This is an obsession of mine, but I think it matters. From to time we are all guilty of over-long sentences, unnecessarily long, unusual, technical or abstract words, or just writing too much. But surely some of the citizens of UD are the worst offenders. I was moved to write this by the most recent post from KF which runs to 3000 words – quite short by his standards but rather longer than the word limit for most university essays. I don’t often have time to wade through posts of this length but for once I tried and I think it can be summarised as:
Materialism means there is no ultimate foundation for ethics and no human free will and this leads to all sorts of evil behaviour.
(I may have missed other important points amongst the deluge)
I am picking on KF because he just posted and he is a serial offender, but many of us do it on both sides of the debate. Does it matter if posts and comments are too long and difficult to read? After all isn’t it the content that matters not the presentation? I don’t think so.
- Your critics are unlikely to take the time to read it. So you have subtly cut off discussion and debate.
- It often covers sloppy thinking. It is so easy to hide fallacies and lack of evidence under a blizzard of abstractions and quotes.
On a more personal level it is egocentric. It is saying that I and my idea are so important you should all be prepared to spend the next 30 minutes wading through my post. My time is too important to be spent extracting the essential points and anyway I want to show how clever I am.
Now I am must stop before I go on too long 
It also takes more time to write a short post 🙂
(confessions of a serial offender here….)
I sometimes feel he’s trying to create a fortress of words, phrases from his back catalogue get thrown in to buttress the walls. Does he feel it is more comprehensive if larger? It feels like procedurally generated content, like BornAgain77s.
[edited]
TL;DR
Enjoy the irony of the association of compressibility and information. 😉
I think KF (Gordon Mullings) probably has some kind of communication or psychological disorder. You probably don’t need any explanation more than that.
I would suspect that the reason that KF prefers to be comprehensive, rather than concise, is due to a long history (from his point of view, which I agree with) of less comprehensive posts being taken out of context (the context of other parts of the argument being elsewhere explained), strawmanned, rabbit-holed, mischaracterized, misunderstood, etc., incessantly.
I suspect KF’s long-winded posts, along with other folks’ similar walls-of-text, are the result of an inferiority complex or perhaps a perceived respectability padding. I think there is this perception that if you jam enough words – particularly sesquipedalian ones – into a thought, you will come across as more intelligent and authoritative. The problem is that in most cases you end up befuddling your audience by Fogging the presentation or simply boring your audience. Of course, this may be the point all along.
As any beginning pool player will illustrate, if you can’t shoot straight, shoot HARD.
But they’re not ‘comprehensive’, they’re bloated, regurgitations. Comprehensive does not equal big.
edited to add ‘does not equal’ as those little less than / greater than signs did not appear!
Certainly, the incessant repetition (Lewontin, Plato, Alinskyites) in many posts makes it look like that. I haven’t read the post referred to in the OP, but he does seem recently to have dropped the drumbeat of “strawmen soaked in oil of ad hominem and ignited to poison and distract the red herrings…” and its variants.
Which is a step towards readability.
But I do suspect that much of each megapost is C&P’d from his own madly multicoloured website
I totally agree on the importance of keeping it short and to the point.
KF and vjtorley are the worst offenders at UD, with ba77 not far behind. And there are some offenders here. In fact the world seems to be full of people who don’t know how to keep it short and concise.
I sometimes write too much myself. If I notice in time, I come back and trim it down to size.
That might be the case, William, but the net result is that what he writes looks like a randomly assembled string of quotemines from his own past posts! I honestly cannot make head nor tail of them, except that he seems angry, and seems to greatly fear that what he calls “evo-mat” is a serious threat to humanity. If that is a misinterpretation then it’s one that is hard not to make.
His posts remind me of the old jibe about Englishmen and foreigners – if the foreigners can’t understand, talk louder!
On the contrary, better advice is: if the foreigners can’t understand, restate your case in terms that they are likely to understand, ideally using the same language!
