’t think Lightcone Infrastructure are making the world worse on net, or that nobody should donate to them; only that there are doing some stuff badly, that people should be very careful when dealing with Oliver Habryka and be aware of his policies, and that there is information that, for some people, would change their mind about donating to LI.)
Did it make things awkward during your stay there?
Somewhat so with Oliver Habryka, not really otherwise. (Though you’d need to ask other people whether it was awkward for them.)
One experience, though a lot more funny than awkward, was one the residents coming up to me after I made the post and saying that it’s a shitty thing to do as a guest. I asked them if they’ve read the post (as it contained an explanation for why it was written and published at that point), and they replied that they have not. This immediately teleported me into the “I haven’t read Pasternak but I condemn him” situation as Pasternak, which somehow never happened before!
Don't hurt me but, the preceding clause is a real hum-dinger of a way to start a sentence.
I saw a name starting with "F, r, e" and followed by "don't hurt me" and somehow started expecting to read Freddie duBoer responding to the many people apparently wishing for his death.
The words "don't hurt me" haddaway of reminding me of something else.
And now I'll have that stuck in my head all morning.
Am I getting pranked? One of Scott’s recent posts included a sentence that started with “obviously” and was not obvious at all. At least, tons of Americans would consider it trivially rebuttable by means of newspaper headlines seen by the entire anglophone world. And now he says not to use the word “obviously”?
And just a few months ago he did a post (or part of one) about how terrible Scott Adams’ wild hyperbole was, followed up by a post lampooning Trump which was full of wild hyperbole. I can’t make sense of it.
I keep thinking there has to be a Straussian esoteric reading somebody smarter than me is putting together the puzzle pieces of.
The use of "obviously" here sounds like "for humorous effect," which is one of those usages beyond the simple rules for beginners.
Are you referring to the POSIWID post he linked to above?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/orban-was-bad-even-though-we-dont
“Still, the 2028 presidential election is a toss-up, and it’s obvious that neither party can get away with crazy things like openly shooting opposing senators or shutting down opposing newspapers.”
That one seems fair enough. In other contexts it wouldn't be obvious, but here in the US it is, and that's a relevant distinction. The word actually appears in the url of this one linked above https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of
It does prove his point here; that bit stood out to me as being wrong and weakening the post.
I read this as "It's obvious to both parties that they can't get away with it" rather than "It should be obvious to the reader that they can't get away with it".
Not only can they not get away with it, they _obviously_ can't get away with it, which means they won't try. If they non-obviously couldn't get away with it then you'd have to worry that they might try, thinking they could get away with it.
So yes, it's a very different use of the word obviously.
Not saying you can’t read it that way, but I didn’t.
Yes, this is how I read it as well. 'Obviously' carries load-bearing information *about the beliefs of the parties*, which is relevant to the meaning of the argument.
Spend 30 years avoiding the word "obviously", then you may use it in your writing.
> No words like “obviously”. Either it’s obvious to the reader, in which case there’s no need to say this, or it’s not obvious, in which case it’s insulting
One of my favorite jokes is about the math professor who during a lecture says "...and from here the answer is obvious", to which a student raises their hand and asks "Sorry, is that actually obvious?". The professor stops, looks at the blackboard and thinks for a minute... five minutes... ten minutes... finally he exclaims, "Ah ha! It *is* obvious" and then he continues with his lecture.
As I see it, the purpose of "obviously" is to avoid your audience feeling talked down to when you explain something they already know, but which would be awkward to cut from the text altogether.
Re Seeing Like a State, have you maybe considered reviewing this book:
https://x.com/BevansAdvocate/status/2046577077307220430
16. If you use non-standard abbreviations that omit punctuation to save keystrokes and raise a speed bump for some readers, omit them when they're superfluous. E.g., "This is to the credit of my readers and community (ie you)."
You're arguing that i.e. is nonstandard?
