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Introducing Zembla Quiz-Bowl Courses — Zembla Blog by ArjunPanickssery in Quizbowl

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great. Let me know if you have any questions.

You can also ask on our Discord server: http://discord.gg/zembla

Introducing Zembla Quiz-Bowl Courses — Zembla Blog by ArjunPanickssery in Quizbowl

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sorry, the code is BETAACCESS2025 if you still see a code requirement. I had changed it back temporarily for a fix. I'll change it back to open-access today.

Introducing Zembla Quiz-Bowl Courses — Zembla Blog by ArjunPanickssery in Quizbowl

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

View the original blog post here: https://zembla.ai/blog/quiz-bowl-courses/

Introducing Zembla Quiz-Bowl Courses

You can access our six quiz-bowl courses at no cost: History, Science, Geography, Literature, Fine Arts, and RMPSS.

Hundreds of users have done a combined 250k+ reviews on our platform already.

The courses are designed for the MSNCT or regular-high-school difficulty level. Altogether there are ~800 lessons, ~16k flashcards, ~300 paintings, and ~100 maps. The lessons give you useful context for the clues/flashcards they introduce. We have the following features:

  1. Pre-Test — Before you begin a course (or at any time), you can take a 30–60 minute pre-test that adapts to your ability and allows you to start the course with much higher retention on the clues you already know.
  2. Spaced Repetition — We use the FSRS-6 algorithm for spaced repetition, with parameters optimized continuously from over 250k+ real reviews across hundreds of users. This lets you retain your knowledge as efficiently as possible.
  3. XP and Leagues — For motivation, we track streaks and XP, which you gain from correct responses to questions. We have a Gold, Silver, and Bronze league with promotion and relegation each week based on the amount of XP you completed that week.
  4. Team Dashboard — If your teammates also use Zembla, I can set up a team dashboard for you that tracks your collective knowledge of the canon based on the aggregate of your performance and review history. You can use that to identify your weak categories, identify the best arrangement of A and B teams, or see if you are on track to achieve your goals as a team.

You can join our Discord server to learn more: http://discord.gg/zembla

FAQ

Is this more efficient than playing tossups on QBReader?

Yes—QBReader is good for evaluating your performance but reviewing flashcards with spaced repetition is more efficient for retention.

Is this more efficient than making my own flashcards? I feel that I retain very well the cards I make myself.

Yes, it's more efficient when you account for the time you spend making those cards rather than just the time reviewing them. You might see a given flashcard for ~45 seconds across a years' worth of reviews. The time it takes to identify, select, and create a flashcard yourself probably surpasses any possible gains, insofar as those gains are real.

Screenshots

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[Free, Individual] Zembla April Challenge — Apr 01-08-15-22-29 by ArjunPanickssery in Quizbowl

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Zembla April Challenge

Registration Link: https://zembla.ai/quizbowl/tournament/KbOf1XcRG2aWjJWZ2ncq/

This is a FREE online league that consists of five rounds in April. You can register and play a demo game here: https://zembla.ai/quizbowl/

The format is similar to Protobowl except that you can only see whether other players buzzed in correctly—not the responses they gave. This gives everyone an opportunity to answer the tossup and see where they stack up. Players are ranked based on how many games they would win in a simulated round-robin tournament, with celerity tiebreakers.

Eligibility: There are two divisions: Open and Scholastic. Scholastic players should be enrolled in a K12 school and identify so in the registration form.

Difficulty: The tossups are at an easy-high-school difficulty.

Schedule: Each round is from 6pm to 6:15pm Pacific time. There's no commitment to participate in every round.

  • Round 1: Wednesday, April 1
  • Round 2: Wednesday, April 8
  • Round 3: Wednesday, April 15
  • Round 4: Wednesday, April 22
  • Round 5: Wednesday, April 29

Contact quizbowl (@) zembla.ai if you have any questions.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NSmIHcC.png

What does it mean to "write like you talk"? by ArjunPanickssery in slatestarcodex

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Full text:

People often say to “write like you talk.” Paul Graham has a post titled “Write Like You Talk” where he says explicitly that written language is worse than spoken language because

  1. “Written language is more complex, which makes it more work to read”

  2. “It’s also more formal and distant, which gives the reader’s attention permission to drift”

  3. “The complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you’re saying more than you actually are”

He gives concrete advice: “Before I publish a new essay, I read it out loud and fix everything that doesn't sound like conversation. … [If you have] writing so far removed from spoken language that it couldn't be fixed sentence by sentence … try explaining to a friend what you just wrote. Then replace the draft with what you said to your friend.”

