There is a transcription but reading the original letter, typewritten by Bertrand Russell, with all the typing corrections that probably stemmed from some kind of holy anger he must have felt responding to someone like Mosley, was incredibly more pleasurable.
I thought that was how one simply started letters -- you used to even say "Dear Sirs" in the past -- but it seems "dear" has come to be reserved only for close recipients.
It is not entirely true that the usage has changed; I usually start my emails with this salutation, both to recipients close to me and those whom I do not know well. I address mailing lists with a simple "Dear all".
Nonetheless, this is the first time I have done so in a Hacker News post, and it shall probably be the last too.
> more or less invented types to solve a problem he was having with set theory.
For people who haven't encountered it yet, this problem is the famous "Russell's Paradox"[1], which can be stated as
Consider the set R, consisting of all sets S such that S is not an element of S.
Ie in set builder notation
R = {S : S ∉ S}
and then the paradox comes from the followup question. Is R an element of R? Because of course if it is in R, then it is an element of itself so it should not be. And if it's not in R, then it is not an element of itself, so it should be. This is a logical paradox along the same lines as the famous "The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?"
In modern axiomatic set theory, Russell's paradox is avoided these days by the "axiom of regularity"[2] which prevents a set builder like "the set of all sets who are not members of themselves", so what I wrote above would not be accepted as a valid set builder for this reason by most people.
Russell proposed instead Type theory which got revived when computer science got going.
> The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?
I'm not familiar with this one but is it misstated here? The barber doesn't only shave men who don't shave themselves. If he doesn't shave himself then he shaves himself and therefore can shave himself without contradiction. If he shaves himself he can shave himself without contradiction. Either way he shaves himself.
They had a long history of correspondence. The preceding letter is archived and you can probably get a copy. (https://bracers.mcmaster.ca/79128)
> Jan 6/1962 Re nuclear disarmament and world government. BR is not inclined to agree or disagree with Mosley's views, but he does think that Mosley is "rather optimistic" in his expectations. BR provides criticism of his main two objections. (A polite letter.)
> Jan 11/1962 Mosley wants to lunch privately with BR about their differences.
These are basically all the letters exchanged with Mosley:
This letter makes perfect sense to me if he had sent it as his first reply to a fascist in 1946. Why did he correspond with him over 43 previous letters from 1946 and only in 1962 act as though he had principled objections to corresponding with fascists? The tone is not "this time you've gone too far", or "I have decided we're not getting anywhere", but "We have nothing in common and could never converse". I wonder if he realized it was the same guy, or was submitting this to some public forum.
As I wrote above they did not have a long history of correspondence (previous correspondence was mainly with a Gordon Mosley).
The letter written by Russell was preceded by a letter from Mosley (maybe trying to bait BR) on "the root differences between us" in December 1961 to which BR replied with two letters before Mosley tried to invite BR for a private lunch which prompted the letter of note response. I think this makes perfect sense, he initially engaged intellectually, but when invited to associate privately he strongly refuses.
Bertrand Russel also was - and hopefully still is - a public intellectual, like Einstein or Chomsky (for better or worse), whose opinions on many areas of life reached ordinary people. His values were ahead of his time.
This is a wonderful interview with him that gives a great sense of what he was all about:
For general context, this was addressed to post-ww2 Mosley, in the 60s, who argued a unique form of holocaust denialism at the time. He didn’t take the position that the holocaust didn’t happen, he took the position that it was justified.
Feels relevant, thank you for posting. I have so many swirling thoughts and emotions from recent prominent events and this letter provides a compass for that.
> Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals of his generation, was known by most as the founder of analytic philosophy
That title is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege (in particular his 1884 book "Grundlagen der Arithmetik", and his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung") who directly influenced Bertrand Russell, Rudolph Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who all later became large influences on analytic philosophy themselves. Frege is most known for the invention of modern predicate logic.
"He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[111] and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[112] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing."
—Srinivasa Ramanujan
"The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was..." - G. H. Hardy
Is this a critical thinking test? All sorts of public religious figures claim all sorts of miracles as an introductory biography item. I happen to believe in miracles! but this is not one of them. Symbolic logic, and certainly math, is not inherently written in one character set or another. Dreams mean things and things could carry effects somehow but a dream of math symbols with crimson curtains is not convincing from this view.
Way, way off-topic now, but if you ever get a chance to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disappearing_Number, don't miss it. It's rare to see a play weave mathematics and history into such a form, threading them through our modern world and showing the humanity of those who lived and breathed the equations on the page.