No; "ie" without periods and a terminating comma, which has been Scott's rendering for a while, is non-standard. My comment did violate at least one of the rules enumerated in the post in that my nominal point that "(you)" was sufficient was secondary to what motivated the comment.
Now I finally understand why, despite Scott introducing ie, eg, cf, and ht to my regular lexicon, I always feel that slight sense of universal wrongness that indicates some prescriptivist rule has been broken, somewhere, somehow. The the the of two-letter abbreviations. Gonna have to be more careful with those going forward, now that the confusion has been noticed.
ht?
Harry Truman, the tipping of a hat as a gesture of appreciation and acknowledgement.
I’ve set my computer and phone to autocorrect ie to i.e. and eg go e.g.
I’ve set my computer and phone to autocorrect ie to i.e. and eg to e.g.
Scott writes: "many discussions of Freddie deBoer start 'I’m a huge fan of Freddie, even though I disagree with everything he says, and find him personally abrasive, and his topics are unoriginal and repetitive, and I hate him, and I hope he dies.'"
That's clearly exaggeration for effect - I don't hate Freddie or wish him ill, and I think he has some actual expertise around education, but yes, his primary appeal is that he's a lovely stylist and his secondary appeal is that he's very cranky, so when he is criticizing something I don't like, I enjoy it.
Maybe Freddie should start a podcast or a writing seminar with Kevin D. Williamson. I'd give it a try.
His posts on AI are infuriating (oh, the goalposts you'll move!), but I still can't quite bring myself to cease reading them entirely. At least the swipes at Matt Yglesias are mostly back to being good-natured ribbing. Reading takedowns of things you like because they nevertheless persist in being entertaining or even thought-provoking: a rare skill, great niche to cultivate. It's even more notable for things I'm completely ambivalent about, like sportsball, where I don't even understand half the jargon, but it's often a fun ride to see The Ringer or whomever get taken down a peg anyway. If someone could write a beautifully compelling paint-drying post, it'd definitely be Freddie.
Orwell has great writing about avoiding cliches in his famous essay "Politics and the English Language" -- https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship."
Dang, Bob really hit a homerun while blindfolded 🤩
"When you demand even the flimsiest of details, nobody’s written a good blog post even on the ultra-controversial topics that everyone talks about every day."
Eh, careful. The real answer is usually "Steve Sailer covered this exhaustively in 2003 but no one will admit to having read it."
«The purpose of poetry is that it’s beautiful and good» - but you don’t believe in either? 🤔
You must be new to Scott’s writing. His old posts on Raikoth are all about how Scott’s imaginary ideal society is founded on the pursuit of Truth and Beauty.
Always thought he was an atheist. Guess I was wrong!
This sounds like rage-bait.
How so?
The implication that atheists can't believe in beauty or good.
How would one justify it as opposed to mere preference?
The good and beauty of poetry doesn't have to be objective or justified.
Scott is an atheist, but he also believes in beauty and goodness. I believe he takes a very intuition-y view of lots of things, including more out there ethical scenarios.
Hey, that's my Hammurabi post!
I learned the "runway" trick from YouTube, where it's super easy for someone to click away if they're bored. You always need to give them at least an excuse to keep their attention on your work.
My favorite sentence: "The fruit is so low-hanging that it’s burrowing tiny fruit boreholes until it dissolves into molten plant matter somewhere near the Mohorovicic discontinuity."
And now, moving on to being as openly one-up-oriented as a good 3/4 of the commenters, here are a coupla variants of Scott's variant of the Larkin poem:
Man passes ecstasy to man
As opened doors and torn-off lids
Step through and master all you can
Then open futures up for kids
It pretty well captures my view, but it lacks the lightness of Scott's poem, and I'm not sure I actually like it as much.
Wanna feel depressed? Here's the grimmest variant I can come up with, way worse than Larkin's:
Man passes horror on to man
The bitten’s bite injects their rabies
Survive by any means you can
And think twice before you make babies.