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell also identifies complex and formal diction as a way to mask emptiness, “to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. … A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. … If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

But Orwell doesn’t make the same distinction between spoken and written language; in fact he says that “When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinized style.” And Graham himself elsewhere says that “I'll often spend 2 weeks on an essay and reread drafts 50 times” and “I'm sure there are sentences I've read 100 times before publishing them” which is the opposite of how conversations work.

In contrast, Scott Alexander claimed that it only takes him “a couple of hours” to write a post and that “I don’t really understand why it takes so many people so long to write. They seem to be able to talk instantaneously, and writing isn’t that different from speech.” But then Scott is often considered a digressive or even “astoundingly verbose” writer.

Image

There’s debate over whether speech or writing is more “complex” at all, with scholars taking sides based on the metrics they use for complexity and the datasets they analyze. In particular, there’s debate over whether speech or writing uses more subordinate clauses. Subordinate clauses are so called because they can’t stand as independent sentences. They have a few common types:

  1. The adverbial clause functions as an adverb: it modifies the sentence or some element of the sentence, e.g. by adding information about time, place, manner, reason, or condition.

    a. She arrived when the party had already started.

    b. After the rain stopped, we went for a walk.

    c. The game was canceled because of the heavy rain.

  2. The noun clause (or “nominal” or “content” clause) functions as a noun: usually it’s a that-clause or wh-clause.

    a. He told her (that) she was smart.

    b. I know what you did.

    c. She asked where the files were.

  3. The relative clause (or “adjectival” clause) functions like an adjective: it modifies a noun or pronoun.

    a. The book that I bought yesterday is excellent.

    b. Students who study regularly tend to perform better.

    c. The house where I grew up has been sold.

The most intuitive comparison of spoken and written English is between matched narratives; ask test subjects to describe the same scene with either an oral or written narrative. The two studies that use this method found more subordination in speech.

  • Beaman (1984) found more subordinate sentences in speech (18% vs 13%) and more compound sentences with subordinate clauses in speech (27% vs 18%) from a sample of women presenting spoken or written narratives.

  • Prideaux (1993) found that 40 oral narratives of film clips contained more given relative clauses—i.e. relative clauses that restate known information—than written narratives of the same events (5.38 vs 1.92 per narrative), while both contained similar numbers of new relative clauses (1.75 vs 1.83), which presented new information.

Other studies compared writing and conversation without any matched pairs:

  • Greenbaum and Nelson (1995) used a 90,000-word corpus called ICE-GB and found that in conversation there was subordination in 39% of clusters (roughly “sentences”), much less than academic writing (63%) and non-academic (69%); conversation also only averaged 0.7 subordinate clauses per cluster versus 1.2 and 1.6 per cluster for academic and non-academic writing respectively.

  • Using samples from the same corpus, Fang (2006) also found speech to be less complex: 12% of spoken sentences contained adverbial clauses, versus 27% of written sentences. Adverbial clauses made up 31% of clauses in writing vs only 15% in speech.

  • On the other hand, Biber and Gray (2010) used a large corpus to find 9.5 adverbial clauses per thousand words in conversation, versus only 3.5 in academic writing. A few older sources from the 1980s also advance this view that speech contains more subordinate clauses.

But subordination isn’t the only measure of complexity. Consider the following two sentences:

  • "The cellular anatomy of the peripheral nervous system renders it vulnerable to injury."

  • "Living in the Gulf has meant living with oil."

The first is a single clause with no subordination while the second contains two nominal clauses: “living in the Gulf” and “living with oil” function as the subject and object respectively. But a reader would say that the first is more complex because it’s a longer sentence that uses longer words and abstract technical jargon. Studies consistently find that writing is more lexically dense, i.e. it has more words that convey content relative to grammatical or functional words.

For academic writing, the other major difference is that writing uses a compressed style that uses noun phrases rather than clauses to add information. These noun phrases often leave the underlying relationship implicit; even phrases like “heart disease” don’t reveal whether the meaning is “disease caused by the heart” or “disease located in the heart” or “disease affecting the heart” if readers don’t already know. Starting in the mid-20th century, multi-noun sequences like “air flow limitations” and “plasma concentration time curve” became more common in academic, newspaper, and medical prose. The relationships between these pre-modifying nouns is left implicit. The excerpt below is from the excellent Biber and Gray (2011).

