Improving My Writing Style

In the consequentialism piece, one of your examples illustrating consequentialism refers to TDT. I think examples need to be simpler than the point you're trying to make--referencing more complicated ideas should be avoided if possible. Of course, nearly everyone here will understand you, but we wouldn't be able to link our facebook friends to the piece; there's too much of an inferential gap. Writing is more powerful when the examples are viscerally obvious.

Your point was fairly simple and should be understandable by anyone who knows what consequentialism is, but the writing was probably understandable only to LW readers. You don't need to supply a level 10 argument in the first post introducing a level 5 point, just because it's written for level 10 readers; doing so makes it inaccessible for level 4 readers who otherwise would be able to appreciate a level 5 point. It's OK to wait for people to actually object before answering their objections.

ETA: You have to ruthlessly go through your writing and remove everything in it that doesn't take your reader to your conclusion in a direct, easily understandable route. This may mean not saying something that you really want to say. This is hard for me. Only very high-level writers can reliably pull off meandering or non-direct routes to their points.

Read these:

• Writing Naked
• Nobody Gives a Shit (totally relevant to writing and life, though it's about advertising)
• Singularity Writing Advice (by Eliezer)

In Reference to "Consequentialism Need Not Be Nearsighted"

Let's start with the word Simple. It's in the first two words of the opening sentence of your post. Remove it, please don't use it again. You've just set up the entire post to automatically fail a percentage of readers who will be (now) emotionally impacted by failure to understand any section of your post. Even if it is understood after a moment or hours reflection, the self-shame brought on by this single word will reduce your chances to gain positive karma.

This word is used four times. This may be four times too many.

Next, you've used an example that 'many' saw through. What is many, how did you decide many have done this? by what cause do you have to decide that the people who post replies indicating they saw through it are the majority?

Why put in reflections (or praise) to a segment if it's going to exclude a large portion of your audience, you seem to be limiting the article to those who've already succeeded at finishing your previous article.

In your fifth paragraph you introduce names, Defectbots and CliqueBots. This information is used once in the footnotes. It's not really useful and shades the article by personalizing it. When Kibitzing is off and no names are beside the post, this seems to be a little...wrong. Your personalization of the article destroys the detachment of it's content, making it more about you and less about the content, this could narrow the field of people

So, in conclusion. to me, when you are writing, I am excluded because I have not immediately grasped everything in your article at once, I am excluded for a second time for not reading your previous article (And then, not seeing the catch on it straight away) and finally, for a final exclusion for caring about the content and not about you.

I hope this has helped.

Most popular articles directly prescribe relevant things to do in your day to day life.

Yours don't really.

The Qualia sequence is pretty much correct, but I feel like it was a bit drawn out. The agent networks are interesting, but I think that you could get most of the (directly relevant to qualia) information out of the idea that there's a particular neural activation pattern for red that you can't activate through learning lots of things about how humans perceive red.

If that pattern was standard between humans, you could probably get a congenitally blind person to see red through transcranial magnetic stimulation, or sufficient LSD. Or other hallucinogens.

• Consequentialism posts were communicating a simple idea with a complicated technical example (that is not even well-understood, strictly speaking). Thus target audience is probably too small, people either already have the idea, or don't understand the example.
• Qualia sequence seemed substantially confused to me (on the relevance-of-arguments level, I'm not saying I can pinpoint anything technically wrong in it). I'm not even sure if there is a way of recovering a clear argument from it.

So I expect it's not a matter of writing style for these posts.

This document is short: Scrutiny of the Introduction. It is advice on making your writing presentable from a guy who has published ten books, a couple hundred journal articles, and directed 40 PhD students. You might find it helpful.

Here is how I would have edited the first three paragraphs of your post on consequentialism:

The simple idea that we ought to choose actions according to their probable consequences, ever since it was formulated, has garnered a rather shocking amount of dissent. Part of this may be due to causes other than philosophical objections, and some of the objections get into the metaphysics of metaethics. But there's a fair amount of opposition on rather simple grounds: that consequentialist reasoning appears to endorse bad decisions, either in the long run or as an effect of collective action.

Consequentialism, the simple idea that we ought to select among our possible actions according to their probable consequences, has garnered a surprising amount of criticism ever since it was first proposed. As lukeprog discusses here, some of these objections are likely to be mere superficial rationalisations of intuitive moral judgements, which are easily dispensed with in the philosophical arena. Other objections may be metaphysical in nature; needless to say, most Lesswrongians would consider metaphysical objections to a metaethical principle, or indeed any metaphysical argument, to be a priori incoherent. However, a significant proportion of opponents of consequentialism argue that consequentialist reasoning appears to endorse bad decisions, in the long term and when multiple consequentialist agents produce collective action; this criticism seems more worthy of our consideration.

Every so often, you'll hear someone offer a reductio ad absurdum of the following form: "Consider dilemma X. If we were consequentialists, then we would be forced to choose Y. But in the long run (or if widely adopted) the strategy of choosing Y leads to horrible consequence Z, and so consequentialism fails on its own terms."

Occasionally, a critic will offer a reductio ad absurdum of the following form: “Consider dilemma X. Consequentialists are forced to choose strategy Y to deal with the dilemma. But in the long run or if widely adopted, strategy Y leads to horrible consequence Z, therefore consequentialism fails on its own terms.

There's something fishy about the argument when you lay it out like that: if it can be known that the strategy of choosing Y has horrible consequence Z, then why do we agree that consequentialists choose Y? In fact, there are two further unstated assumptions in every such argument I've heard, and it is those assumptions rather than consequentialism on which the absurdity really falls. But to discuss the assumptions, we need to delve into a bit of decision theory.

This argument seems suspect. If a consequentialist knows in advance that strategy Y is likely to produce horrible consequence Z, then why should we expect him to choose strategy Y? In fact such an argument relies on two unstated assumptions, and since I believe these assumptions to be invalid the argument fails to refute consequentialism. In order to discuss these assumptions, we will need to delve into a bit of decision theory.

Some of this is just my preferred way of phrasing things. In other places I do feel that it's an improvement (for example, "if it can be known" is passive voice, which is generally considered to be both dull and unclear in comparison to active voice, therefore only to be used if there's a good reason to do so).

Maybe you should read more writings worth imitating? Try reading regularly from http://longform.org/ and watch for how the prose is entertaining.

Problems I Think I Have:

• I over-formalize things.
• I feel a need to anticipate and answer every possible objection, and so I lose the ability to say something simply the first time around.
• I write overly convoluted sentence structures.

Possible Remedies:

• I might be able to do NaNoWriMo, which would certainly train me to do without over-editing.
• I've been wanting to do an FAQ on some issue that's very basic and brief at first, and only summons more material when you click on a sentence that you object to.

NOTE: My brain reacted way to much to the part about crockers rules, so I suspect I might be biased in a sadistic direction, but can't figure out how to compensate for it so I'll just leave that to you.

open posts in tabs

... Oooh, I remember these posts, as some of my absolute favourites as examples for everyone else (even possibly Eliezer himself) on how to write exiting, easy to understand posts!

... Well drat. But I guess this provides some evidence as well. Or maybe there was some kind of confused multi-directional cascade of attempted bias compensation in my brain that I didn't notice.

Edit: just now my brain made an association between the feeling inspired by your posts and the excitement I get when I'm about to enter a cage fight with some new exiting basilisk. This association could not be reproduced under controlled conditions.

At this point this post looks like nothing more than a verbose event log of my brain, rather than a comment on something.

Futher edit: After reading the rest of the thread I conclude I just have weird taste and my opinion probably shouldn't count.