1. Williams’ Style: Towards Clarity and Grace shows writers how to construct paragraphs that tell clear “stories” (even when they aren’t overtly narrative). Highly recommended. Buy a used copy with the yellow cover (or another > 10 year old version), not the new expensive co-written “textbook”: https://www.amazon.com/Style-Clarity-Chicago-Writing-Publishing/dp/0226899144
2. Claude has become an invaluable editor for my writing. I ask it to suggest areas for improvement in a draft. When I am stuck or unsure about a passage, I ask its advice. By offloading the cognitive effort of conceiving possible next steps, it helps me get to my choices much more quickly. It does not supply my prose: I stand behind every word.
I think part of the problem is that these workshop participants mostly want someone to teach them how to be excellent advanced writers, but what you think they actually need is to learn how to be good beginners. Beginners need to learn how avoid cliches, the passive voice etc.
Here's a nice Yiddish story I just read
A man wants to sell more fish so he sells his little cart and buys a store. Above the store he puts a sign that says "fresh fish sold here daily." Then a kibitzer shows up and says "why write 'daily'? Surely if it's fresh it has to be new that day." So the man paints over the word "daily." Then another kibitzer says "why 'here'?" Surely the sign means that the store is here." So the man paints over the word "here." Then a third kibitzer asks why he wrote "sold" since just "fresh fish" implies it's being sold. So the man paints over the word "sold." A fourth kibitzer comes by and says "why 'fresh'? Would people think you are selling them old fish?" So the man paints over the word fresh. A fifth kibitzer arrives and says "you hardly need the word 'fish' up there, we can smell you from blocks away." So the man finally takes down the sign.
A few days later another kibitzer comes from out of town and asks, "you have such a nice business here but you haven't done any advertising. Why not put up a sign?"
"Ye Newe Fish"
I read this as a kid in an English joke book, I am unconvinced that it's originally Yiddish.
I've been searching for the actual origins of it and I found a Turkish version as well https://enchantedforest.substack.com/p/fresh-fish-sold-here
The concept is not culturally specific at all, the only thing that makes this version especially Yiddish is the liberal use of the word 'kibitzer'
As a Jew, I think the Turks can have this one if they want, but next time there's a folktale of uncertain origin it should be our turn for cultural ownership. :)
Kung Fu parable is actually, I think, why I was never a very good blogger. It's sort of like you spin two wheels, one of which determines your ability to write, and one of which is much heavier and more cumbersome to spin but determines what you have to write about. I'm good at the first wheel and not so good at the second.
Would anyone care to describe improvements they've made in their writing?
I can think of changes I've made relatively recently. I started using comma splices before the m-dash (actually double n-dashes) became a mark of AI.
I used to add my emotions in parentheses, but now, presumably as a result of more self-assurance, I don't.
I don't have samples of what I wrote back when for comparison.
I've got some limited ability to imagine an audience. A lot of the time I'm writing for the past self who didn't yet understand what I'm writing about.
Could you explain what you mean by comma splices relative to em dash
I have an idea-- and then another idea.
I have an idea, and then another idea.
Looking at them now, I see the rhythm is considerably different. The m-dash is staccato, while the comma is smoother. I could have said legato instead of smoother-- but that might have been less likely to be understood.
Since they got out of school is when.
I actually just want to say that I find your writing style in this comments section quite unique and refreshing. I'm not sure what you have but it's a sort of...raw directness...I'm not sure if that's the best description, but it feels unusually straightforward and honest. Hardly anyone actually writes like you do.
Declaring your emotions sounds like it's part of that and something I support. I think I do that myself now and then.(e.g. I'll say something like "your comment is causing me strong disgust which I'm attempting to keep at bay" which I think is a lot better than "your comment is objectively disgusting" or not acknowledging the disgust but having it manifest very obviously). It's a lot harder to do this for positive emotions because they usually feel affected or artificial to me (e.g. "that was very helpful" and equivalents).
