All of Emerson Spartz's Comments + Replies

Love this! I used to manage teams of writers/editors and here are some ideas we found useful for increasing readability:

To remove fluff, imagine someone is paying you $1,000 for every word you remove.  Our writers typically could cut 20-50% with minimal loss of information.

Long sentences are hard to read, so try to change your commas into periods. 

Long paragraphs are hard to read, so try to break each paragraph into 2-3 sentences.

Most people just skim, and some of your ideas are much more important than others, so bold/italicize your important points.

Thanks for the feedback! We think a bot could make sense as well - we're exploring this internally.

So glad you're enjoying it! It's mine too - I consume way more LW content because of it.

 I'd expect the most common failure mode for rationalists here is not understanding how patronage networks work. 

Even if you do everything else right, it is very hard to get elected to a position of power if the other guy is distributing the office's resources for votes.

You should be able to map out the voting blocs and what their criteria are, i.e. "Union X and its 500 members will mostly vote for Incumbent Y because they get $X in contracts per year etc"

1Asgård1y
The mapping of voting blocs seems like a really good idea, very actionable, and a great way to visualize who could be electing you. Putting their requirements, or encouragements out in a visual way, to weigh where the least action can cause the greatest gain. I think that the situation I'm considering has an intensely powerful patronage network that it can relatively easily attach itself to. Other patronage networks will also be necessary.

People are so irrationally intimidated by lawyers that some legal firms make all their money by sending out thousands of scary form letters demanding payment for bullshit transgressions.  My company was threatened with thousands of frivolous lawsuits but only actually sued once. 

Threats are cheap.