What’s missing here? Why would anyone think I’m spending a lot of work optimizing for third-party readers?
I think some of Eliezer’s stuff is “optimized for third-party readers” and it is presented in the form of a dialogue, and that might be a source of some of the confusion here. Either way, I read what Wei Dai said as something “Please add a dialogue tag so people who prefer ‘treatises’ to ‘essays’ will understand how to engage with the material.”. I think this is seen as useful to have at the start of posts, for the same reasons it might be useful to have distinct commenting guidelines like “Ask questions instead of telling people how they’re wrong” versus “We’re all working together to tear each other’s arguments down.”
I think some of Eliezer’s stuff is “optimized for third-party readers” and it is presented in the form of a dialogue, and that might be a source of some of the confusion here.
For what it’s worth, I find Eliezer’s dialogues (especially the ones he’s written in the past several years) to be absolutely unreadable. His non-dialogue writing was much, much easier to read.
I think some of Eliezer’s stuff is “optimized for third-party readers” and it is presented in the form of a dialogue, and that might be a source of some of the confusion here. Either way, I read what Wei Dai said as something “Please add a dialogue tag so people who prefer ‘treatises’ to ‘essays’ will understand how to engage with the material.”. I think this is seen as useful to have at the start of posts, for the same reasons it might be useful to have distinct commenting guidelines like “Ask questions instead of telling people how they’re wrong” versus “We’re all working together to tear each other’s arguments down.”
For what it’s worth, I find Eliezer’s dialogues (especially the ones he’s written in the past several years) to be absolutely unreadable. His non-dialogue writing was much, much easier to read.