This exercise was a little mean but made a useful point so was pretty interesting.
Rather than proving “editing for style and readability is quick and easy for everyone,” this made me think “wow there’s a huge opportunity here for more people to start using editors”!
The fact that you could clearly rewrite this comment presumably without subject matter expertise makes me think there should be more people asking you to edit their work for a small fee …
More than “a little mean” in my view – seems like showing off what Eliezer calls “writing privilege.” But I agree otherwise, and yes, it does seem useful.
It is currently 7:07 AM for me. To test your claim that it would take weeks to write more concisely and for a general audience, I’m going to edit the first 5 paragraphs of the report and see how long it takes.
The point I’m trying to make is that there’s something insensitive about assuming that because you can do something in 40 minutes, other EAs must be able to do it in that time as well. I’ve repeatedly had people tell me that some task should be easy for me (in writing contexts, specifically), but I ended up taking >3x the amount of time they said it should take me.
This exercise was a little mean but made a useful point so was pretty interesting.
Rather than proving “editing for style and readability is quick and easy for everyone,” this made me think “wow there’s a huge opportunity here for more people to start using editors”!
The fact that you could clearly rewrite this comment presumably without subject matter expertise makes me think there should be more people asking you to edit their work for a small fee …
More than “a little mean” in my view – seems like showing off what Eliezer calls “writing privilege.” But I agree otherwise, and yes, it does seem useful.
Step 3 masterfully executed
The point I’m trying to make is that there’s something insensitive about assuming that because you can do something in 40 minutes, other EAs must be able to do it in that time as well. I’ve repeatedly had people tell me that some task should be easy for me (in writing contexts, specifically), but I ended up taking >3x the amount of time they said it should take me.