By your omission I can assume you don't feel that way about leftists? I certainly find tankies and figures like Sartre repellent on multiple levels. He was an apologist for Stalinist communism, downplayed the show trials and gulags, and infamously denounced Camus for his 'naive' rejection of revolutionary violence.
Much as I like the elocution of Russell's letter, it's clear that it boils down to an unwillingness to continue the conversation, which is inherently somewhat an indication of weakness, even if it doesn't imply defeat. When one is resoundingly winning an argument, it's much rarer to take this position, after all.
It's entirely possible to logically respond to fascists (if you actually find one that isn't just a role-playing fool) and to push back against their extremism. The first step of that is actually understanding what it is that they really purport to believe, rather than attacking the easy strawmen that have been rhetorically established for you.
Anyone who wants to attack fascism should read Evola's critique on fascism "from the right" - really helped me fill in my understanding on what these people were trying to do, to separate the ideology-in-theory from the ideology-in-practice. Just like with communism, where "true communism has never been tried", so too nobody's ever really tried "true" fascism, or democracy for that matter.
When arguing with someone, it's usually best to actually get a mental model of how they themselves think... but that's a vulnerable moment for both parties involved, and not always something that can happen in the heat of verbal sparring.
A link posted upthread indicates the context was an initially polite exchange of not completely incompatible opinions on something related to foreign policy, followed by Mosley offering him lunch.
I shall have to remember Russell's turn of phrase as a way to turn down meetings I don't want :)
Indeed, and "what Mosley believed" was pretty well known at the time given his fascist activity over the preceding thirty years. Mosley was not likely to change his mind, and while there may well sometimes be joy and enlightenment in the practice of debate and rhetoric, you don't have to do it with a fascist. Bertrand Russell had nothing to prove and was perfectly reasonable in saying, effectively, that they were never going to agree and there's no point in wasting more paper in proving that.
> it's clear that it boils down to an unwillingness to continue the conversation, which is inherently somewhat an indication of weakness
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps Russell had already responded to the fascist position elsewhere, either generally or to Mosley specifically? Perhaps it didn't make sense to dialogue with him at that particular time?
> Just like with communism, where "true communism has never been tried", so too nobody's ever really tried "true" fascism, or democracy for that matter.
I reject this claim, but even if I were to concede for the purposes of argument, they don't need to be tried to be rejected, because what makes them repellent in the first place aren't the supposed ways in which regimes and people have failed to "try them", but the very positions themselves. Both are rooted in a false anthropology and a false humanism that reduces individual persons to means, which further entails a false ethics of utilitarianism.
Absolutely, the technique of "you won't debate me so I must be right" has somehow risen from the playground to mainstream politics, but it's arrant nonsense. Not every idea is worthy of rational and moral consideration, and sometimes it is not weakness to reject even a proposition, simply humanity and a recognition of the underlying motive, which is not always to seek enlightenment, but sometimes to undermine the very idea of enlightenment.
I gather by the mention of fascism that the correspondent is a bad person. So it makes sense that Russell told him to get bent. But, that is all that he's really saying here.
I can only guess this is noteworthy due to the parties corresponding because it isn't very interesting outside of that.
Have you been reading the news? Perhaps about someone who engaged people in debate while holding extreme views? In the process, they gained some measure of credit amongst people with less radical views, merely for the act of having conversations. Except in this case the debates were not with Bertrand Russell, but with 18 year old college freshman.
I understood the posting to be a subtweet-style comment on that.
IDK, I see this as in some ways verbose, not succinct at all. A completely succinct reply to Mr Mosley would be two words only, the second being "off".
This letter tries to "unpack" its point of view rather than reply succinctly. But you're right that LLMs do not do it that clearly.
The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective. That's succinct, not "the minimum amount of words communicating anything that might roughly align with a view".
The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me, they're not fluff or pointless pleasantries for code reasons.
English is a very front-loaded language, information-theoretically, isn't it? Often the first few words of the sentence tells us everything we're going to need to know about the rest of it.
Yeah but f.. off simply does not say the same thing that his letter says, now matter how succinct.
He writes like he assumes good faith, then explains why he thinks that exactly this attempt won't be fruitful, giving a good-faith argument for why Oswald should consider further correspondence fruitless, unless he changes his whole political ideology.
That's a lot more than just "I don't want to talk to you and I think badly of you"
> English is a very front-loaded language, information-theoretically, isn't it?