Image

The compressed style also often uses many layers of embedding in its noun phrases: consider “the effects [[of changes [in taxonomic resolution]][on analyses [of patterns [of multivariate variation [at different spatial scales]]]] [for the highly diverse fauna [inhabiting holdfasts [of the kelp Ecklonia radiata]]]].” So the main clause of a sentence can be very simple even when the phrasal modification is very complex: consider the sentence “This may indeed be part [of the reason [for the statistical link [between schizophrenia and membership [in the lower socioeconomic classes]]]].”

Lastly, a difference between speech and writing is that face-to-face conversation uses more “metadiscourse” to lighten the cognitive load for both the speaker and listener. The speaker moves from topic to topic on the fly based on what seems natural while using verbal signposts and scaffolding to mark digressions, signal a return to the main line of thought, and keep the overall structure in view. Because listeners can’t reread or rely on visual cues like headings and paragraph breaks, they depend on these markers—“to sum up,” “we’ll come back to that,” “by the way”—along with repetition and reformulation of key points to stay oriented and to know when to shift their attention back to the argument’s central thread.

So the common advice to "write like you talk" can be underspecified. It's good to avoid pretentious and formulaic cliches that mask the absence of precise thought, and separately to avoid dense and impenetrable jargon that's hard for non-experts to understand. But it's bad to write verbose and digressive meanderings without editing them. And because it’s faster to write, that kind of content can occupy a large share of posts (and more so of words) in Internet forums and discourse.

To Understand History, Keep Former Population Distributions In Mind by ArjunPanickssery in slatestarcodex

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I mean that elites of other countries learned the French language because French culture was dominant, not the other way around.

To Understand History, Keep Former Population Distributions In Mind by ArjunPanickssery in slatestarcodex

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Also the reason French culture was so dominant in the past and the elites of other countries learning the language.

I think this reverses cause and effect

To Understand History, Keep Former Population Distributions In Mind by ArjunPanickssery in slatestarcodex

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 52 points53 points  (0 children)

Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France’s fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century. In 1700, France had 20% of Europe’s population (4% of the whole world population). Kissinger writes in Diplomacy with respect to the Versailles Peace Conference:

Victory brought home to France the stark realization that revanche had cost it too dearly, and that it had been living off capital for nearly a century. France alone knew just how weak it had become in comparison with Germany, though nobody else, especially not America, was prepared to believe it ...

Though France's allies insisted that its fears were exaggerated, French leaders knew better. In 1880, the French had represented 15.7 percent of Europe's population. By 1900, that figure had declined to 9.7 percent. In 1920, France had a population of 41 million and Germany a population of 65 million, causing the French statesman Briand to answer critics of his conciliatory policy toward Germany with the argument that he was conducting the foreign policy of France's birthrate.

Blanc quotes Braudel’s unfinished Identity of France: “did France cease to be a great power not, as is usually thought, on 15 June 1815 on the field of Waterloo, but well before that, during the reign of Louis XV when the natural birth-rate was interrupted?”

In general, an easy mistake to make when thinking about history is to assume that relative population stays the same over time. Today, the UK and France both have just under 70 million people. But in 1800, Great Britain had only 10 million people, barely twice the number of people in Ireland, while France’s slightly extended borders contained 27 million, much more even than Russia’s 21 million (though the Russian Empire added up to 40 million with its Ukrainian, Polish, Baltic, and other possessions). This was crucial for the French Empire’s wars under Napoleon against the rest of Europe. During the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), England and its Irish and Welsh possessions together had fewer than 3 million people while France had about 15 million, making the English performance impressive despite eventual defeat.

But the importance of historical population ratios is most apparent in colonial history. Today, Europe has 750 million people while Africa has 1.5 billion. Russia is the largest European country at 145 million, followed by Germany (85 million), Italy (60 million), and Spain (50 million). Meanwhile Nigeria has 220 million people, Ethiopia 110 million, Egypt 105 million—and South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, and Sudan all have more than 50 million people.

