LessWrong’s had a lot of discourse over the years about the virtue of brevity. However, that could hypothetically mean a few things.

• People want others to do a better job editing their posts.
• People want writers to assume more shared context, or a greater capacity of readers to independently infer what’s meant, so that more can be left implicit.
• When there’s an intrinsic tradeoff between nuance and brevity, people prefer more brevity on current margins.
• People don’t actually care about brevity and are being sarcastic. It’s also possible the situation has changed and the notion that there’s a desire for more brevity is just out of date.

I’m not sure if any of these are true, but my tentative impression is that LessWrong’s karma voting patterns reflect a combination of factors:

1. LessWrong sincerely wants more brevity, but isn’t always explicit or clear about the tradeoffs in the writing content that would require.
2. LessWrong’s desire for brevity shouldn’t be conflated with a desire for less discourse or a restriction of discourse to what’s intellectually novel. In this, LessWrong is perhaps less similar to academia and more similar to a think tank. LessWrong rewards making arguments that may be perceived as capable of broadcasting its shared views to a wider readership, or as defining what the existing community stands for. To oversimplify, LessWrong appreciates it when writers spend words to say out loud what everyone around here already thinks.
3. LessWrong dislikes hyperbole, and rewards explicit, sometimes lengthy arguments against hyperbolic statements, as well as explicit flagging and caveats. This is true even when everyone knows it’s hyperbole (see what I did there?). Hyperbole is common and rewarded outside of LessWrong, and since hyperbolic statements are often also short and to the point, it can be easy to conflate with the kind of nuance-preserving brevity LessWrong actually rewards.
4. LessWrong rewards brevity achieved via better editing and better quality writing, even if it delays publication. There’s recognition that this may have the undesirable side effect of inhibiting discourse, so there are efforts to incentivize more and speedier production on the margin (i.e. Inkhaven).