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Notes -
The rot runs deep.
Take a look at this paper. Here's the abstract:
Do read the paper. It's not long and it's a good test of one's bullshit detector1. For the impatient:the author assumes a 2% growth rate for humanity's energy use and projects that forward a thousand years.
The paper's isn't that interesting once you spot the trick. But it does bring up two interesting thoughts:
1 I suppose this is technically consensus building. If you think the paper's arguments are reasonable, I'd be happy to discuss that as well...
Am I the only one who finds Moldbug's writing style completely incomprehensible? He rambles on for paragraph after paragraph, smugly self-assured, and at the end of it I come away with literally no idea what he's trying to say. The only thing I'm confident of is that, whatever it is he believes (which is something I am wholly unable to glean from the actual content of what he's written), he thinks it's so self-evident that you'd have to be an utter cretin not to already believe it.
It's an experience not unlike reading TLP/Edward Teach, but at least in that case the incomprehensibility does seem to be deliberate (for whatever reason).
I think you've identified two keys flaws in Moldbug's writing. I'm not deeply familiar with everything he wrote but from what I've read, he strikes me as afflicted with Smart Person Syndrome. Because he's smart, he assumes everyone else is an idiot, especially anyone who disagrees with his viewpoints.
He writes like he was partially graded on word count, rather than solely substance, in college and never quite kicked the habit. I've noticed a lot of so-called "thought leaders" (I hate that term but I don't have a better one) have the same issue. 10 words when 5 will do, most of which are only tangentially related to the subject at hand. It's a sort of anti-Twitter where an idea is expanded on way past the point of coherency.
I think there's a problem that affects a lot of writers wherein they get so close to their ideas that they lose the distance and objectivity that would allow them to assess how these ideas would be met by someone encountering them fresh. "Because I understand it, it must be comprehensible to anyone of approximately my intelligence." But there's a world of difference between coming up with a smart idea and actually explaining it effectively, which is why you need beta readers to ensure that your ideas are coming off in the manner you intend. I'm sure if this was suggested to him, Moldbug would of course insist that he doesn't want his ideas to become diluted or "dumbed-down" by making them more accessible to the "lay person", but this defense smacks of insecurity to me. If you live in a democracy and you want to influence policy you have to meet the voters where they are, which means explaining your ideas in a way that makes sense to the biggest possible audience. Maybe Moldbug would claim he's not trying to influence a big audience, but rather a curated intelligentsia who are themselves powerful enough to influence public policy. Not to blow my (our) own trumpet, but this website is full of high-IQ autistic nerds with thousands of postgrad degrees between us who are not shy about giving controversial or even taboo topics/positions a fair hearing - if even we have trouble understanding what he's trying to say half the time, that suggests it's a deficiency with the writing style, not with the intelligence of the readers.
Richard Hanania wrote a good article arguing that it's rarely worthwhile reading non-fiction books about ideas (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, pop philosophy, pop psychology etc., as distinct from history books, biographies and so on). He argued that the core idea of such a book can usually be succinctly expressed in essay form (<10k words) with no loss of fidelity - but book publishers have no way to make money from essays, so they get the writer to pad out the essay with numerous examples of the phenomenon they're describing, personal anecdote, and filler passages to bring it up to book length. He gave the specific example of The Righteous Mind, a book which I enjoyed and agreed with the core premises of - but 400 pages, really? Scott has covered more ground than that book in a single blog post of a few thousand words.
Probably a lot of writers who get into the habit of doing this find that the habit starts to infect even their non-book writing, resulting in even the articles published on their own blogs becoming needlessly bloated.
I acknowledge that this comment itself may come off as an example of precisely the negative phenomenon I'm describing.
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