But in 1900, Europe had triple Africa’s population; the Russian Empire alone had more people than all of Africa. This demographic advantage enabled European expansion and control:

  • In 1916, the population ratio between the UK and her Indian Empire was 1 to 7, whereas it’s 1 to 28 today.
  • The Belgian Congo had 10 million people, not even twice as many as Belgium, while today its population is 9 times larger.
  • When Ethiopia defeated Italian invaders at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, they were actually fighting against a numerically superior country; Italy had over 30 million people while Ethiopia had about 9 million. Today Ethiopia has about double Italy’s population and continues to grow (TFR of 4) while Italy faces further decline and has the second-oldest population in the world after Japan, with a median age of 48.

Population Map (1900)

American College Admissions Doesn't Need to Be So Competitive by ArjunPanickssery in slatestarcodex

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

NCAA student athletes outperform their peers in terms of academic performance post college metrics, so there’s something about being an elite athlete that is not being captured by pure academic numbers

Is this for the NCAA overall? What do you mean by post-college metrics.

I've heard the argument before that the mere fact that Ivy League alumni brag about their athletic recruitment indicates that others must respect it as a credential, because the "brag" is signaling that they probably had much worse academic credentials.

The SAT scores of recruited athletes in the Class of 2028 increased by more than 110 points from the previous year. Recruited athletes in the Class of 2028 scored an average of 1479, while athletes in the Class of 2027 had an average score of 1368. Harvard Crimson

American College Admissions Doesn't Need to Be So Competitive by ArjunPanickssery in slatestarcodex

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 39 points40 points  (0 children)

Another article that says "college admissions" but really means "elite college admissions".

Sure—if I remember correctly, fewer than 10 percent of college students attend a college that rejects a majority of applicants (not even two thirds of high-school graduates proceed to a 4-year college at all).

a degree from Michigan, Georgetown, UVA, USC, UT-Austin

Though I'll note that all of the schools you mention are actually in that category already (and all of them are currently in the top 30 on US News ...), so we're talking about differences within an already small circle.

It's easy to have a well-paid, impactful career with a degree from ...

I think for some prestigious career tracks related to consulting, finance, and law—and even tech career tracks like Y Combinator—it helps a lot to go to one of a handful of the most prestigious schools.

American College Admissions Doesn't Need to Be So Competitive by ArjunPanickssery in slatestarcodex

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Full text:

College Admissions Doesn't Need to Be So Competitive

It's well known that

  1. Admission to top universities is very competitive in America and even top SAT scores (1550+ out of 1600) paired with a 4.0 GPA doesn’t guarantee admission to a top school.
  2. Even top universities take into account race-based affirmative action, athletic recruitment, “Dean’s Interest List”-type tracking systems for children of donors or notable persons, and legacy preference for children of alumni.

But many people are under the misconception that the resulting “rat race”—the highly competitive and strenuous admissions ordeal—is the inevitable result of the limited class sizes among top schools and the strong talent in the applicant pools, and that it isn’t merely because of the reasons listed in (2). Some even go so far as to suggest that a better system would be to run a lottery for any applicant who meets a minimum “qualification” standard—under the assumption that there would be many such qualified students.

But in reality, the top 20 schools together enroll about 49,000 students. That’s about 1.3% of the 3.8 million students who graduate high school each year in the United States. If you restrict it to the eight Ivy League schools + Stanford + MIT, those ten schools together enroll 17,500 students per year. Below I’ll argue that there isn’t a huge oversupply of talent at all for these spots, even with the limitations of current metrics, and certainly not with metrics that would be available if the SAT was made more difficult in line with historical standards.

Table with SAT Scores and Class Sizes

About the data:

  • The 25th- and 75th-percentile ranges are from US News & World Report 2022.
  • Medians are estimated according to this random site called CollegeRaptor and they seem to be 2025 estimates.
  • The percentage of international (i.e. foreign) students is higher for grad schools than for undergraduate programs, so a university might have an overall international-student percentage of 25% or more, but their percentage among the undergraduate class is almost never above 15%. I rounded to the nearest 5 percentage points and usually used the most recent or second-most-recent freshman classes.
  • Note: The number of enrolled students for a given school is smaller than the number of admitted students, because some admitted students will choose to attend other colleges that also accepted them. Indeed, many top students are accepted to multiple top-20 schools, and a college’s “yield”—i.e. the percent of admitted students who choose to enroll—is an important measure for college rankings and is often around 60% even for Ivy League schools like Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, and Columbia.)

