I am enjoying this exchange. It recaps debates I’m always having with myself as a writer.

I think both of you would enjoy the book “Clear and Simple as the Truth”, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner. It is one of the best books I’ve read on writing. It is about standard English prose style. However, unlike most writing manuals, which just vaguely exhort you to be clear, Clear and Simple observes that standard style is a style of “disguised assertion” and that the appearance of clarity is always kind of illusion. It discusses the history of this style its unspoken assumptions about the structure of the subject mater and the nature of argument, the settings in which it is appropriate, etc.

It is also a short book. To me at least, this signals quality — I suppose because it shows someone is not trying to signal quality by writing an unnecessarily long book!

BUY FOOBAR STOCK NOW!!! INCREDIBLE VALUE!!! GOING UP UP UP!!!

He experimented with it a lot, and said that though he
initially thought that using grammar and punctuation
would be more persuasive, he got better results using all caps.

This indicates that most people don’t divide domains into
emotional ones in which persuasion is appropriate, and
informational ones in which reason is appropriate.
Rather, those domains Robin singles out as “persuasion”
domains are simply those domains in which more people operate,
and so they are tailored to a style that is persuasive to
most people – a style Robin calls propaganda.

P.S.

Eliezer wrote: “The idea that our actual, evolutionary motives are lurking in our subconscious and actively steering things is not conventional evolutionary psychology.”

AFAIK, this is not just conventional evolutionary psychology; it is the whole of conventional evolutionary psychology,
and of psychology in general. Psychology usually
proceeds as if there were no such thing as consciousness.

The idea that our strong friendship might, for some odd reason, start to fade when our friend can no longer be of service to us, would be more conventional evolutionary psychology – but that’s a new hidden circuit activating that the thinker doesn’t know about; it’s not a subconscious motivation that was at work all along.

Yes, we’ve evolved a general faculty to (a) in general, be influenced by ‘unvirtuous’ desires such as desire for high status; and (b) in general, put the best possible rosy cast on our actions. But to suppose that every trace of virtue is just status-seeking by trying to appear virtuous, is simply too cynical; it does not seem psychologically realistic.

I note that the rules may be different in economics than in evolutionary psychology. I can see why, in economics, you would try to put the burden of proof on someone claiming that a behavior is genuinely noble. But in evolutionary psychology, the burden of proof is on whoever claims the more complex adaptation. If there’s a selection pressure to signal quality X, then one simple adaptation that does the trick will be to actually have quality X. If this seems on its face to be psychologically realistic for humans, then the default is to say, “This would seem to explain why we have quality X!”, and maybe try to invent an experimental demonstration by reasoning about the ancestral conditions that should activate or maintain quality X. A more complicated conscious-plus-subconscious hypothesis that enabled even more sophisticated behavior, would bear the burden of further demonstration in a way that distinguished it from the simpler hypothesis. It would also prompt the question of why attention to the signal hadn’t faded over evolutionary time.

Economic actors routinely invent quite complicated and intelligent plans on the spur of the moment; evolution tends to be relatively more parsimonious.

Anna, yes one is wise not to insult high status audiences.

Katja, informative authors often have little idea what conclusions readers will draw from info provided.

Douglas, my topic is not what I can infer about Eliezer from his total corpus of writings.

All, I’d think it more important to understand typical author and reader behavior than to focus so on a few outliers like Smullyan or Feynman.