Do you like bullet points?

They're harder to read straight through. If you include bold words, readers might not bother reading the non-bold words, and miss nuance.

This actually happened to me right now when reading the list of reasons why you like them: my brain only read the bolded bits and reading the rest felt like it would have required an active expenditure of effort, so I mostly didn't. (otoh, your list of reasons for why some people dislike them, didn't use bolding in that way, so that was straightforward to read in its entirety)

If you're informing me of something I prefer bullets. If you're persuading me of something I prefer paragraphs. I find that bullet points lose out on the ability to include story type data that my system 1 responds to. My ideal world would be each article started with bullets for if it's something I already mostly agreed with and ended with stories about it for if it was something I'd need convincing of.

I'm mostly a fan.

1. I like presentation that foregrounds the structure of the ideas being presented. Sometimes bullet points do that well.

Some specific common structures that are served well by bullet points:

• General principle with multiple supporting examples. (Like this list right here.)
• Claim with multiple bits of supporting evidence/argument. This fits bullet points well because
• you can put each bit in its own bullet point
• you can bulletize recursively
• so you can see the support for the claims that support the claims that support your main argument
• if a reader is already satisfied that a thing is true, or so convinced it's wrong that they don't care what ridiculous bogus pseudo-evidence you've marshalled for it, they can skip the bullets
• Claim with counterarguments/objections
• You might think this is confusing because its presentation is just like that of the claim-with-support, where the bullet-pointed items have exactly the opposite significance.
• Maybe it is, but I don't think any other mode of presentation does better.
• This and its predecessor might be better thought of as special cases: you make a claim, and then you bulletize whatever bits of evidence or argument bear on it one way or the other.
• In plain-text bullet-lists, I like to use "+" and "-" (and sometimes "=") as my "bullets" in this sort of context, with the obvious meaning.
• Main argument and incidental remarks
• I like pizza.
• Chronological sequence with fairly clear-cut divisions (at regime changes, important technological/scientific developments, publication of important works, etc.)

2. I like concise, compact accounts of things. Bullet points can work against this (because they space things out) or for it (by encouraging terseness). But I don't like concision when it comes at the cost of clarity or correctness, and maybe concise bullet points are bad because they encourage omission of necessary nuance.

3. I agree with the person who said numbered lists are better than bullet points because they allow for easy cross-reference. (But also for easy screwups, if you add something and everything gets renumbered without the cross-refs being fixed up.)

4. Bullet-lists don't tend to make for elegant writing. Sometimes that matters, sometimes not.

5. Bullet-lists can obscure your logical structure instead of revealing it, as follows. The list structure takes the place of many explicit logical-structuring elements ("therefore", "because", "furthermore", etc.) but sometimes explicit is better than implicit and e.g. it may not be clear to the reader whether you're saying "here's another reason to believe X", "here's a good argument against X which I'll address below", "here's a silly argument against X which I bring up merely as a hook on which to hang something I want to say in favour of X", etc.

6. Although bullet-lists tend (on the whole) to clarify logical structure at small scales, they don't work so well at larger scales (say the length of an essay, or even a book). For that you need something else: chapters, headings, and so forth. And longer (say, paragraph-length or more) explanations of the structure. ("In this book I'm going to argue that scholarly publications in theoretical physics should be written in verse. The first three chapters motivate this by showing some examples of important papers whose impact was greatly reduced by their being written in prose. Then I'll explain in detail what poetic forms are most appropriate for what sort of research and why, giving numerous examples. The final four chapters of the book illustrate my thesis by taking Einstein's so-called "annus mirabilis" papers and rendering them in the sort of verse form I recommend. This book is dedicated to the memory of Omar Khayyam.")

7. If I'm writing down my thoughts on something to help clarify them, I often use something like bullet-point structure.

GPT2's degree of bullet point use has me feeling somewhat validated re: how much they have apparently historically been used.

Another data-point: I love bullet points and have been sad and confused about how little they're used in writing generally. In fact, when reading dense text, I often invest a few initial minutes in converting it to bullet points just in order to be able to read and understand it better.

Here's PG on a related topic, sharing some of his skepticism for when bullet points are not appropriate: http://paulgraham.com/nthings.html

I am likely to decide against my reading any LW post consisting only of bullet points because although I can recall reading lots of "ordinary" texts that proved beneficial to me, I cannot recall reading a text consisting only of bullet points that proved beneficial (except for manuals for products that need assembly by the consumer).

I naturally write documents in bullet points, especially when multiple distinct points or items are presented, or if it's a list of thoughts to be expanded on later. Didn't realize that many people dislike it.

I like reading. I like reading prose, as if I were listening to someone talking.

I also read very fast and I'm very good at skimming prose.

That being said, I strongly dislike bullet points, in most part because they're not fun to read... But I also find them harder to skim. Indeed, they are usually much denser in terms of information, with much less redundancy, such that every word counts; in other words, no skimming allowed.

I don't understand why skimming natural text should be any more difficult.