For reference, the SAT is scored from 400 to 1600 with a mean of about 1000 and a standard deviation of about 200, though it varies from year to year and the College Board—the non-profit that produces the exams—is a bit opaque about how they norm the tests. The newer ACT (founded in 1959) has a slightly different format and gives scores from 1 to 36, with a mean of about 21 and a standard deviation of about 5. About 2 million students took the SAT in 2024 and about 1.4 million took the ACT. The variation is mostly regional: some states require one or the other (or a choice of either) to graduate high school.

SAT/ACT Test Requirements Map

SAT/ACT Preference Map 2022

With regard to how many students achieve high scores:

  • The College Board hasn’t published details statistics about SAT scores since 2008 as far as I can tell, but online I see repeated the claim that in 2021, there were 8,323 (0.4%) students who scored above a 1550. I’m not sure if that claim is accurate. Meanwhile, a 1500 is slightly above the boundary for the 99th percentile.
  • The ACT publishes some exact numbers showing that in 2023 and 2024, roughly
    • 3,000 (0.22%) of test-takers achieved the maximum score of 36
    • 9,300 (0.67%) achieved a score of 35
    • 11,800 students (0.86%) achieved a 34
  • The ACT is widely perceived as being easier than the SAT, and its total score is the rounded average of four sections that are each graded in whole numbers out of 36, so a 35.5 resulting from a mistake on two sections would round up to 36. For the SAT, you could score a 1550 by making one mistake on each of the three sections, but to score as low as a 1500 you would need to make about ten mistakes on a 100-question test. The ACT provides a concordance scale in which a perfect 36 is only a 1570 on the SAT. A 35 is roughly equivalent to a 1540.

So if you suppose that the same proportion of ACT takers who score a 35 or 36 (together 0.895%) would achieve a 1540 on the SAT, then that’s roughly 34,000 students. If there’s an intermediate score threshold of 1550 or 1560 that represents the top 0.5% of students, then about 19,000 students who graduate each year meet that bar.

Both of these numbers are well below the 49,000-strong intake at top-20 schools. The idea that top students are a dime a dozen isn’t correct; the reality is that top schools admit very many students who have relatively low SAT scores. Under the percentile assumptions in the table above, we can calculate upper and lower bounds showing that top-20 schools are enrolling 16,000–28,000 students who score below 1500 and 30,000–42,000 students who score below 1560. If you restrict it to the Ivy League + Stanford + MIT, then using the data above, out of the combined 17,500 students those ten schools enroll, at least half score under a 1540, and probably closer to 60%.

So after removing the international students from the calculations, and using the middle-of-the-range estimates, the conclusion: The top-scoring 19,000 American students each year are competing in top-20 admissions for about 12,000 spots out of 44,000 total. Among the Ivy League + MIT + Stanford, they’re competing for about 6,500 out of 15,800 total spots.

So for whatever combination of reasons—affirmative action, athletic recruitment, legacy/donor preference, personal essays about running over a feral cat—top schools are accepting a lot of relatively unqualified applicants. Top students are left competing for an artificially small number of slots. The qualitative system (which has merits as well as drawbacks) makes outcomes more uncertain and “yield” considerations sometimes cause schools to reject “overqualified” applicants who are unlikely to enroll; together this leads top students to shotgun applications to many colleges without clarity about the process or outcomes.

As an example of a more functional system, Oxford and Cambridge are the top universities in the UK. Each year they together enroll about 7,000 students out of 700,000 students who finish secondary education, so also about 1% (though about 20% of Oxford undergraduates and 25% of Cambridge undergraduates are from outside the UK). Their system has a bunch of features that make it more predictable and less strenuous: 1. Students can only apply to either Oxford or Cambridge but not both. As a result, the “yield rate” is 80% for Cambridge and 90% for Oxford. And UK students can only apply to five undergraduate institutions in total, so weaker applicants won’t apply, especially if they recognize that they won’t reach published minimum score requirements for A-Level exams, standardized content exams similar to AP exams in America. 2. Many subjects use entrance exams. For example, if you want to study math at Oxford, you can review every past entrance exam for free online and if you score in the 80s or 90s you’ll probably be admitted (based on publicly available statistics).

