The author opens with a concrete ratio: a 25,000-word Scott Alexander post became a 2,700-word citation in the author's own piece on Catholic miracle apologetics, after cutting 70% of a first draft. The implication is pointed — discretion is a skill, and the rationalist blogosphere systematically undervalues it. The structural critique is clean. Rationalist bloggers, the author argues, spend their effort in exactly the wrong direction: layering detail and nuance atop unchallenged premises rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions that load-bear the entire argument. Eliezer Yudkowsky's "sequences" clock in at over one million words. The question isn't whether all those words contain some insight — of course they do, statistically — but whether the format itself is a failure mode. The Gwern nicotine case is the essay's sharpest exhibit. Nine thousand words and over 100 references marshaled to argue that nicotine isn't addictive and is good for you if you don't smoke it. The author's counter: nicotine is addictive and harmful even without smoking, as most people already knew. The rhetorical apparatus — the citations, the length, the hedged quantitative tone — functioned as a credibility substitute, not as evidence. What the essay identifies is a specific failure pattern: verbosity as social proof. Within rationalist culture, the volume of text produced about an idea is treated as evidence that the idea merits attention. This inverts the usual epistemic relationship between evidence and conclusion. The 9,000-word post doesn't persuade because of its arguments; it persuades because its length signals that someone serious took the idea seriously. The deepest cut is the essay's claim about wisdom. Wisdom, the author argues, involves discretion — knowing what not to pursue, what doesn't need saying, what common sense or inherited tradition already handles. The rationalist community's core identity is built on rejecting exactly this kind of inherited knowledge, which means the community structurally selects against the cognitive trait that would cure its worst tendencies. The essay is itself admirably short. It makes its argument, cites its examples, and stops — modeling the virtue it advocates. Whether that brevity sacrifices some nuance is almost beside the point; the author would say that's exactly the trade-off wisdom demands. The limitation is that the essay paints with a broad brush. Scott Alexander, Gwern, and Yudkowsky are not interchangeable writers, and the best rationalist work — Alexander's psychiatric case studies, say — often earns its length. But the essay isn't really about individual bloggers. It's about a community norm that treats word count as a proxy for rigor, and on that structural point, it lands.