'No hedging. “It seems to me that possibly snow might be the sort of thing that is white, although other people might presumably differ”. No! Go to the mountaintop until you can write “Snow is white”. Then, when you leave the mountain, at least you’ll write some normal healthy hedge like “Snow is probably white” instead of some godforsaken sentence with eight nested layers of hedging.'
Bad mountaintop. Absolutely not.
No matter how intricate the origami of qualifiers and epistemic calibrations might get, it can never be as awful as strong, declarative statements on nuanced, complicated questions.
As for the thing that was hit by Bob, I still think "As for the thing that Bob hit" flows better. Part of that is just the rhythm of it: "As for the thing that Bob hit, it lay in the house that Jack built."
>“Just one more question: where do you get your enemies?”
And thus began the denouement of the single longest Columbo episode ever filmed.
Avoid cliches like chlamydia.
Avoid cliches like that guy in the supermarket who is still wearing a mask avoids Covid-19 even though he's already had it twice.
Avoid cliches like a ton of bricks.
Avoid cliches, like and subscribe.
Am I the only one to have thought that rhyming ____ with kids here was a great idea before finishing the section? I found it a good way to conjure the pure, unmaterialized potential of making a new human ab initio... Anyway, the bid bit: indeed better than a mountain, a sunrise.
Man passes ecstasy to man
It rises up like obelisk
Enjoy your time here while you can
And if you’re up for it, have kids
This could be the Castro's epigraph.
Re: #12, this is why sometimes the funniest rounds in cards against humanity happen during the last hands, when everyone agrees to stop drawing cards and play till everyone's hand is empty.
That said, if you really want a kick to the ego wrt how funny you are, put a rando in every round alongside everyone's chosen card. It often does surprisingly well
I think it can help people to figure out what makes them comparatively unique compared to most people to hammer that edge in their writing.
If someone is a high agreeableness worrier, then diligent and well-researched pieces about the impact of crime policy on GDP might be a good avenue for them. If they are really relational and sensitive, then they could maybe go all in on emotionally leveling Knausgaard-style confessional articles. People high in schizotypy could maybe stand to emulate aspects of how TLP used to write. People with underdeveloped self-concepts could play that up: circling controversial arguments, major life contexts, emphasizing that they can see all angles of the situation while being able to commit to none. My problem with most aspiring writers is that they don't differentiate themselves enough: the writing comes off as being written by a generically educated person, without a ton of cues present as to what makes this person's way of seeing things unique.
I also think longer articles are usually better than shorter articles. A lot of aspiring Substackers write really short posts: by the time you have begun to immerse yourself in the writer's perspective and interpretive frame, the article ends.
How long is "30 years" in Scott's sense, literally? 3 months? 12?
40 years.
Man hands on quiet hope to man.
It lingers close like starlight wild.
Press onward however you can.
And pass the light on to a child.
> for those eyes to see
This should read "for those with eyes to see."
I have to say I'm confused about the spinner even knowing that there's a battery and motor. The force is internal, so how does that work with conservation of angular momentum? And what is the force applied exactly? And where was that angular momentum stored in the battery - did the electrons spin in a certain direction?
Ask Claude Opus 4.7 Adaptive! (Or honestly any vaguely frontier model at this point.) I have a degree in physics and ask the models physics questions regularly as a private benchmark. Models would have been unreliable on questions at this level 6-12 months ago; now it's a layup.
(But some key things to realize are that you're holding it, so the spinner isn't a closed system, and that the angular momentum doesn't come from the battery.)
Good advice!
Here's the model's answer. (Briefly: there's a flywheel inside spinning in the opposite direction, so the total angular momentum is actually decreasing with friction all the time as the shell continues to spin at the same speed.)