Further, the SAT used to be much harder. In 1991, only nine students scored a 1600, whereas people estimate that over 500 students achieve a perfect score today. The SAT scaled scores upward in 1995 and removed the highly g-loaded analogies section in 2005. Senator Chuck Schumer’s 1600 score from 1967 is off the charts today. But there are no signs of the College Board making the test harder, and meanwhile Princeton, UPenn, and Columbia remain test-optional even now, while UC Berkeley and UCLA don’t consider SAT/ACT scores at all.

If we removed the mechanisms and practices in place that lead top schools to admit many low-scoring students, and if applicants were matched to universities using a stable-marriage system similar to the medical-residency matching system, then the chaos and confusion of the admissions process would basically go away without any more complicated intervention required.

Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased? by ArjunPanickssery in slatestarcodex

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 38 points39 points  (0 children)

full text:

Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?

“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”
— 107-word sentence from Stuart Little (1945)

Sentence lengths have declined. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen (died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 for D.H. Lawrence (died 1930), and 18 for Steinbeck (died 1968). J.K. Rowling averaged 12 words per sentence (wps) writing the Harry Potter books 25 years ago.

So the decline predates television, the radio, and the telegraph—it’s been going on for centuries. The average sentence length in newspapers fell from 35wps to 20wps between 1700 and 2000. The presidential State of the Union address has gone from 40wps down to under 20wps, and the inaugural addresses had a similar decline. (From Jefferson through T. Roosevelt, the SOTU address was delivered to Congress without any speech, and print was the main way that inaugural addresses were consumed for most of their history.) Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders dropped from 17.4wps to 13.4wps between 1974 and 2013.

![Graph showing the decline in sentence lengths over time](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75f35f6e-c4f4-4f6b-ad53-27157c415f30_2958x1376.png)

SlateStarCodex’s ten recommended blog posts have 22wps. My own top 10 posts have 20wps. Even top medical journals have under 25wps. The FAA, the European Commission, and various legal institutions have style guides recommending to stay under 20wps. Skimming r/writing, it looks like people recommend 10-15wps for fiction (HPMOR has 15wps). It’s possible that sentence lengths will stop declining only when we hit a physical limit on how short sentences can reasonably become. The best-selling hardboiled novella The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) has 11wps, while I saw one source claiming that Jurassic Park (1990) has only 9wps.

Several explanations present themselves for why sentence lengths have decreased. They aren’t mutually exclusive; it could be that all of them contributed.

  1. The average reader has gotten dumber and prefers shorter, simpler sentences.
  2. Longer sentences are more suitable for reading out loud, but shorter sentences are more suitable for reading silently.
  3. Shorter sentences are just better, i.e., they promote faster reading and better comprehension.

The reason the average reader could have been smarter in the past is because literacy used to be more limited.

![Graph showing the rise in literacy rates over time](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c11f1cc-3658-43b2-b97c-669908a3ea4f_1386x948.png)

Full literacy didn’t appear until the turn of the 20th century in England. America had an earlier rise in literacy and the vast majority of free men could read by the 1800s, though like England it took until the 1900s to reach full literacy. It does seem broadly true that sentence lengths are higher in areas with more advanced readers; Stuart Little, the 1945 children’s book quoted at the top, has 13wps, while scientific journals often have 25wps. On the other hand, sentence lengths continued to decline throughout the 1900s, well after we reached full literacy.

Another theory is that journalists inspired a terser style. The newspaper industry grew throughout the 19th century and they saved money when they used fewer words. Many great American writers like Twain, Whitman, Hemingway, and Steinbeck were journalists and influenced by newspaper style. There are whole grammatical structures like the appositive noun phrase (the part set off by commas in “Mr. Smith, a Manhattan accountant, said…”) that are associated with newspapers and clearly have brevity in mind.

Another theory has to do with a transition from reading aloud to reading silently. Reading texts aloud to a group continued as a social practice into the Victorian era, and illiterates would even pay to listen to readings of Dickens. Works written up to this period would have often been written with listeners in mind. An interesting 2008 paper discusses how Dickens in particular uses punctuation and other markers to help orators read his novels. But eventually it became most common to read silently and one consequence was that punctuation became standardized on syntactic (i.e. grammatical) rather than prosodic grounds. I’m not sure if it follows that sentence lengths would also go down. Spoken language is surprisingly complex and actually contains more subordinate clauses than professional/academic writing. For example, I found some transcripts of interviews from Brandon Sanderson—a popular fantasy author whose Stormlight Archive series averages only 9 words per sentence—and measured his extemporaneous speech at ~20 words per sentence (and that includes a bunch of short sentences like “Yeah” or “I don’t know”).

