为什么每篇理性主义博客文章都那么长?
Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?

原始链接: https://alexwennerberg.com/blog/2026-10-13-long.html

作者将自己简洁的写作——一篇关于天主教奇迹护教学、被删减70%的2700词文章——与理性主义博主们的冗长相对照。尤德科夫斯基的系列文章超过一百万词;就连想法不错的文章也冗长乏味。这些写作者增添细节和微妙之处,却忽略关键假设与更宏大的哲学,把篇幅误当作透彻。格温那篇9000词、引用100条文献、声称尼古丁不成瘾且有益的文章,正说明了问题:它是错的。这类写作缺乏的是智慧——判断哪些想法值得追求、哪些不必言说的审慎。理性主义社群在很大程度上摒弃常识与承袭传统,偏爱非正统、反文化的观念,并把围绕这些观念所写的庞大篇幅当作它们值得认真关注的证据。

理性博客文章常因过度冗长而受批评,评论者认为长度往往代替了清晰与严谨。许多人认为这是一种故意策略——“甩手枪法”,即通过海量文字淹没对 claims 的审查。评论者指出,理性主义者可能利用冗长来合理化既有信念而非追求真理,有的认为这表明智力地位或掩盖了薄弱论点。其他人则辩护称,长度对于详尽是必要的,尤其是在涉及复杂主题或既有文献时,而有人将这种风格与神经多元化的交流模式联系起来。讨论引用了 Scott Alexander 与 Gwern 等具体作者,并以详细的尼古丁分析以及 Eliezer Yudkowsky 的百万字“系列”为例。批评者认为简洁的写作需要更高的技巧,而支持者则认为详细的解释尊重了读者的语境。最终,这场争论的核心在于理性主义的冗长是反映了真正的智力深度,还是作为一种对抗批判的修辞屏障。
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原文

For my piece on Catholic miracle apologetics, I read (correction: skimmed) a 25,000-word post by rationalist blogger Scott Alexander. My piece, which cited (but does not focus on) his, ended up being a cool 2,700 words. I don't think it would benefit from being longer, and it was the result of me cutting around 70% of the text I initially wrote.

Rationalist bloggers do not generally appear to have this impulse. Eliezer Yudkowsky's "sequences" are over one million words long. Nearly every blog post I have read in this ecosystem, even the rare one that contains some good ideas, is painfully long and extremely tedious. These bloggers tend to spend their time on precisely the wrong things, i.e. adding layers of detail and nuance rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start or broadening their philosophical background beyond the collection of texts popular within their subculture.

It seems to me that, in this community, verbosity is a substitute for thoroughness: surely, if someone wrote a lot about something, and is able to demonstrate that by producing a large volume of text, they must have something worthwhile to say about it? Consider when blogger Gwern explained that nicotine, actually, is not addictive, and is good for you, as long as you don't smoke it, over the course of 9,000 words, with over 100 references. It turns out, actually, nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it, as you probably already obviously knew.

In any case, what is missing from this endlessly verbose rationalist writing style is wisdom. Wisdom involves discretion: an intuition for what ideas are and are not worth seriously pursuing, and the ability to determine what does and does not need to be said. This community, broadly speaking, does not seem to value wisdom as a trait at all; the idea that something may be true, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited tradition is anathema to them. Instead, there is a heavy bias towards that which is unconventional and counterculture, with the amount of ink spilled for heterodox ideas taken as evidence in itself that these ideas are worth taking seriously.

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