Thanks for elaborating. I have a few disagreements:

1. Given a choice between thinking about more important topics, and thinking correctly, I think the answer is "alternate between trying to shift your thinking to more important topics, and thinking more correctly about the topics you are thinking about." If you don't do this, you are screwed.

2. Thinking about potential objections is not just a good dirty rhetoric trick. It's a good rationality tool for getting yourself to red-team your own arguments and views. Many times I've written the last sentence of an argument, and then thought "OK, time to anticipate objections... oh huh, now that I think about it objection X is pretty plausible, I should go think more." Plus it helps you rewrite your original argument to avoid stumbling into the objection, i.e. it helps to make your original argument more "clean logical chainy."

3. Yes, there will always be a chance of people misinterpreting. So? It's true that if your audience expands to include dumber people (or people who have less context and familiarity, or whatever) then the average comment quality will drop. But sometimes there are good reasons to want your writing to reach a wider audience! And often these reasons outweigh the cost of lower average comment quality.

4. If you quote G.Orwell it doesn't mean you can't come up with anything better to write; just that you can't come up with any better way to phrase the exact point that you are quoting him making. This is pretty common IMO. Analogy: "If you reuse someone else's code, that means you can't code any better than them. Therefore you shouldn't use libraries and whatnot, you should just do everything from scratch."

5. There are honest methods of doing persuasion, and it's very important that one master and employ these methods.

At the risk of being a misinterpreting idiot:

When I spell things out so clearly only an idiot could misinterpret my words, the comments get worse because idiots misinterpret my words.

Do you judge how successful a piece is by the quality of the comments it received? That strikes me as a strange metric to optimize for.

I could see this metric aligning with "discover", if you permit bad comments to waste your time. But I think you get more "explain" by writing for a broad audience. Maybe not "dumb", but at least "ignorant".

Even math PHDs prefer simple English before differential equations. See Eliezer on "aim high, shoot low": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2TPph4EGZ6trEbtku/explainers-shoot-high-aim-low [LW · GW]

I thought the bit about indirectly screening your commenters was very clever. I haven't written enough to know if it works the way you described, but it sounds very plausible

If I quote George Orwell then I imply that I couldn't come up with anything better to write than George Orwell. The reader should just read George Orwell instead.

But how do people know that they should read George Orwell rather than E.L. James? Quoting other authors is a little advertisement for that author, which can be a very valuable service for the reader.

Not sure how contrarian "Few Quotes" is. I've gotten that advice at least once in college. Then again, a lot of books (especially nonfiction) quote a bit too much, so maybe this is contrarian advice in such contexts.

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