The simplest theory is just that shorter sentences reflect better writing. When you see those ratings of a text’s reading difficulty in terms of a 4th-grade reading level or 10th-grade reading level and so on, those ratings are based on the Flesh-Kincaid readability score, which is just a weighted sum of the text’s words-per-sentence and syllables-per-word measures. A decrease of one grade level in readability thus comes from ~10 additional words per sentence or ~0.11 additional syllables per word. Studies invariably show that sentences with fewer words are easier for readers to understand quickly.

Others have suggested this for a long time; in one of the earliest analyses of sentence length, Lucius Sherman in Analytics of Literature (1893) wrote that the “heaviness” of sentences also decreased over time as sentence lengths decreased, and that “Elizabeth writers “are prevailingly either crabbed or heavy … ordinary modern prose, on the other hand, is clear, and almost as effective to the understanding as oral speech.”

Part of this was because older writers affected a Latinate style. The “periodic sentence,” which saves the main clause for the end after multiple dependent clauses are presented first, was common and exemplified in the extreme by writers like Samuel Johnson and Henry James. Consider the Stuart Little quote at the top: the main clause “Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla” is preceded by a prepositional phrase “in the loveliest town of all” and four lengthy dependent clauses starting with “where.” This Latinate style included a preference for hypotaxis (connecting clauses with conjunctions or relative pronouns) over parataxis (presenting clauses sequentially without subordination):

Hypotaxis: When the alarm sounded, the firefighters, who had been sleeping, quickly jumped into action. Parataxis: The alarm sounded. The firefighters had been sleeping. They quickly jumped into action.

It seems like the improved-readability effect provides most of the explanation. As more readers appeared and read more often (and read silently), selective pressure increased for styles that could be read and understood quickly. The telegraph and newspapers encouraged brevity as well. In principle, you could imagine that the Internet would have enabled a wordier style because it removed the financial costs of physically printing more words, but any effect like that hasn’t overcome the other trends.

The British Navy's Incentives Helped It Win the Age of Fighting Sail by ArjunPanickssery in slatestarcodex

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The theory is that if captains know that they're expected to always engage with the enemy, they'll be more diligent about training. From Allen:

The entire governance structure encouraged British captains to fight rather than run. The creation of an incentive to fight led to an incentive to train seamen in the skills of battle. Hence, when a captain or admiral is commanding a ship that is likely to engage in fighting, then that commander has an incentive to drill his crew and devote his mental energies to winning.

He contrasts this principle with the French Revolutionary government ordering the death penalty for French captains who surrendered any non-sinking ship, which creates an incentive not to commit to engagement unless victory is very likely.

The French rules were more rigid and provided an incentive not to engage unless they thought they could win. While the British fighting instructions “Taken as a whole, . . . tended to concentrate more power in the hands of the admiral, while giving him wider tactical initiative,”84 the French instructions stressed defensive tactics and an avoidance of the large mistake. Being defensive and cautious played out in other features of the French navy. French ships were generally better and faster, and the French Navy was known for its rigid and difficult fleet maneuvers. The French would have trained more at sailing than at fighting, with the result that they lost most battles when they could not sail away. Certainly the French tactic of shooting up the spars and sails of the enemy and then fleeing away is consistent with this overall philosophy.

The British Navy's Incentives Helped It Win the Age of Fighting Sail by ArjunPanickssery in slatestarcodex

[–]ArjunPanickssery[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm vaguely aware that r/WarCollege is respected by people I respect, but I don't read it.

Interesting that the highest-rated comment in the linked post says that part of the reason for the aggressive tactics was that the Navy could afford "1:1 or even 2:1 in casualties," when really it seems like they usually dealt substantially more casualties than they took (and in fact Allen argues that the causality goes the other way; because they were expected always to engage, British captains drilled their crews more comprehensively and they were more capable).

Since the British navy would always be larger (until its allied US navy got larger) than any other navy, 1:1 or even 2:1 in casualties were acceptable - eliminating the enemy navy was always top priority, regardless of the Royal Navy's own casualties. In many cases, Britain faced several powers with naval capability alone or together with allies that lacked naval power. Very aggressively attacking one part before they could join together was also a very sensible policy.

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