A heck of a lot of the miscommunication between ID proponents and ID opponents arises because we are “divided by a common language” as GBS (I think) said about Americans and the English. We think we mean the same things by the same words, but we don’t.
And yet attempts to agree on a common definition for the purposes of arguments is often greeted with suspicion.
I have a hunch that ID proponents tend to be lumpers, and regard words as having a wide domain of referents, whereas ID opponents (scientists) tend to be splitters, and use words very narrowly. Both can work: Italian poetry depends on the richness of allusions conveyed by each word in a small vocabulary, and is very hard to translate into English, where the poetry depends on the richness of specific meaning conveyed by precise choice of words from a vast vocabulary – and is horribly difficult to translate into Italian! English translations of Italian poetry sound pedantic, while Italian translations of English poetry seem to miss the entire point.
anyhoo…(no, I’m not very concise am I…..?)
Can you convey, concisely, what you think KF’s point of view is?
The real problem is not that they are long, but that they are unresponsive.
Liz,
Are you Guano-laxing again?
Repeat what you think they have said and ask if that is right. Hopefully you get a yes or a no. Often works for me. Doesn’t seem to work with William. 🙂
Brevity good, bloviation bad.
(as succinct as I could get it!)
The thread title sounds like a line from a Broadway musical.
Why be concise?
Why bloviate, when you could be precise?
Why pad your prose ’til it is overweight
When being sparse
Would make it parse,
The better to communicate?
Why would you obfuscate, and say it twice,
When parsimony would suffice?
I think KF’s posts serve a mildly useful purpose, and I am all for him having a more prominent role in the ID movement.
Mark Twain has you beat:
KF is (IMO providing extensive documentation and argument that Barry’s perspective of materialism and what it necessarily entails logically is in fact a rather non-controversial (historically speaking) perspective on materialism.
Indeed, it’s hardly a new argument. Experience of qualia has long been a thorn in the side of materialism.
KF goes on to argue that it’s hardly controversial, in a philosophical framework, to hold that materialism only logically supports a might-makes-right, morally relativistic set of ethics. That’s not an accusation that materialists themselves are evil and hold such views, but rather that it is the only rationally coherent justification for any particular ethical view they might espouse – even if the ethical view they espouse is pacifism, peace and kindness.
I believe that he goes on to point out that this materialism-based moral relativism facilitates immoral and non-ethical behavior by making it very easy to justify moral and ethical lapses especially when you think no one is watching and you wont be found out or punished, enabling the decline of moral and ethical civilization.
“Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.”
William,
No, because none of that accounts for the endless repetition of talking points in KF’s posts (Lewontin, Alinsky, Plato, strawmen soaked in oil of ad hominem and set alight to cloud and polarise the atmosphere, ad nauseam) and that he, with no apparent sense of irony, so often criticizes in others’ posts and comments.
Good writers concentrate on expressing their ideas clearly. If you do that, you can trust that good readers will understand and think about what you have said. KF, by contrast, tries to dictate the reader’s thoughts, which ends up turning everybody off — including those who agree with him.
I would say it should not be controversial because it is wrong in almost every particular.
William – why do you love censorship so much?
No, just busy!
Can I ask everyone to READ THE RULES.
Yes, they do impose some constraints. But constraints are useful.
Rules on a board are not censorship, any more than the rules of scrabble are censorship, and in any case, I will not delete any posts or hide them from view (subject to the usual caveats).
Hmm, perhaps including those who agree with him. I don’t often read UD, so I don’t know who – if anyone – has ever admitted to being turned off by KF.
Do you conclude that all normal humans must be turned off by KF’s dictatorial hate-athons? Well, I think that’s a reasonable conclusion. Except, I don’t think very many – if any – of the remaining UD denizens are normal/reasonable in their responses to hatefulness. It may be that the Dominionist faction at UD is perfectly willing to have KF dictate their thoughts since his dictation so comfortably reinforces their own bigotry.
