I have not read nor heard of this, but umm, its fanfic. People write fanfic because they enjoy the world of the story and want more of it. Why would it be a surprise that a fanfic is overly long and verbose? I'd assume that just goes with the territory.
I'd be interested to see some evidence that it's "considered a foundational text" or is treated in anything like the way that observant Jews treat the Torah.
I'm not sure that's the case here, because rationalist fanfics tend to instead try to tear down the world as illogical.
Example for Harry Potter and this fanfic.
In Harry Potter magical currency is made of precious metals and there are bronze coints, silver coins and gold coins. And they have fixed exchange rate.
"But wait!", notices the rationalist. "Since those coins could theoretically be melted down, and rates for those metals on exchange is different I could make infinite money glitch and crash the economy. Those wizards are so dumb, haha, for thousands of years they never figured out the basic logic."
Congratulations you found an economical inconsistency in a children's book. Your next period is boxing against kindergartners.
In my mind if you were a fan of original work, you would not be doing this.
You could find different explanation that does not try to paint the world as stupid. Simplest being https://xkcd.com/1494/
Are we reading the same bible? The bible is a super meandering document that repeats itself a bunch and also contradicts itself. (which is to be expected if you assume its some sort attempt at writing down and standardizing an oral myth tradition that came before it)
The Bible is fundamentally a collection of different works. Within those works, I generally agree that the ideas are fairly succinct. But because there are multiple documents in the Bible which cover roughly the same events, it kind of necessarily isn’t succinct as a single cohesive document.
In other words, if you rewrote the Bible as a single document, yeah, it’d be like 10% as long. But that isn’t how it was made.
I’m guessing you haven’t read it in Hebrew because the Hebrew is pretty succinct.
As for meandering, the narrative follows people who travel around to different places so I don’t know what you mean. The canon of the Bible doesn’t arrange all the books chronologically. You can read them in chronological order if you want.
The verbosity and ability to rationalize let's you come up with reasons which makes sense to your in-group quickly, even if it isn't often grounded in reality. They're quicker to rationalize than understand.
> adding layers of detail and nuance rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start or broadening their philosophical background beyond the collection of texts popular within their subculture.
Personally i think the world would be a better place if more of us added nuance to our arguments.
The problem part in that quote is “rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start”, not that they’re including nuance. Nuance can be a value add or it can be a distraction. It is not by itself virtuous.
The trick is to include a lot of nuance, details, and steelmanned arguments about little concessions and downstream, but to leave the key assumptions at the start largely unquestioned.
The reader spends 15 minutes reading what feels like a highly nuanced, deeply researched article. If you’re not paying close attention you don’t notice that some pivotal assumptions were spared from the nuance and steelmanning.
Rationalist bloggers aren’t the only ones who use this technique, but it is oddly common in rationalist blogs. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.
I don't know, I think rationalist bloggers tend to love arguing, and if you identified some assumption that they didn't address they'd just as happily write 50,000 words on that instead. :-)
I think he just used nuance as a polite way to say meandering.
Personally I really wish authors would pack their 'nuance' into well-sectioned areas, maybe even collapsible (we have the technology!). I shouldn't have to skim several paragraphs just to understand the core of the argument.
Arguably, it's not a big problem if you already love the author and hang on to their every word. But as someone who is often just trying to get the gist of the idea, I find the rationalist writing style really tiresome.
Off topic: The idea of a City of Dentists seems like a Grim Fandango [0] kinda thing. Bonus points if somehow "cotton" (algodon) can be worked into the afterlife themes.
I would think "reasonable" is more about pay equity than pay scale. As in a CEO shouldn't be making like three times more than their direct inferiors, for example.
that might be a nail in the conference's coffin...
You're not wrong for wanting your money back for services not provided, but also recognize this organization is to promote women in tech. A charge back kicks them while they are down.
They have nobody to blame but themselves for that. Charities have a duty to conduct themselves with integrity just as much as anyone else does. This has been a regular event for many years. Normally you would expect there to be contingency plans and as other commentators have posted, for ticket sales to mostly fund next years event not the current one.
> People who attend conferences like this are probably not a representative sample of general arrivals
Business air travel to America was flat in 2025 from 2024 [1][2]. I'm just not seeing any data which support the hypothesis that conference visitation to the U.S. has cratered in general to the point of threatening conference finances. (NTTO stopped breaking out conference visitation after 2019 [3].)
Different conferences are likely to attract different audiences. I don't think you can draw the types of conclusions you are drawing based soley on broad trends.
To be clear, i do agree that i don't think there is any evidence either way (nor is it likely we will be able to get any unless the conference organizers release some). The fact that they cancelled just 2 weeks before suggests to me that there are probably deeper management issues, even if lower intnl. travel contributed.
> don't think you can draw the types of conclusions you are drawing based soley on broad trends
Without evidence of exceptionality I think it’s fair to loosely conclude based on broad trends. This conference would have had to have been attracting a disproportionate number of international attendees to be disproportionately impacted. I’m seeing no evidence of that.
The difference is that I assume good faith and a history of competence on the part of the GHC operators and do not make any such assumption about the Fyre operators.
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