Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?
- ID
- 35741
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 14 Oct 2026, 2:02 PM
- Fetched
- 15 Oct 2026, 5:06 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://alexwennerberg.com/blog/2026-10-13-long.html
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 5.0
- Created
- 15 Oct 2026, 5:07 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developerssaas_founders
What happened
In a post titled 'Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?', Alex Wennerberg argues that rationalist bloggers pad posts with nuance instead of interrogating their starting assumptions, citing Scott Alexander's 25,000-word piece he skimmed versus his own 2,700-word response produced by cutting about 70% of an initial draft, and noting Eliezer Yudkowsky's 'sequences' run over one million words. His sharpest example is Gwern's 9,000-word, 100-plus-reference case that nicotine is not addictive and is good for you, which Wennerberg says turned out to be wrong. The Hacker News thread drew 345 points and 290 comments.
Why it matters
The concrete, transferable rule here is the 70% cut: Wennerberg's 2,700-word piece came from deleting most of a first draft, and he argues the remaining text lost nothing. Applied to what builders actually write — READMEs, RFCs, design docs, changelogs, launch posts — that is a measurable editing target rather than a style opinion. The Gwern example is the caution: a 9,000-word post with 100+ references asserted nicotine is not addictive, and Wennerberg states it is, so length plus citation count is not evidence of correctness. There is no Malaysia or Southeast Asia angle in this item; it is a writing-craft and online-community argument.
Discussion angle
Take one doc you own — onboarding README, architecture note, or launch post — and try the 70% cut on it. Does anything actually break for the reader, or does it just get faster to read? The Gwern case is the harder follow-up: how do you tell 'this is thorough' from 'this is long and well-cited but wrong' when reviewing a teammate's or an AI's write-up?