(1) It’s surprising to me that you bring up analytic philosophy as a better parallel. Writing in agent foundations / LessWrong feels very different to me than analytic philosophy!
Analytic philosophy works within a well established and rigorous taxonomy of terms / concepts, as evidenced by, e.g., PhilPapers and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The assumptions at the roots of this taxonomy are generally pretty well explored. So even if philosophers are not exactly deducting an entire chain of belief for every paper, we can usually articulate the tradition within which an author operates, and understand the common arguments and axioms.
This is in contrast to continental philosophy, which is often much less explicit about its assumptions, and instead draws on a hodge-podge of different thinkers, ranging from Freud to Hegel, without rigorously examining its own claims. Not all continental philosophy is like this! Alain Badiou, for example, starts from an ontological exploration of reality based on set theory to build up to his theory of politics. But the parallel with continent philosophy is exactly to point out this lack of consistency and this poor habit of leaving assumptions implicit.
If others belief I am being too generous in my treatment of analytic philosophy, I’d be interested to hear why.
(2) I agree with your point that the examples could be improved.
(3) I agree that clean conclusions would be nice, but it seems legitimate as well to simplify identify the problem. I’d also assert that some of the conclusions are implicit in the critique, i.e. be cautious of formalizing an inherently imprecise concept, or don’t treat the “epistemic status” label as permission to advocate for a dubious opinion. Agent foundations has a very hard task set for itself, so I wouldn’t pretend to have the answers for how it can ensure intellectual rigor.
EY has been incredibly productive, so while I’m sure there’s counterpoints like those you cited, The Sequences themselves seem like a clear example of a more verbose writing style (without making an assessment of this as good/bad; maybe it’s fit for purpose! My critique is that this has influenced others to replicate the style when it may not be appropriate).
If you’re submitting fiction or poetry to literary magazines, you need to be prepared to submit each piece a (surprisingly?) high number of times before you should consider reworking or retiring it, particularly if you only submit to top-tier publications (acceptance rate ≤1%). I think 20 submissions is probably the sweet spot.
Consider a simplified example.
Let’s say you submit to magazines with a 1% acceptance rate. Out of an audience of 10,000 writers, a random 2000 submit manuscripts, including yourself.
The editors have various biases (taste, fatigue, etc), meaning they cannot perfectly select the top 1% of submissions. Instead, they randomly select from the top 10%, meaning they select 20 of the top 200 submissions.
If you are not selected, what is the probability your manuscript is in the top 1%?
Before submission, if you assume no priors about the quality of your submission, we should assume a 1% probability we’re in the top 1%. By Byes law, after 1 rejection we should only lower that probability to 0.91%. In other words, we could say we’re still 91% sure our work is in the top 1% of possible works.
After 10 submissions, this drops to 0.37% (still pretty high!). After 20, we’re down to 0.13%. At 30, we’re down to 0.04%.
20 submissions feels like a good inflection point to me. 13% confidence is probably an underestimate, given extenuating factors like normativity of taste. Beyond this, unless you really believe in your writing, the opportunity cost alone isn’t worth the effort.