The spinner is almost certainly a **LIMBO**, made by Fearless Toys — a motorized spinning top that raised over $1M on Kickstarter/Indiegogo. It contains a processor that controls a motor spinning a mass in the counter direction, powered by a rechargeable battery that lasts roughly 4 hours, though one unit famously ran for 27 hours, 9 minutes in 2018 for a world record. There are also DIY versions and clones floating around.
Now the physics, which is actually the more interesting part of the tweet's puzzle:
**The key mistake is treating the spinner as a closed system.** It isn't. The tip is in contact with a table, and the shell is in contact with air. Those contacts are external, and they carry torques. Once you notice that, conservation of angular momentum stops being mysterious — the spinner's total angular momentum *does* change over time because of external friction, and the battery+motor's job is to compensate.
**What the motor actually does.** Inside LIMBO there's a flywheel (rotor) that spins in the opposite direction to the visible shell. A motor applies equal-and-opposite torques to these two parts (Newton's third law, applied internally). So the motor pushes the shell one way and the internal flywheel the other way. The motor cannot create angular momentum out of nothing — it can only transfer it between parts it's bolted to.
**So where does the shell's sustained angular momentum come from?** Two sources, working together:
- Air drag and tip-friction continuously drain angular momentum from the shell to the Earth.
- The motor continuously "refills" the shell's angular momentum by pushing against the internal flywheel, which as a result spins faster and faster in the opposite direction.
The total angular momentum of the whole device (shell + flywheel) is actually *decreasing* the entire time — it's flowing out through tip-friction into the Earth. But the visible shell stays spinning because the motor is pumping negative angular momentum into the hidden flywheel, which spins up. That's why it eventually stops even with battery left: the flywheel hits its terminal speed (back-EMF limits motor torque), or the battery dies, and then there's nothing left to counter the friction.
**On your battery question: no, the electrons aren't spinning in a preferred direction.** A battery stores chemical potential energy, not angular momentum. What the battery provides is *energy*, which the motor dissipates as work against bearing friction, air drag, and the tip's friction with the table. The angular momentum on the spinner's axis was never in the battery — it's being continuously transferred to and from the Earth through the contact point. The Earth's rotation changes by an unmeasurably tiny amount each time you turn the thing on.
**The force applied, concretely:** it's a magnetic torque between the motor's stator (rigidly attached to the visible shell) and the motor's rotor (the internal flywheel). Energy flows battery → current through coils → magnetic torque → mechanical work on both parts. Angular momentum flows shell ↔ flywheel through the same magnetic interaction, and shell ↔ Earth through the tip.
The tweet's "test" is nice because the failure mode is exactly what you'd expect: people can reason fluently about air resistance, bearing quality, material science, etc., but they don't question the premise that this is a passive object. "Spinner" triggers a schema, and the schema doesn't include a battery.
Linking Scott's old post of writing advice, which I thought was great.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
These are fire. This community yet again confounds me. Since man's posted it out here, that means LightHaven benefit is literally the people you meet and they've l whatever famous Substackers care to show up
(steelmanning the case, the strawman is that the mandem drop 4k for the privilege of being forced to write one blog post every day)
> Write the Traditional Five Paragraph Essay on a distant mountaintop for thirty years. Then, when you come down, please please please write something else.
I think this principle applies to many domains. The most creative musicians in the world spent years learning all the standard technique, but that's not how they become famous. Same with athletes with unorthodox styles or rare skills, like Magic Johnson. "You have to understand the rules to know when to break them" is cliche, but true.
"the English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty"
I seriously don't see this. Consider how the word "liberals" could mean anything from the mostly apolitical managerial-professional class to social democrats, even socialists (Chomsky the anarcho-communist was often called one, or at least someone liked by liberals).
Consider the vague meaning of "welfare" esp. "corporate welfare", consider the really vague meaning of "democracy" which half the time means "republic" or rule of law or human rights or whatever you want it to mean.
