I often wondered if Patrick uses unnecessarily convoluted sentences, or if he is simply careful about using the proper terminology, and my English is just not good enough to follow him like a native speaker would.
Some people do not enjoy my writing style. That is fine; it’s a big Internet and there are writers with many styles on it. Some people think my style is poorly considered or unnecessary. I invite them to attempt writing a few million words. It will give one a very considered view on one’s own style.
I have spent half my life working in a foreign-to-me language and so I feel for non-native speakers who try to read my writing. That said, all choices in life have trade-offs. Many publications in the U.S. target a fifth to eighth grade reading level. You likely would have little difficulty reading those publications, much like I have comparatively little difficulty reading Japanese aimed at 5th graders. However, people rarely associate those publications with dense, insightful, textured prose on complicated technical and interdisciplinary subjects. (If some HNers do, awesome; stuff you’ll love is available at the obvious places on the Internet.)
I love your writing. I believe the reason some people do not is because you are very precise, which means using more words. As you know, people are impatient and prefer less words unless they can see clearly how more words were necessary.
In case you needed any encouragement, here's some: Keep going, you're amazing!
> I invite them to attempt writing a few million words. It will give one a very considered view on one’s own style.
That it will! I recently went from [not writing many documents] to [writing a ton of documents], and it turbocharged my reflecting-on-style background process.
Thanks again for your documents over the decades!
...and as a quote in HPMOR put it:
> Apparently people who were in books actually sounded like a book when they talked.
That's the way I try to write, with middling results; I'm nowhere nearly as gifted as you are (which drives me a little nuts). I don't know if it's the way Patrick tries to write. But I do know that Patrick's writing is extraordinarily successful. It's stylistically not to your liking, you've made very clear, but it's effective at communicating the ideas he's looking to communicate, and, especially with Bits About Money, has found a large and receptive audience.
The concision you're looking for in his work is one mark of successful writing, but not the only one. You can compare his writing to that of, say, the Rationalists, who have never found a narrative they were unable to pulverize into a half-finished wiki page. There's research, and the choice of which details to make prominent. B.A.M. succeeds in part because it tells interesting stories. That's good writing, regardless of stylistic choices.
I think you're being too glib. This could have been a much more interesting discussion.
The guy came here and said, people can't handle my writing because it's so dense and textured; let them go ahead and try to write these millions of words. I thought that was obnoxious, but since the technology does not yet exist to give people swirlies over the internet, I adapt to the constraints of the medium.
I really don't care about the personal dynamics here. We are all three of us polarizing figures to substantial numbers of people on the Internet.
What bugs me is the blithe assertion about the quality of his writing, because like it's just demonstrably false that he writes badly. He has different writing goals, different subject matter, a different audience, and a very different style. It's easy to see how any or all of those things might not be your cup of tea. But his writing is effective, which is really the first and most important thing you want to ask for from what he's trying to accomplish. Just as important (to me, nerding out about this) I don't think he'd be more effective if he tried to write more like you do.
I'm sorry, but he writes badly! Like the guy at the head of the thread said, it's painful trying to parse his sentences, and that's not because the material is inherently difficult (compare Matt Levine, who can make similar subject matter read like Wodehouse).
The context of this subthread is a non-native speaker asking if the fault here lies with the writer or the reader, and I gave my honest opinion. Arguments about effectiveness and success are neither here nor there; don't make me drag Kenny G into this.
It is wild to me that you think that, because he has a following that adores his writing, including among professional writers. I'm not trying to persuade you at this point, but I genuinely would like a better understanding of how you think about this stuff.
This is not about sticking up for Patrick, who can stick up himself just fine (he has more readers than either of us). It's about my understanding of what "good writing" is.
I'd enjoy a prix fixe meal at the French Laundry more than I would a burger on an aircraft carrier, but a lot of people wouldn't agree with me about that!
Funny enough the common wisdom in the Navy is that you eat much better on smallboys (destroyers, frigates, etc.) than on a carrier.
I knew a guy whose brother worked as a chef on the Charles de Gaulle (France's only aircraft carrier), and I bet the cooking there was incredible. The thing probably has a dedicated wine deck.
There's a hidden advantage to writing like this. It comes up when, e.g., you're communicating on a controversial topic in a forum like Twitter with a history of forming mobs against folks who communicate on controversial topics.
Suppose an angry reader is looking for a reason to form a mob against you. If you write in simple sentences, that makes it easy for the angry reader to process your statements and go after them. But if your sentences are more complicated, the angry reader needs to decode them logically before they can justify their anger. Angry people tend to be poor at logic. So when they run into this kind of writing, they often get bored before they have a chance to get outraged. You get your message across, and the angry reader moves on to the next tweet in their feed. Everybody wins.
This doesn't work 100% of the time. But if you do it right, it cuts down on a lot of negative virality. I'm not saying this is or isn't Patrick's intentional strategy. I have no idea. It's just one among many consequences of this communication style.
I wish this were true but frankly, at least on most social media sites, people will happily move forward with any kind of mob justice irrespective of the truth or one’s writing style.
I do think that precision in writing is useful for defending one’s prior claims (and for other reasons!) but I think that’s orthogonal to defending one’s self from mass action on today’s internet.
To me, he writes like a precursor of how most of the folks on LessWrong write. I think it's a case of convergent nerd evolution.
Someone else I put in this group is CGP Grey, the YouTuber, specifically his early podcast episodes. That guy's ideas changed my life in a lot of ways as a teenager in ways I think I can't fully describe today.