It's more that journalism and in other context though, it is good writing style to "not bury the lede", i.e. put the main point upfront. It's a writing choice, not a language feature.
> The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me
I agree, and I don't say otherwise. I still though don't agree that someone else should characterise the piece as "succinct" because of that thoughtfulness. These are different qualities of writing, are they not?.
> The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective.
Yes, it's a good concise argument, to third parties who read it. I see that. It's a different thing to a succinct reply to Mr Mosley - that is what the words "in some ways" mean in the comment above.
That would not convey nearly the depth of emotion, sincerity, etc. nor would it demonstrate Russell's own innate good will the way he would like to see it characterized.
"F off" has exactly zero semantic meaning (unless you actually believe this is a literal expression). Without context, it barely even has emotional meaning.
It's no less or more a spontaneous expression of emotion than yelling some curse word when you step on a piece of Lego.
There is a transcription but reading the original letter, typewritten by Bertrand Russell, with all the typing corrections that probably stemmed from some kind of holy anger he must have felt responding to someone like Mosley, was incredibly more pleasurable.
It's amazing how much fuck-you-and-fuck-who-you-fuck-with Russell managed to fit into a few ink smudges on a piece of paper.
You can almost feel the hammer violently hitting the paper and nearly poking a hole in it with some of these words.
He also had just turned 91 years old when he wrote this
If you’re really interested in his works and correspondence, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario holds the Bertrand Russell archives.
Some stuff is online. Here’s a curated collection of some really interesting letters sent to him:
https://dearbertie.mcmaster.ca/letters
I always feel funny starting letters with “dear”, but next time that happens I'm going to remember that this one started with “Dear Sir Oswald,”.
Well, when you're saying "goodbye", remember you're really saying "God be with ye"....
WHAT is that true!?!?
https://english.stackexchange.com/a/387742
Which is also what "adios, "adieu", "adéu", "tschüss", etc. approximately mean.
Now I think I'll start letters with “Dear Sir Oswald,” regardless of who they are to.
I thought that was how one simply started letters -- you used to even say "Dear Sirs" in the past -- but it seems "dear" has come to be reserved only for close recipients.
Dear esafak,
It is not entirely true that the usage has changed; I usually start my emails with this salutation, both to recipients close to me and those whom I do not know well. I address mailing lists with a simple "Dear all".
Nonetheless, this is the first time I have done so in a Hacker News post, and it shall probably be the last too.
Best wishes,
seabass
What did Mosley write to him?
Thanks mods for the title fix.
I can't find a copy of the letter this is in response to which would provide more context. I believe it was an invitation of some sort.
Bertrand Russel was a prominent logician and philosopher, more or less invented types to solve a problem he was having with set theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Mosley
> more or less invented types to solve a problem he was having with set theory.
For people who haven't encountered it yet, this problem is the famous "Russell's Paradox"[1], which can be stated as
Consider the set R, consisting of all sets S such that S is not an element of S.
Ie in set builder notation
R = {S : S ∉ S}
and then the paradox comes from the followup question. Is R an element of R? Because of course if it is in R, then it is an element of itself so it should not be. And if it's not in R, then it is not an element of itself, so it should be. This is a logical paradox along the same lines as the famous "The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?"
In modern axiomatic set theory, Russell's paradox is avoided these days by the "axiom of regularity"[2] which prevents a set builder like "the set of all sets who are not members of themselves", so what I wrote above would not be accepted as a valid set builder for this reason by most people.
Russell proposed instead Type theory which got revived when computer science got going.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_regularity
> The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?
I'm not familiar with this one but is it misstated here? The barber doesn't only shave men who don't shave themselves. If he doesn't shave himself then he shaves himself and therefore can shave himself without contradiction. If he shaves himself he can shave himself without contradiction. Either way he shaves himself.
(Or maybe I'm just bad at logic)
Yes you're right it's typically stated as "shaves all those, and those only, who do not..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_paradox
They had a long history of correspondence. The preceding letter is archived and you can probably get a copy. (https://bracers.mcmaster.ca/79128)
> Jan 6/1962 Re nuclear disarmament and world government. BR is not inclined to agree or disagree with Mosley's views, but he does think that Mosley is "rather optimistic" in his expectations. BR provides criticism of his main two objections. (A polite letter.)
> Jan 11/1962 Mosley wants to lunch privately with BR about their differences.
These are basically all the letters exchanged with Mosley:
https://bracers.mcmaster.ca/bracers-basic-search?search_api_...