I think KF can’t be concise because he isn’t aiming for clarity or understanding. He’s aiming at reinforcing the christofascist brainwashing, and it takes constant repetition to hammer away the tiny seeds of human empathy which might crop up sometimes.
And if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. No wonder that man can’t write! Somebody hand him a #2 pencil.
I don’t think KF hates people – and I do think he is “aiming for clarity [and] understanding”. I think he’s just not very good at it, and he is truly worried about the world.
I think he’s not very good at it because his position doesn’t actually make sense, and it’s hard to make a good argument from a terrible premise. And I think his worries are unfounded, and if only he’d read a little more, and write a little less, I think he’d cheer up.
William, would you like to comment on the Inside Looking Out thread? I set it up to discuss just this, although I have a Pt II half written (and will prune before posting :))
Being worried about the world is a constant part of the human condition. As far back as we have written records the younger generation has been going to hell.
What I worry most about is folks who seem to be nostalgic for the past.
“Front loaded Gish-Gallup” comes to mind…
Yes. I honestly think the world is a better place for people now than it’s ever been. Sure there are some horrible regimes, and the sheer scale of slaughter when things go wrong dwarfs earlier ages, but not more so than our population, I think.
On the whole we are more tolerant, we treat each other better, we are more effective at relieving suffering, and when people do hideous things, we try to take action to find out what went wrong and reduce the future risk.
I’m worried about climate change, but I think we are capable of putting it right. We have a lot of smart people around now, with vast amounts of knowledge. Materials science alone has transformed our future.
[/Pollyanna]
Absolutely!
There is a 50 year history of this tactic. It started with debating, and it has become a characteristic of most of the writings of the ID/creationists.
It makes plowing through their “works” excruciatingly difficult when one first encounters it. However, after you learn the tactic, you go straight for the math; if there is any math. Then you go back to the “prose” and check to see if it is consistent with the math. You generally find that it is not. Further checks simply confirm the misconceptions and misrepresentations of science covered up by the bloviated prose.
Most of the time I find their errors and misconceptions in their abstracts. For example, after reading the abstract of Sewell’s thermodynamics paper, I didn’t even have to read Sewell’s math to know his thermodynamics paper was bogus. A thorough check of the math revealed not only the misconceptions again, but revealed the neophyte mistake of not checking units.
Kairosfocus’s “calculations” are based on the arrangements of Scrabble letters as stand-ins for atoms and molecules. That makes his calculations pretty much irrelevant to any “argument” he wants to make about the impossibility of atomic and molecular assemblies.
I don’t know much chemistry, but I am able to read the relevant literature on the distribution of functional sequences.
I don’t think Axe or anyone in the ID movement has even considered the evolution of regulation. Most vertebrate evolution has occurred as regulation rather than as new proteins.
There is another reason for such bloated, turgid writing on the part of the ID/creationists; it takes an enormous number of words and diversions into all the sideline issues that have to be addressed by their opponents. Endless mud wrestling gets them that kind of attention from those willing to engage them.
The political advantage for the ID/creationist is that they can claim – as indeed they have – that there is a huge dispute in the scientific community about ID/creationism, and the school kids need to hear it.
But the “dispute” is false; it is not taking place in the scientific community, and ID/creationist pseudo-science doesn’t belong in the science classroom. The turgid nature of it reflects poorly on the minds that produce it.
However, as long as the people over at UD want to display their angst and loathing while concocting ever more ludicrous “arguments” against science, we have the opportunity to study their tactics and mischaracterizations of science and use those in constructing better explanations for those people who really do want to learn.
UD has a rather large preoccupation with celebrity anyway; and that is a rather poor motivation for learning real science. I, for one, don’t wish to waste time helping the people over at UD enhance their celebrity.
AMEN.
This YEC agrees. I always find so many are so long winded. there is not so much to say in a single post. What ever it is can be sort and sweet.
