> 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.
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.