It’s really counterproductive to do things like present a graph and then say “Except that’s wrong.” + “I didn’t technically lie to you, for what it’s worth. I said it’s what the canonical Dunning-Kruger graph looks like, and it is.”
I just don’t want to further read a post using these sort of tricks.
Me too, but that’s because I appreciate being “caught red-handed” believing what I’m reading. I see it as a favor done me by the author.
If you weren’t anyway in the mindset that you need to practice weighing the information that’s given to you and calibrating by guessing at the answer before actually reading the real answer, I suppose it could be annoying.
Scott Alexander uses this style sometimes, and I like it. However, he tends to do it once per essay. I think that can work very well. Here, though, after I hit the “that’s wrong” multiple times, it started to feel like nothing in the essay was worth trying to understand, since I expected what I was reading to later be proclaimed wrong. (Just my own feeling.)
Yes. The fact that this post is precisely about trying to deconfuse a pre-existing misconception makes it even more important to be crystal clear. It’s known to be hard to overwrite pre-existing misconceptions with the correct understanding, and I’m pretty sure this doesn’t help.
This seems like the sort of thing best addressed by me adding a warning / attention-conservation-notice at the start of the article, though I’m not sure what would be appropriate. “Content Note: Trolling”?
ETA: This comment has been up for 24 hours and it has positive agreement karma and no-one’s suggested a better warning to use, so I’m doing the thing. Hopefully this helps?
I fully understand how this format could be frustrating to some people. I personally loved it because each new step/graph made sense and taught me something that helped me understand the next one. There was such a feeling of invested discovery in reading this post that it lead to me reading it a second time.
Some writing styles don’t work for some people, but this one really worked for me.
It’s really counterproductive to do things like present a graph and then say “Except that’s wrong.” + “I didn’t technically lie to you, for what it’s worth. I said it’s what the canonical Dunning-Kruger graph looks like, and it is.”
I just don’t want to further read a post using these sort of tricks.
I have the opposite experience. It delights me and I enjoy digging in deeper.
People are different!
Me too, but that’s because I appreciate being “caught red-handed” believing what I’m reading. I see it as a favor done me by the author.
If you weren’t anyway in the mindset that you need to practice weighing the information that’s given to you and calibrating by guessing at the answer before actually reading the real answer, I suppose it could be annoying.
Scott Alexander uses this style sometimes, and I like it. However, he tends to do it once per essay. I think that can work very well. Here, though, after I hit the “that’s wrong” multiple times, it started to feel like nothing in the essay was worth trying to understand, since I expected what I was reading to later be proclaimed wrong. (Just my own feeling.)
Yes. The fact that this post is precisely about trying to deconfuse a pre-existing misconception makes it even more important to be crystal clear. It’s known to be hard to overwrite pre-existing misconceptions with the correct understanding, and I’m pretty sure this doesn’t help.
This seems like the sort of thing best addressed by me adding a warning / attention-conservation-notice at the start of the article, though I’m not sure what would be appropriate. “Content Note: Trolling”?
ETA: This comment has been up for 24 hours and it has positive agreement karma and no-one’s suggested a better warning to use, so I’m doing the thing. Hopefully this helps?
I fully understand how this format could be frustrating to some people. I personally loved it because each new step/graph made sense and taught me something that helped me understand the next one. There was such a feeling of invested discovery in reading this post that it lead to me reading it a second time.
Some writing styles don’t work for some people, but this one really worked for me.
Agreed. One should state the main finding in a TLDR/abstract or else I’ll ask chatgpt to write one for me.