I think considering brevity, for its own sake, to be an important rationalist virtue is unlikely to prove beneficial for maintaining, or raising, the quality of rationalist discourse. That's because it is a poorly defined goal that could easily be misinterpreted as encouraging undesirable tradeoffs at the expense of, for example, clarity of communication, laying out of examples to aid in understanding of a point, or making explicit potentially dry details such as the epistemic status of a belief, or the cruxes upon which a position hinges.
There is tr...
ever since i read your post on epistemic legibility i find myself thinking about this whenever i'm about to link a source. its resulted in me relying on citing sources much less frequently, and (i think) made my writing clearer and easier to follow.
i think this is a lovely post, and i hope the other points you've brought up in it will stick with me just as strongly as that has. especially the suggestion to do more to push back against posts that have substantial flaws... it really is so e... (read more)