No secret that I am big fan of Scott Aaronson’s blog, Shtetl Optimized. I have been reading it for years, a national treasure. Herein, I analyze the linguistic complexity of his blog compared to my own and two others, the also great Simon Willison blog along with the ineffable Alex Harri blog.

Source	Flesch-Kincaid Grade	ARI Grade	Gunning Fog Grade	Lexical Diversity	Word Count
alexharri_posts.csv	9.77	9.55	12.40	0.228	3,866.5
juleshenry_posts.csv	15.51	16.31	17.78	0.458	2,000.4
scottaaronson_blog_posts.csv	13.01	13.31	15.61	0.543	966.8
simonwillison_all_blogs.csv	12.13	12.55	14.52	0.554	627.8

Writing Stats Over Time

The curiosity? Technical posts are considered more sophisticated when code is used because it has no “periods”, qualifying as long Faulknerian sentences. Note the outliers in my own blog achieve Flesch-Kincaid of 80+. Therefore, I also include an “outliers removed summary to truly compare. Alex Harri, and Icelander, unsurprisingly writes at a lower grade level, even though his posts are incredibly engaging and informative. Simon Willison’s posts are more accessible, while Scott Aaronson’s posts are more complex, likely due to the technical nature of his content. Jules Henry’s posts are the most complex, which may be due to the size of his ego.

Interquartile Reduction of Outliers

Source	Flesch-Kincaid Grade	ARI Grade	Gunning Fog Grade	Lexical Diversity	Word Count
alexharri_posts.csv	9.86	9.64	12.49	0.234	3,443.41
juleshenry_posts.csv	11.50	11.33	13.58	0.500	1,110.80
scottaaronson_blog_posts.csv	12.77	13.01	15.35	0.559	702.75
simonwillison_all_blogs.csv	11.80	12.12	14.21	0.568	482.81

A ha! So I do not write at a higher level than Scott or Simon, although I tend to be more verbose.

Writing Stats Over Time Without Outliers

That I am doing this on Valentine’s Day should be a testament to how much of a great-big nerd I am. Love you, Scott! Solve NP vs. P when you have the chance, will ya?

Code analysis repostiory found here.