This letter makes perfect sense to me if he had sent it as his first reply to a fascist in 1946. Why did he correspond with him over 43 previous letters from 1946 and only in 1962 act as though he had principled objections to corresponding with fascists? The tone is not "this time you've gone too far", or "I have decided we're not getting anywhere", but "We have nothing in common and could never converse". I wonder if he realized it was the same guy, or was submitting this to some public forum.
As I wrote above they did not have a long history of correspondence (previous correspondence was mainly with a Gordon Mosley).
The letter written by Russell was preceded by a letter from Mosley (maybe trying to bait BR) on "the root differences between us" in December 1961 to which BR replied with two letters before Mosley tried to invite BR for a private lunch which prompted the letter of note response. I think this makes perfect sense, he initially engaged intellectually, but when invited to associate privately he strongly refuses.
The long correspondence that you describe (from the 40's to the 60's) was with Gordon Mosley of the BBC, and not with Oswald.
The only letters that Russell personally wrote to Oswald were sent in January 1961.
That's incorrect if you read the summaries and recipients, most of the Mosleys are not Oswald Mosley.
Bertrand Russel also was - and hopefully still is - a public intellectual, like Einstein or Chomsky (for better or worse), whose opinions on many areas of life reached ordinary people. His values were ahead of his time.
This is a wonderful interview with him that gives a great sense of what he was all about:
• A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952) https://youtu.be/xL_sMXfzzyA
Russell also lived a long time, with family who did too.
While young his grandfather told Bertrand about meeting Napoleon. Late in life Bertrand watched the moon landing on TV.
Obviously that two experiences that span more than one life time, but they are very far apart.
https://www.openculture.com/2022/05/philosopher-bertrand-rus...
I understand that Professor Yaffle -- the woodpecker bookend in the classic kids' TV show Bagpuss -- was loosely based on Russell.
For general context, this was addressed to post-ww2 Mosley, in the 60s, who argued a unique form of holocaust denialism at the time. He didn’t take the position that the holocaust didn’t happen, he took the position that it was justified.
Mr Mosley also had a pretty well known son lol.
For reference, this is alluding to Max Mosley who used to be prominent in formula one car racing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Mosley
Feels relevant, thank you for posting. I have so many swirling thoughts and emotions from recent prominent events and this letter provides a compass for that.
In case someone's too lazy to enter the address in Google maps, here you go: https://maps.app.goo.gl/oZ5c8aqH1uJ35VaD8
He was so angry he could hardly contain himself.
A propos
A tangent..
> Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals of his generation, was known by most as the founder of analytic philosophy
That title is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege (in particular his 1884 book "Grundlagen der Arithmetik", and his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung") who directly influenced Bertrand Russell, Rudolph Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who all later became large influences on analytic philosophy themselves. Frege is most known for the invention of modern predicate logic.
Where do any of us stand but on the shoulders of giants?
On the shoulders of god(s)?, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
"He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[111] and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[112] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing."
—Srinivasa Ramanujan
"The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was..." - G. H. Hardy
Is this a critical thinking test? All sorts of public religious figures claim all sorts of miracles as an introductory biography item. I happen to believe in miracles! but this is not one of them. Symbolic logic, and certainly math, is not inherently written in one character set or another. Dreams mean things and things could carry effects somehow but a dream of math symbols with crimson curtains is not convincing from this view.
Way, way off-topic now, but if you ever get a chance to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disappearing_Number, don't miss it. It's rare to see a play weave mathematics and history into such a form, threading them through our modern world and showing the humanity of those who lived and breathed the equations on the page.
That's about the opposite of analytic philosophy though. Frege and Russell would have said it relies on reason, not intuition.
"Hacker" "News"
> It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own.
Perfectly describes how I feel when talking with rightwingers.
You're just like him!
By your omission I can assume you don't feel that way about leftists? I certainly find tankies and figures like Sartre repellent on multiple levels. He was an apologist for Stalinist communism, downplayed the show trials and gulags, and infamously denounced Camus for his 'naive' rejection of revolutionary violence.
Yea, because by leftists today, people mean Jean-Paul Sartre ...
Most Republicans are leftist by today's standards.
I'd like to see you argue this, but to be clear my first draft was: "open the schools"
Much as I like the elocution of Russell's letter, it's clear that it boils down to an unwillingness to continue the conversation, which is inherently somewhat an indication of weakness, even if it doesn't imply defeat. When one is resoundingly winning an argument, it's much rarer to take this position, after all.
