Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.

Of course, as there is no other way to do this with posts of this length. If you want to dismantle an average SSC post you will need to explain so much more things than he already does so it blossoms into small novel territory. Any I gish nobody has the time or attention span for that.

A novel which could often be abridged by saying:

"look at this incredibly offended dork" ;)

I should note that I didn't ghostwrite that one either

As Robert Evans put it:

If you are a normal, decent, well-socialized human being, you probably have not heard about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Actually explaining what this thing is will have to happen in several different stages. But I should start by telling you this re-write of the first Harry Potter book is around 660,000 words long.

The entire Lord of the Rings series, including The Hobbit, comes in at a little less than 580,000 words.

The audiobook is 67 hours long.

The interminable length has got to have started out as a gullibility filter before ending up as an unspoken imperative to be taken seriously in those circles

Only in these circles could an article that AI can read to you in an hour and forty-eight minutes be clickbait for the paywalled "companion piece."

unironically, their culture has a better use case for it than the rest of earth does. they're not even losing informational value in the compression and nonsense-izing since there isn't any to start with