"government" means the actually elected President half the time, and half the time the career bureaucrats at various agencies, so that it is possible and in fact common for conservatives to like the President and hate the government.
"feminism" can mean anything from Martha Nussbaum's wonderfully precise 14-item sexual objectification checklist to "men are bad amirite".
"atheism" can mean anything from not giving a damn about religion to considering it the root of all historic evil.
"queer" sometimes includes cis, "normie" looking gay guys, sometimes not.
Most of the world has political parties whose policies you can guess from their name, e.g. social democrat, liberal, christian democrat or conservative. America not, although originally "democrat" used to mean a kind of left-populism and "republican" used to mean limited government, it is no longer true in any sense. Nor does the liberal media like the NYT ever had the same kind of explicitly political mission statement as say The Guardian. They are just sort of liberal by osmosis and fashion, not an explicitly stated political project.
"mental health issues" range from "stressed out mood" to "barking mad". "autism" ranges from "rigid engineer type thinking" to "chewing furniture, non-verbal". Then there are those people for whom "christian" means "protestant". "white" sometimes means "WASP". it is utterly unclear whether Rahul Gandhi is white or not. half-black is sometimes black (Prez Obama).
the "rich" in "tax the rich" can range from dentists to Elon Musk. "the poor" seem to have sometimes really fucken big cars. "fat" in body poz discussions can range from not exactly like a fitness model to flat out immobile.
I SO fucking feel like learning Fr*nch.
I also thought that was odd. The quoted phrase doesn't seem true at all. Maybe he just means readers will notice.
Yes, I agree. You can sense it when you enter a patch of insincerity in prose. It's as though the patches have a different texture or smell. But I'm sure that applies to written communications in other languages too, and isn't a special property of English. (But I doubt Scott thinks it's only English language insincerity that turns the litmus paper red.)
How do the story about "where do you get your enemies?" answer the question at 9: “Where do you get your ideas?”
I don't get the implied lesson here.
If you don't have enemies, why are you even learning kung fu?
Seeking out enemies just to use kung fu is perverse. And while you might need to defend yourself at some point, that's not enough to justify truly dedicating yourself to the art.
If you don't have ideas, why even learn to write?
Seeking out ideas just to use your writing skills is perverse. And while reasons to write do come up organically from time to time, that's not enough to justify truly dedicating yourself to the craft.
Yes, it is preverse to learn the art just to beat up someone. But I guess most people learn writing to express themselves first, and to develop writing as a general intelligence/skill. Seeking "enemies" to put what they learned into hands-on practice, to sharpen thinking, avoid fallacies... seems legit. "Enemies" is a strong word, it would be more reasonable to use "sparring partner" or "interlocutor".
If someone wants to express themselves, presumably there is something they want to express
"We're here to teach you how; the why is up to you."
SOTA LLMs are amazing thesauruses. You can have them generate multiple lists of rhyming words all with a topic or connection in mind.
wonderful advice, thanks!
The "Say the thing you want yo say" is what stands out to me the most in your writing. Although I'm not interesting enough to have a blog myself, it positively influenced the way I think. Similar dishonesty can happen i one's thoughts too, and it takes effort to notice it.
>Each of the next three paragraphs presents one piece of evidence for your thesis. The first sentence of each is a topic sentence: “The first piece of evidence that the quark is large comes from particle accelerators”. Then several sentences describing what you mean and why this is true. Next paragraph. “The second piece of evidence that the quark is large comes from theory.” And so on.
This doesn’t seem quite right. Each paragraph presents one argument in support of the thesis; a paragraph can include several pieces of evidence. Here, the first topic sentence should be something like, “Experimental data indicates that the quark is large.” And then, examples of that experimental data: “In Smith (2017), experimental subjects were 20% more likely to fall down the stairs when a quark was placed in their path than when a golf ball was placed in their path. This implies that quark is larger than a golf ball, which is quite large relative to other subatomic particles.”
>I ask my mentees questions like: What is your thesis? How does this paragraph here support the thesis?