How can conversations include so many points? Thats not a conversation or a teaching even.
If a idea is good it should be able to hit its spot pretty quick.
I strive to be short and fail but its not too long.
It does seem arrogant when people make long posts.
Nobody has that much new stuff to contribute.
I mostly agree – on the whole I was convinced by Pinker’s “Better Angels of our Nature”. But the world has become more fragile in the sense that a relatively small number of people can make an enormous difference one way or the other. This makes politics in its broadest sense absolutely crucial to success.
For example, a fellow mature PhD student at Soton is looking at what kind of Global Governance is needed to cope with using geoengineering to respond to climate change. Apparently it is not that expensive or difficult to cool the planet with sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere. But the effects are very big, global, unpredictable and difficult to reverse. Reducing in the temperature in the USA might switch off the SE Asia monsoon. Who decides what to do?
Important questions, but somewhat different in character than questions about violence.
“Brevity is the soul of wit”
You’ve got to acknowledge their additions to philosophy of science:
Abduction, deduction and induction are now joined by circumduction.
If you can’t strike oil in ten minutes, stop boring.
damitall2,
Some comments moved for peanut-gallerying that exceeded my arbitrary and subjective threshold.
Didn’t realise there WAS a threshold for that particular activity (if that’s what you say it was), and I regret my posts didn’t come up to the arbitrarily rarefied standard.
Umm, moved where? There aren’t any new posts in Sandbox or Guano that I can see …
See
http://tinyurl.com/lynuvf7
“Also, for the love of PZ Myers, can’t you be a little more focused in your writing style. Your handle implies focus not circumlocution. Perhaps the remedy for the dissonance between the writing style and the handle is to rename the handle as KairosCircumlocution.”
Dr. Liddle,
I had to re-register to get in. I noticed I no longer have author privileges here and my name no longer appears as author on a thread I wrote last year:
If I’m no longer welcome to author here, that’s fine, but if my name can be re-associated with posts I authored here, I would be appreciative.
Thank you.
Salvador,
The website was hacked a while ago and the user database was messed up. That’s why you no longer have author privileges and why your name doesn’t appear on your OP.
I’m sure Lizzie will restore both.
Welcome back Sal! Yes we had a major hack and lost the user database. I have reinstated your posting permission, and reassigned your post to you. I have to do this piecemeal as people lay claim to them unfortunately, but now one more is done 🙂
Thanks!
Apologies to both of you – and I’m not quite sure why your name, damitall, got included in my comment. Weird.
My intention had been to move to the sandbox a couple of posts that seemed a bit more peanut-gallery than this rules suggests I have in mind:
But where they went is a mystery.
And, in any case, there’s nothing wrong with peanut galleries (IMO) which is why I modified the “rule” – I’m an enthusiastic peanut shooter myself. I just want to keep the main page of this site as non-tribal as possible, so that people from any gallery can feel welcome to down peanut-shooters and exchange ideas without fear of anaphylaxis. As it were.
Will hunt around the database for your posts, and if I find, reinstate.
*embarassed*
Found and restored to sandbox.
Guilty as charged! My recent response to vjtorley (himself no mean wordsmith, sometimes running to 10,000 inc. quoted text) broke my intended 3000 word limit by 35%. I can’t pin the blame on vjt. My personal fault is in trying to address every point made (including by quoted sources).
After a while, I start to wonder whether I wouldn’t be better writing a book!
Brevity good; bloviation … can lead to considerable confusion particularly when words and concepts are rendered meaningless by excessive demand upon the reader to parse that which should be capable of expression in a manner that requires substantially less effort on their part [and note that the frequent addition of parenthetic asides and further hyperklink does little to enhance readability, see for example here and here] and the insertion of epistemological, ontological and orthogonal referents designed to … ummm …. sorry, I’ve got a bit lost … 🙂
[Hyperklink! That was a typo, but I like it, so it stays!]