Star Slate Codex is the only "armchair philosophy" site I read. I really love it.
Every time I click a link to some of the author's inspiration sources, or read the comments even, I'm appalled at how complicated and unattractive the writing is there. The contrast to Alexander's writing is simply so stark. I simply find myself giving up after a few paragraphs.
I recently read his enormous and lovely "Mediations on Moloch" essay, and was amazed by how hard I found it to follow the Nick Bostrom citations. I mean this is a famous bestseller philosopher. Is Bostrom's writing so bad, or is Alexander's writing simply so good?
This article is one of my favourites. I love how, like many of his articles, he doesn't actually change my mind about anything (at least not to my knowledge), but he does help me express, verbally, an itch that I had about something for a long time.
> Is Bostrom's writing so bad, or is Alexander's writing simply so good?
I think there are three things in play here.
First is the simple observation that different writing styles appeal differently to different readers. Some find an informal style easier to absorb while others are turned off by its lack of rigor.
But a deeper aspect is that, like everything, writing style is also a social signal. Many authors are put in the unfortunate position to choose between a writing style that identifies them as being in the right tribe (like "academic philosopher") or one that is easier to read by a greater fraction of readers. Given the incentive structure when your job is to be an academic philosopher, people rationally end up writing in a style that makes their material harder to read.
Finally, with philosophy in particular, the field has such a long history of self-reflection on everything, including questions like "what does this word mean?" and "what does it mean for words to have meaning?" that it gets really hard to talk precisely about things and move the discussion forward without falling into traps and loops. So philosophers have had to bend English in weird ways to route around past ambiguities or pin down things that we are normally comfortable with being vague.
It's the problem of jargon, but applied to the whole damn language.
That feeling you talk about in your last sentence is one that's familiar to me as well, because I get it all the time when reading SSC, and we've got to be suspicious of it- that's exactly how people who read <religious literature, cult creeds, academic papers> that confirms their preexisting ideas feel.
Not every thing you read is meant to change your mind. I had this feeling with SSC too (more frequently in the past, in the Meditations on Moloch era, less so now), but I can clearly tell that I had pieces of those ideas developed on my own, and an SSC article only let me put them in a refined form.
(Having been brought up in a pretty cultish religion, I'm now painfully aware of cultishness works.)
Philosophy is a real field of study, just as computer science is. You can't expect to dive directly into reading papers written by Knuth intended for an audience of professional computer scientists without going through a great deal of preparatory work. Whereas you might find Alexander easy to read, it is doubtful his work would stand up to academic scrutiny or be useful to establish the concepts by itself, which is usually what the sources he would link to are doing.
Every time I click a link to some of the author's inspiration sources, or read the comments even, I'm appalled at how complicated and unattractive the writing is there. The contrast to Alexander's writing is simply so stark. I simply find myself giving up after a few paragraphs.
I recently read his enormous and lovely "Mediations on Moloch" essay, and was amazed by how hard I found it to follow the Nick Bostrom citations. I mean this is a famous bestseller philosopher. Is Bostrom's writing so bad, or is Alexander's writing simply so good?
This article is one of my favourites. I love how, like many of his articles, he doesn't actually change my mind about anything (at least not to my knowledge), but he does help me express, verbally, an itch that I had about something for a long time.