Re the latter, back when I was teaching high school, I had some success with the following method: I advised students that the first sentence after each topic sentence should be, “This implies that my thesis is correct because ____________.” If they can’t fill in that blank, then something is wrong. They need to alter either their thesis or their topic sentence.
The same process applies each time they cite a fact. The next sentence should be, “This implies that my topic sentence is correct because ____________. If they can’t fill in the blank, then again there is something wrong. Either the topic sentence needs to be changed, or the fact does not belong in that paragraph.
Finally, re the quark hypothetical, it really helps students (and writers) if they define their terms. Eg, what does “large” mean. Above, I implicitly defined “large” relative to other subatomic particles, but I should do that in my introduction. I found that that was helpful to students because it helps them with the process of logically connecting their arguments and evidence to their thesis. Eg: If the thesis is that the war in Iran is immoral, well, what does immoral mean? It is much harder to explain “the strike on the school implies that the war is immoral because _____” than it is to define immoral as, eg, insufficiently valuing human life and then arguing “the strike on the school implies that the Administration did not sufficiently value human life because it could have been avoided with minimum effort.” (NOTE: I am not stating that any of those statements are necessarily true, but rather that they are logically coherent. And getting students to consistently write in a logically coherent manner is a major win).
PS: FWIW, I also find that, when debating someone, asking them, “and that fact demonstrates your argument because _____” can be rather effective in getting them to clarify their claims.
Thank you for this. I wish I could have applied to inkhaven but as a parent of young children and a demanding job I can’t afford to at this stage of life…but this advice will tide me over!
I really like this post Scott, but the real reason I'm commenting is to say that I also wrote an inverted Larkin this winter:
https://substack.com/@seekingtobejolly/note/c-191236345?r=2ho2a&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web
Enjoyed it, especially the title!
> One of the Inkhaven posts, When The Heck Did Hammurabi Actually Rule? starts with: [snip]
> This has conflict - the conflict between the different sets of dates. It has mystery - why are the dates so precise? This was a good use of this post’s runway, which kept me reading further.
Well, I agree with the point. But I was sadly disappointed by the post itself; it's a "longform" effort, but the answer is "the dates are specific because (1) we have documents specifying that Hammurabi reigned for 42 years; and (2) they are relative to the astronomical behavior of Venus - we can identify a few specific candidate years, but we can't pick out one of them as better than the others."
So this is a post with a good introduction and content that aspires to waste as much of your time as it thinks it can get away with. It's a simple question with a simple answer, provided by an author who really, really wishes the answer was more complicated.
:-/
"12: The purpose of poetry
...By the way, this whole section is a metaphor for life."
Full length post on this metaphor, pretty please? :D
Thank you! That was a pleasure to read.
Hard disagree with point #1. Wrote a whole essay in response here: https://fourthcastle.substack.com/p/scott-alexander-is-wrong-about-lying?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
will replace "reinventing the wheel" with "build every brick of your edifice from scratch" everywhere from now on
This has been bothering me for a few days now: why did you pick "ecstasy" there? It makes it sound like a hyperactive drug rave instead of the image matching the rest of the poem of calm, wholesome happiness. Do I just have a weird emotive hook for "ecstasy" here or am I misreading the vibe.
I have the same reaction. But I can’t think of an alternative that works better. “Happiness” is just a way less tasty word than “ecstasy,” same way “sadness ” is weaker then “grief.” Something about making an adjective into a noun by adding “ness” gives it a manufactured quality. “Joy” seems like the best word to me, but it doesn’t have enough syllables. “Comfort” is sort of an under-reacher. I’ve wondered whether “man passes happy on to man” would work.
Writing chapter 6 as a five paragraph essay is a nice touch.
It rises up like giant squid
With its penis pumped by Poseidon’s id
🔥🔥🔥
>No words like “obviously”. Either it’s obvious to the reader, in which case there’s no need to say this, or it’s not obvious, in which case it’s insulting.
