I am somewhat amused that the author seems to me to emphasize the peculiarities of their communication styles when the author has such downright awkward, disjointed and mashed-together style. Eliezer’s faults do not include lack of facility with paragraph structure.
when the author has such downright awkward, disjointed and mashed-together style
Some of that may be the fault of my excerpting/editing. There were so many short paragraphs I felt I had to combine a bunch for HTML presentation (little paragraphs may work well in a double-column narrow magazine layout, but in a single column wide layout? not so much), and I tried to cut as much material as possible (otherwise there’s no point in excerpting and I should’ve just left it as a pointer to the PDF).
In addition to what gwern said, it’s worth bearing in mind that Harper’s is a very literary sort of magazine, and its typical style is thus somewhat less straightforward than most news.
I am somewhat amused that the author seems to me to emphasize the peculiarities of their communication styles when the author has such downright awkward, disjointed and mashed-together style. Eliezer’s faults do not include lack of facility with paragraph structure.
Some of that may be the fault of my excerpting/editing. There were so many short paragraphs I felt I had to combine a bunch for HTML presentation (little paragraphs may work well in a double-column narrow magazine layout, but in a single column wide layout? not so much), and I tried to cut as much material as possible (otherwise there’s no point in excerpting and I should’ve just left it as a pointer to the PDF).
I see. Using ellipses would have helped.
I did.
Hmm. So you did. They didn’t make anything like full impact since they were not accompanied by paragraph breaks.
Anyway, that mitigates but does not completely solve the author’s style issues.
Oh. >:(
Well, have this additional upvote in addition to the frowny face.
In addition to what gwern said, it’s worth bearing in mind that Harper’s is a very literary sort of magazine, and its typical style is thus somewhat less straightforward than most news.