Style Guide: Not Sounding Like An Evil Robot

A practical writing-craft style guide for rationalist writers, built on the 'weirdness points' principle: never offend with style when you can offend with substance. The core rule — if there's a science term and an everyday term for the same thing, use the everyday one in everyday contexts — worked through eleven cases with wrong/right/acceptable examples (IQ→intelligence, humans→people, males/females→men/women, rational→good, optimal→best, utility→happiness, autistic→nerdy, neoreactionary→right-wing, meme→idea, status→respect), so you stop 'sounding like an evil robot.'

Quality 60 · Strong. 60 — Solid/Strong boundary. A genuinely useful, actionable, well-organized craft guide with a memorable framing, cited within the rationalist-writing community. Held at the boundary because it's practical style advice with limited scope, not an insight essay.

Claude’s paradigm shift 40 · Moderate. 40 — Moderate. Practical style advice; not a novel idea.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. 2 — minor/within-blog. Some real influence on how rationalist writers write; discourse-level.