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Just had a realization: long posts are a method for jailbreaking your mind. They can make many subtle moves to manipulate your state of mind. In shorter posts the moves would have to be either larger and thus easier to detect, or fewer and thus unable to move you that far.
It still works even if you detect them, but not yet understand where the author wants to move you. Because if the article is long enough, it will overflow your context window and you'll start forgetting the subtle evidence. This will prevent you from putting the pieces together.
On the other hand, if you identify a statement as an attempted subtle manipulation, you can come up with a hypothesis of which way the author wants to manipulate you. This handily compresses the evidence into a small chunk which you can track even after your context window starts overflowing.
There are some prominent authors known for writing waaayyyy too long posts. I've always been wondering why their posts are so long - can't they just write the same in a shorter post? Or is there some intention behind the length?For a long time my working hypothesis has been that it would be just too much work for the authors to make their posts more concise. After all, it's notoriously harder to talk about complex topics in a concise way.Now I'm wondering whether I should maybe update towards the second hypothesis.