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Why is every rationalist blog post way too long? - alex wennerberg

alexwennerberg.com · 371 words · saved by 8 readers

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 thoroughne

October 13, 2026 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…

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