I agree with the second sentence but disagree with the first. You don't want to say "obviously" about your main point, or any of the primary supporting arguments, but it might be useful as part of your axioms or an immediate corollary that's not especially profound on its own, but is relevant or supporting someway of the actual important parts. Maybe you're trying to prove that B is true, A is widely known and uncontroversial, and the crux of your argument is establishing the logical chain A->B. So you go "obviously A, and here are X,Y,Z are detailed reasons why the proposition A->B is true, therefore B". By saying "obviously A" you're saying that you're not going to go into time establishing it, but you expect the reader to already believe A or quickly figure it out. And if they don't believe A they're not your target audience and should go read something more basic establishing A. And depending on how blunt you are and what A is, insulting people who don't believe A might be a feature not a bug.
Your solution of "there's no need to say this" might apply in some cases, but sometimes it's useful context. If you just say "X,Y,Z -> B" out of nowhere it might not be clear why X,Y,Z are even relevant since you haven't mentioned A. An astute reader might figure it out, but road-mapping and providing background context can be useful.
This post made me realize how important bad writing is for survival of society.
Just imagine the world, where nobody uses cliches, and the phrase "avoid cliches like a plague" is therefore never used. Then the next plague comes, but the need to avoid it isn't cemented in collective memory anymore and everyone dies.
Yalla let's get to writing boyz
Angry Larkin variant:
Men in groups build savage tools
And rise in power like Epstein’s cock.
Your kids won't learn defense in schools --
Teach them to fight, critique and mock.
"[after writing this part, I realized you could trivially regenerate my list in thirty seconds, so I deleted it]"
I can't! I'd like to see the list!
“extrapolated as you wish you could extrapolated”
there, I found it. Here’s your missing section: “Profread.” Everyone understands making typos, because everyone makes them. And with LLMs, it’s almost proof that you wrote the piece yourself. And yet…
Everyone is also ever so slightly irritated by typos. One or two typos are little more than the proverbial pebble in one’s shoe that is discarded after a few steps. But suppose we can’t remove it—our hands occupied, our legs propelling us from danger, or our shoes glued to our feet. Each passing step sours our mood, adds injury to insult.
With very few bloggers do I find myself at the end without some annoyance, some irk, some *judgement*. You are one of the rare exceptions. In the age of LLMs, this should be, yet sadly isn’t, a triviality.
Regarding untangling your sentences…there’s a popular series of military sci-fi novels* whose author has a predilection for sentences like “It wasn’t as if they didn’t have a plan for this.” Grating once you notice it, and perhaps part of the reason why the books are so long.
*The Honor Harrington books
'After running through every -ids word I could think of, I got “It rises up, like auction bids”, which, not to toot my own horn, is spectacular.'
It's pretty good, Scott. But "It rises up like Zanj 'gainst Abbasid" would have been better, given only a slight liberty taken with the rhyme scheme.
My father did not fuck me up.
He did not mean to, and did not.
He filled no bitter heirloom cup
With all the faults that he had got.
Though his own father scorned his son
And cold contempt up to the brim
Was poured on him, my dad was one
Who felt the rot should stop with him.
We choose the route we travel by,
Not some perpetuated curse.
Have kids, and love them. Give the lie
To that old glib and callous verse.
-- Adrian "Cavalorn" Bott
(of face leopard fame)
The discipline on mountaintop for 30 years really seems like reinventing the Shuhari principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari). Learn the rules until you master the meaning behind them at which point you can start breaking them.
Thank you for this.
"Raises up, like auction bids" is excellent. You are right to be proud of it. The fact that there are reflexive contrarians trying to improve on it in the comments provides a 16th lesson about properly discounting feedback.
Most writing advice is really just instructions for how to be palatable to people who don’t want to be challenged. Actual good writing makes someone uncomfortable at least once.