Daniel Kokotajlo points out that I write in ways that directly contradict standard writing advice.
Importance > Truth
Most writing revolves around whether is true. My writing revolves around whether is important. If is unimportant then you should not bother writing whether is true.
What you think about is more important than what you think. Most writing implies "we should talk about ". My writing often implies "we should not talk about ".
Clean logical chains
A single logical argument is sufficient to prove the truth value of a statement. Additional arguments are redundant. If I want to prove something is true then I write my best argument and stop. This maximizes cruxiness.
Cruxiness is a weakness a debate, which is why you don't see it in persuasive writing. Debates are dirty. A clean argument has nothing left to take away.
Write for an intelligent audience
No matter how carefully I write, there is always a chance someone will misinterpret it. When I spell things out so clearly only an idiot could misinterpret my words, the comments get worse because idiots misinterpret my words. On the other hand, when I fill my writing with differential equations, the only people with anything stupid to say are mathematicians and physics PhDs because they are the only ones confident enough to say anything at all. A lower bound is established.
There is a principle of marketing where you don't want to advertise your products to people who won't like them because then people will complain about you which is bad. Dumb people are less likely to misunderstand my complicated ideas when I abstain from dumbing them down.
Few Quotes
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.
Another reason to use quotes is to pass the buck. You can borrow authority on startups by quoting the expert Paul Graham. It's better to be an expert yourself. Einstein didn't need to quote Newton when he wrote about relativity.
Quotes are useful when they encapsulate someone else's large body of work. Such a reference functions like a DLL (dynamic link library).
Conclusion
The human brain is an opaque mass of connections. You cannot fully insulate the lies you tell from your model of reality. Persuasion is like lying. Pandering to others gunks up your internal model of reality.
I write to discover and explain. I do not write to persuade.
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.
I agree with everything in your comment except the idea that we disagree.
Yes. You're right.
I do think about potential objections. If an objection is valid then I fix what I wrote. If an objection is plausible-sounding widely-believed and invalid then I ignore it.
You're right.
You're right. I don't understand what's different between your software library analogy and my DLL analogy. The idea that you should quote someone when "you can't come up with any better way to phrase the exact point" is something I almost included in my original post before deciding against. It is a valid point.
Yes.