I was wondering the same lately. It is interesting to compare his tweets to pg's tweets which are the complete opposite: patio11's tweets feel like oddly specific and extremely hard to parse while pg's tweets seem very generic and easy to parse yet insightful. Honestly the only reason I follow patio11 is that his style and content is so different from other people I follow that I feel I need this diversification.
pg explicitly tries to write very simply, which I've definitely appreciated and tried to learn from. However, I think Patrick's unambiguous style is also interesting in its own way, and he is writing very specifically about how (human) systems operate at a level which very very few people write. Others make generic statements like "the Post Office usually delivers mail on Sundays", while he might say "the Post Office has an obligation to deliver mail on Sundays unless one of several [adjective] scenarios occurs, which tends to happen once every [adjective] weeks". I think the former is easier to read but doesn't convey as much specific information.
> I often wondered if Patrick uses unnecessarily convoluted sentences
One of my weird qualifications is evaluating text complexity. Most of Patrick’s writing is simply highly accurate and precise erudite language. Frankly, compared to other writers at a comparable level of erudition, his writing is downright economical rather than convoluted.
His texts tend to be very information dense in a way that I’m not sure all readers appreciate or value.
>. or if he is simply careful about using the proper terminology
Yep. All that.
> and my English is just not good enough to follow him like a native speaker would.
Probably (not sure about your English proficiency level), but that’s not a knock on your English.
Note that Patrick’s writing is very high level, and I think many native speakers don’t read his texts with a high degree of fluency. Specifically, they simply don’t make it through the text, they don’t understand what he wrote, or they are not able to identify the preciseness and accuracy (and sometimes artfulness) with which he communicates his ideas.
On a personal level, I am a big fan of his writing — it’s just a delight to read material on a complex topic with a high degree of confidence that what he says is extremely accurate.
Another author who I think writes at a high level is Scott Alexander of slatestarcodex and astralcodexten (or wherever he writes these days) — very high brow style on complex topics. It’s not for everyone. Fwiw, I’ve had to read (and reread) some of Scott Alexander’s pieces in small chunks with breaks to process what I had read — sometimes it’s just oozing with intellectual goodness.
For someone who writes in finance in a more casual style, I recommend Matt Levine and his newsletter Money Stuff (free).
I had never read Patrick McKenzie's writing before, but the linked article contains a link to a popular article of his from 2012[1], which I read, and his substack[2], a few articles of which I skimmed as well.
The salary negotiation article really doesn't come off as that formal and high level, to me; the tone is rather casual, although it requires knowledge of some advanced vocabulary like "fungible" and "administrativia". I'm not saying this to brag about my reading level; I'm genuinely a bit confused.
I had been expecting something like the preface from the second edition of Jane Eyre[3].
1. Some topics are easier to write about than others — certain types of complexity will not add to the quality of communication. I agree that the salary negotiation article of Patrick’s isn’t particularly complex.
2. High level texts don’t have to be inaccessible. One of the best high level texts that I’ve seen was a Turkish article that ostensibly looked like a sports story on football/soccer but was actually very high level political commentary. Some of the stuff that African story tellers do is absolutely mind-boggling in its ability to communicate on multiple levels.
3. The salary negotiation article may be simple for you and for many folks on HN, but I can’t tell you how many people I’ve sent this article to (with purpose) who didn’t even finish reading it. Specifically, I think the structure is longer and more involved than some folks like. Some of the (important, imho) topics also can put people to sleep — fully-loaded salary costs comes to mind.
4. I’m not sure what the view on the salary negotiation article is now, but it was an eye opener to many people when it was written. The way salaries are decided in tech companies is quite a bit different now than it was in 2012, and I think this article played at least a small part in that cultural change.
5. Even in an article on a relatively mundane topic like salary negotiation, Patrick comes up with gems like this: “If you have a kid brother who majored in Flemish Dance and got a modest full-time job at a non-profit, his fully-loaded cost is still probably $4,000 a month or more.” There is a lot of cultural load in that one. It might be easy for HN folks to parse it, but it’s not that easy for large swathes of the population, especially if non-native populations are included.
If I run into any of Patrick’s writing that showcases his some of his higher level stuff over the next 24 hours, I will reply here. It’s a busy day, so I’m not sure I will have the time.
As a fun side thing, here is a high-level text from Obama when Seinfeld ask him what sport politics is most like:
“It’s probably most like football. A lot of players. A lot of specialization. A lot of hitting. A lot of attrition. But then every once in awhile, you’ll see an opening, you hit the line, you get one yard, you try a play, you get sacked, now it’s like, third and 15… you have to punt a lot. But every once in a while, you see a hole, and then there’s open field.”
A reasonable comprehension question to ask on a text like this would be something like “Based on Obama’s comment, what are some specific occurrences in politics that might have conceptual parallels in [American] football?”I assure you that this passage is basically like Klingon to non-native speakers who have not immersed themselves in American culture.
You make some good points. I definitely understand where a non-native speaker would have trouble following American cultural references and phrasings; I was more confused by the people saying that they're also native speakers, but that following McKenzie's writing is still difficult for them.
> 3. The salary negotiation article may be simple for you and for many folks on HN, but I can’t tell you how many people I’ve sent this article to (with purpose) who didn’t even finish reading it. Specifically, I think the structure is longer and more involved than some folks like. Some of the (important, imho) topics also can put people to sleep — fully-loaded salary costs comes to mind.
This is also a good point. I think it's because a lot of people, even college-educated people, just don't read much, so most won't read a very long article, even if it's written in a casual tone, particularly if it's boring. Partly, I believe that reading has to be practiced and maintained, similar to maintaining a muscle. If you don't read articles regularly, reading a long one will be very mentally taxing. Even if you do, if an article is longer than what you're used to, you'll feel mentally tired after you're done. And it's harder to read long articles when they're about a bit of an unexciting topic, like salary negotiation.
I've come to the same conclusion as you. I sometimes find it very hard to parse, but given all the praise he gets from very smart individuals, I put it down to not being native.
