I think I agree with like 80% of this. But I think it should be flagged more that when many people try “engaging writing”, they do end up with stuff that’s really bad.
“Here’s why Netflix streaming quality has nosedived over the past few months” ″12 Of The Most Stunning Asian Landscapes. The Last One Blew Me Away.”
I don’t want to see stuff like that on the EA Forum.
Similarly, I found the title of this post hyperbolic (you also call attention to this, but several paragraphs in). I don’t want to encourage many more people to make titles like that. (Though I would encourage images, elegance, plain language, jokes, and so on).
So I think EA writers can definitely improve on being engaging, but we should make sure to steer clear of the alarmist journalist techniques.
I likewise mostly agreed with+ appreciated the post, while also agreeing with Ozzie’s caveat/pushback.
One additional counterpoint to this post that I’d add is “But engagingness is a symmetric weapon!” (I don’t think that means we should avoid engagingness, but it feels worth noting.) To explain via a long Slate Star Codex quote:
Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: it’s an asymmetric weapon. That is, it’s a weapon which is stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys. In ideal conditions (which may or may not ever happen in real life) – the kind of conditions where everyone is charitable and intelligent and wise – the good guys will be able to present stronger evidence, cite more experts, and invoke more compelling moral principles. The whole point of logic is that, when done right, it can only prove things that are true.
Violence is a symmetric weapon; the bad guys’ punches hit just as hard as the good guys’ do. It’s true that hopefully the good guys will be more popular than the bad guys, and so able to gather more soldiers. But this doesn’t mean violence itself is asymmetric – the good guys will only be more popular than the bad guys insofar as their ideas have previously spread through some means other than violence. Right now antifascists outnumber fascists and so could probably beat them in a fight, but antifascists didn’t come to outnumber fascists by winning some kind of primordial fistfight between the two sides. They came to outnumber fascists because people rejected fascism on the merits. These merits might not have been “logical” in the sense of Aristotle dispassionately proving lemmas at a chalkboard, but “fascists kill people, killing people is wrong, therefore fascism is wrong” is a sort of folk logical conclusion which is both correct and compelling. Even “a fascist killed my brother, so fuck them” is a placeholder for a powerful philosophical argument making a probabilistic generalization from indexical evidence to global utility. So insofar as violence is asymmetric, it’s because it parasitizes on logic which allows the good guys to be more convincing and so field a bigger army. Violence itself doesn’t enhance that asymmetry; if anything, it decreases it by giving an advantage to whoever is more ruthless and power-hungry.
The same is true of documentaries. As I said before, Harford can produce as many anti-Trump documentaries as he wants, but Trump can fund documentaries of his own. He has the best documentaries. Nobody has ever seen documentaries like this. They’ll be absolutely huge.
And the same is true of rhetoric. Martin Luther King was able to make persuasive emotional appeals for good things. But Hitler was able to make persuasive emotional appeals for bad things. I’ve previously argued that Mohammed counts as the most successful persuader of all time. These three people pushed three very different ideologies, and rhetoric worked for them all. Robinson writes as if “use rhetoric and emotional appeals” is a novel idea for Democrats, but it seems to me like they were doing little else throughout the election (pieces attacking Trump’s character, pieces talking about how inspirational Hillary was, pieces appealing to various American principles like equality, et cetera). It’s just that they did a bad job, and Trump did a better one. The real takeaway here is “do rhetoric better than the other guy”. But “succeed” is not a primitive action.
Unless you use asymmetric weapons, the best you can hope for is to win by coincidence.
That is, there’s no reason to think that good guys are consistently better at rhetoric than bad guys. Some days the Left will have an Obama and win the rhetoric war. Other days the Right will have a Reagan and they’ll win the rhetoric war. Overall you should average out to a 50% success rate. When you win, it’ll be because you got lucky.
And there’s no reason to think that good guys are consistently better at documentaries than bad guys. Some days the NIH will spin a compelling narrative and people will smoke less. Other days the tobacco companies will spin a compelling narrative and people will smoke more. Overall smoking will stay the same. And again, if you win, it’s because you lucked out into having better videographers or something.