>It's easier to skim, and build up a high level understanding of a post's structure

I mean. This is why we have paragraphs, and leading sentences. There are also some of the reasons listed by gjm: there is more logical and contextual information in prose, which makes it easier to skim.

In fact, I would argue that if we're going to encourage bullet points for easier reading, we could just as well encourage learning to write well...

Use the right tool for the job.

If you start with bullet points and then add filler, it's probably worthless filler and the worst of both worlds. I don't trust the people who say that they want complete sentences. They're probably just praising people for going through the motions, not paying attention to whether it's actually easier to read.

Some things I notice on bewelltuned.com:

It doesn't use bold. But it uses two other things – hyperlinks, and an interesting indentation scheme.

The hyperlinks often serve to remind you that This Concept Should Be Chunked, while also letting you zoom into that chunk if you want to.

The site begins:

• No bullshit.
• It doesn't waste your time. Information is given minimally in bullet points.
• Each skill has clear results, with detailed information that lets you evaluate your progress. Pretty soon, you'll know it's real.
• No religious or mystical connotations.

Compare that to my OP, where I said:

• It's easier to skim, and build up a high level understanding of a post's structure. If you understand a concept you can skip it and move on, if you want to drill down and understand it better you can do so.
• Relatedly, it exposes your cruxes more readily. You can pick out and refute points, in a way that can be harder with meandering prose.

But I could instead have said:

• It's easier to skim and build a high level understanding of a post's structure.
• If you understand a concept you can skip it and move on. If you don't, you can drill down into the details.
• Bullet lists expose cruxes more readily. You can pick out and refute points, in a way that can be harder with meandering prose.

Which might accomplish the goal of "skim high level concepts", without the thing Kaj discussed of "having trouble actually reading the subsequent words even if you want to."

(note: I've seen blog posts that used collapsed bullet points, which you could expand to read a more in-depth version of an argument. That's an interesting tool, but I found it too high friction to work properly. I didn't actually know whether I wanted to read a tag until I got a few words in, after opening it. But regular bullet or numbered lists do a good job of letting me start to read a section and then skip it if I want)

I tend to write a particular type of post in a hierarchy. It seems a natural way to write something purely explanatory, continually making bullet points to define terms, create subcategories, and define nuance until you get to a logical stopping point like common knowledge.

However, I'm wary of people using bullet points to create this hierarchy, as I find that often the use of bullet points means that people didn't think about the ORDER of the knowledge at each level of hierarchy, something which I find really important and is much less likely to happen when using a narrative hierarchy with headings, subheadings, etc. I think there's something about bullets being an unodered list that makes people disregard order as a useful and important teaching tool, and it often means I have to reread the bullets multiple times to get a coherent narrative together of what is trying to be said.

I also really enjoy slatestarcodexy posts that have clear narrative order but not hierarchy. I think they're an excellent way to cover a topic from many angles while maintaining an emotional thread throughout. I think that for me the narrative order is always useful and the hierarchy is sometimes useful.

I often like them, but I use them almost exclusively for summaries or notes. For example, the full-text nuance should be up front, and then the bullets to collect the key points for easy re-reading at the end of the section. Alternatively, when there is a link to a full-text source and the bullet points are summarizing with the goal of making it easier to determine whether the full-text is worth reading.

• Bullets are for summaries or notes.
• They should have a clear relationship with other text (or video, etc).

"I like numbered arguments, since that makes it easier to respond to individual points. But unnumbered bullet lists are just hard to parse."

[Alas, the LessWrong website currently doesn't enable this very well because our Rich Editor's implementation of numbered lists was annoying]

I don't much like writing in bullet points myself, but sometimes it's useful for particular purposes, and having good numbering, especially hierarchical numbering, would make being able to respond to bullet points really nice. For example, I once wrote a post (can't seem to find it now, so maybe it was a comment? closest example I could find was this [LW · GW]) where I laid out numbered claims and conclusions to try to make it easier for people to engage with each one independently. Having numbering that looked like the following would be really nice:

1. top level

1.1 sub point

1.2 another sub point

1.2.1 sub sub point

2. another top level

I use bullets almost exclusively when taking notes or writing for myself. When writing for others, I use them as part of a narrative, but rarely the main text. I have gotten feedback that when I over-rely on bullet style lists of points, it's difficult to find a flow in my documents, and I tend to use too much shorthand so some of the points are less compelling than they can be.

Rather than bullet points per se, I find it natural to think hierarchically. Bullet outlines are one way of writing this hierarchy out. I think this is OK for a comment.

For a top-level post though, it feels unfinished. It's fine to start with an outline, but note that markdown headers also have hierarchical layers just like bullets, with paragraphs below that. Prefer the headers for posts and reserve bullets for very short "leaf nodes" below the level of paragraphs, and only when they add clarity.

If you find you like to think in outlines, I recommend trying FreeMind, which lets you uproot and graft entire subtrees with much less effort than typing bullets. Once you have your thoughts outlined, you can export to normal bullet points.