I’m not against winning by coincidence. If I stumbled across Stalin and I happened to have a gun, I would shoot him without worrying about how it’s “only by coincidence” that he didn’t have the gun instead of me. You should use your symmetric weapons if for no reason other than that the other side’s going to use theirs and so you’ll have a disadvantage if you don’t. But you shouldn’t confuse it with a long-term solution.
Improving the quality of debate, shifting people’s mindsets from transmission to collaborative truth-seeking, is a painful process. It has to be done one person at a time, it only works on people who are already almost ready for it, and you will pick up far fewer warm bodies per hour of work than with any of the other methods. But in an otherwise-random world, even a little purposeful action can make a difference. Convincing 2% of people would have flipped three of the last four US presidential elections. And this is a capacity to win-for-reasons-other-than-coincidence that you can’t build any other way.
(and my hope is that the people most willing to engage in debate, and the ones most likely to recognize truth when they see it, are disproportionately influential – scientists, writers, and community leaders who have influence beyond their number and can help others see reason in turn)
I worry that I’m not communicating how beautiful and inevitable all of this is. We’re surrounded by a a vast confusion, “a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night”, with one side or another making a temporary advance and then falling back in turn. And in the middle of all of it, there’s this gradual capacity-building going on, where what starts off as a hopelessly weak signal gradually builds up strength, until one army starts winning a little more often than chance, then a lot more often, and finally takes the field entirely. Which seems strange, because surely you can’t build any complex signal-detection machinery in the middle of all the chaos, surely you’d be shot the moment you left the trenches, but – your enemies are helping you do it. Both sides are diverting their artillery from the relevant areas, pooling their resources, helping bring supplies to the engineers, because until the very end they think it’s going to ensure their final victory and not yours.
You’re doing it right under their noses. They might try to ban your documentaries, heckle your speeches, fight your violence Middlebury-student-for-Middlebury-student – but when it comes to the long-term solution to ensure your complete victory, they’ll roll down their sleeves, get out their hammers, and build it alongside you.
A parable: Sally is a psychiatrist. Her patient has a strange delusion: that Sally is the patient and he is the psychiatrist. She would like to commit him and force medication on him, but he is an important politician and if push comes to shove he might be able to commit her instead. In desperation, she proposes a bargain: they will both take a certain medication. He agrees; from within his delusion, it’s the best way for him-the-psychiatrist to cure her-the-patient. The two take their pills at the same time. The medication works, and the patient makes a full recovery.
(well, half the time. The other half, the medication works and Sally makes a full recovery.)
I agree about clickbaity titles. I think CopyBlogger should be selectively applied. A lot of their advice isn’t what I would promote. However, I do think overall most of their advice is quite good, such as spending a lot of time on headlines / first sentences, starting with why people should be interested, not burying the lead, etc.
I think I agree with like 80% of this. But I think it should be flagged more that when many people try “engaging writing”, they do end up with stuff that’s really bad.
For example the Copyblogger website seems full of encouraging classic clickbait headlines, like:
I don’t want to see stuff like that on the EA Forum.
Similarly, I found the title of this post hyperbolic (you also call attention to this, but several paragraphs in). I don’t want to encourage many more people to make titles like that. (Though I would encourage images, elegance, plain language, jokes, and so on).
So I think EA writers can definitely improve on being engaging, but we should make sure to steer clear of the alarmist journalist techniques.
I likewise mostly agreed with+ appreciated the post, while also agreeing with Ozzie’s caveat/pushback.
One additional counterpoint to this post that I’d add is “But engagingness is a symmetric weapon!” (I don’t think that means we should avoid engagingness, but it feels worth noting.) To explain via a long Slate Star Codex quote:
I’ve updated my title based on this feedback and others’ reactions. You can read more here
I agree about clickbaity titles. I think CopyBlogger should be selectively applied. A lot of their advice isn’t what I would promote. However, I do think overall most of their advice is quite good, such as spending a lot of time on headlines / first sentences, starting with why people should be interested, not burying the lead, etc.