It's entirely possible to logically respond to fascists (if you actually find one that isn't just a role-playing fool) and to push back against their extremism. The first step of that is actually understanding what it is that they really purport to believe, rather than attacking the easy strawmen that have been rhetorically established for you.
Anyone who wants to attack fascism should read Evola's critique on fascism "from the right" - really helped me fill in my understanding on what these people were trying to do, to separate the ideology-in-theory from the ideology-in-practice. Just like with communism, where "true communism has never been tried", so too nobody's ever really tried "true" fascism, or democracy for that matter.
When arguing with someone, it's usually best to actually get a mental model of how they themselves think... but that's a vulnerable moment for both parties involved, and not always something that can happen in the heat of verbal sparring.
Russell was famous for his debating, with his speeches and writing readily available. What would engaging further with Mosley have achieved?
A link posted upthread indicates the context was an initially polite exchange of not completely incompatible opinions on something related to foreign policy, followed by Mosley offering him lunch.
I shall have to remember Russell's turn of phrase as a way to turn down meetings I don't want :)
Indeed, and "what Mosley believed" was pretty well known at the time given his fascist activity over the preceding thirty years. Mosley was not likely to change his mind, and while there may well sometimes be joy and enlightenment in the practice of debate and rhetoric, you don't have to do it with a fascist. Bertrand Russell had nothing to prove and was perfectly reasonable in saying, effectively, that they were never going to agree and there's no point in wasting more paper in proving that.
> it's clear that it boils down to an unwillingness to continue the conversation, which is inherently somewhat an indication of weakness
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps Russell had already responded to the fascist position elsewhere, either generally or to Mosley specifically? Perhaps it didn't make sense to dialogue with him at that particular time?
> Just like with communism, where "true communism has never been tried", so too nobody's ever really tried "true" fascism, or democracy for that matter.
I reject this claim, but even if I were to concede for the purposes of argument, they don't need to be tried to be rejected, because what makes them repellent in the first place aren't the supposed ways in which regimes and people have failed to "try them", but the very positions themselves. Both are rooted in a false anthropology and a false humanism that reduces individual persons to means, which further entails a false ethics of utilitarianism.
Absolutely, the technique of "you won't debate me so I must be right" has somehow risen from the playground to mainstream politics, but it's arrant nonsense. Not every idea is worthy of rational and moral consideration, and sometimes it is not weakness to reject even a proposition, simply humanity and a recognition of the underlying motive, which is not always to seek enlightenment, but sometimes to undermine the very idea of enlightenment.
TIL the word "arrant", thank you!
I gather by the mention of fascism that the correspondent is a bad person. So it makes sense that Russell told him to get bent. But, that is all that he's really saying here.
I can only guess this is noteworthy due to the parties corresponding because it isn't very interesting outside of that.
Have you been reading the news? Perhaps about someone who engaged people in debate while holding extreme views? In the process, they gained some measure of credit amongst people with less radical views, merely for the act of having conversations. Except in this case the debates were not with Bertrand Russell, but with 18 year old college freshman.
I understood the posting to be a subtweet-style comment on that.
Simultaneously polite, peaceful, respectful, diplomatic, and succinct in writing. LLMs have a long way to go.
IDK, I see this as in some ways verbose, not succinct at all. A completely succinct reply to Mr Mosley would be two words only, the second being "off".
This letter tries to "unpack" its point of view rather than reply succinctly. But you're right that LLMs do not do it that clearly.
Why did you write so many words then?
Your second paragraph says nothing.
The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective. That's succinct, not "the minimum amount of words communicating anything that might roughly align with a view".
The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me, they're not fluff or pointless pleasantries for code reasons.
English is a very front-loaded language, information-theoretically, isn't it? Often the first few words of the sentence tells us everything we're going to need to know about the rest of it.
Yeah but f.. off simply does not say the same thing that his letter says, now matter how succinct.
He writes like he assumes good faith, then explains why he thinks that exactly this attempt won't be fruitful, giving a good-faith argument for why Oswald should consider further correspondence fruitless, unless he changes his whole political ideology.
That's a lot more than just "I don't want to talk to you and I think badly of you"
The point is that a large percentage of the words in any sentence are there to provide structure, not meaning.
Removing those words makes the text more difficult to understand, not easier.
> English is a very front-loaded language, information-theoretically, isn't it?
It's more that journalism and in other context though, it is good writing style to "not bury the lede", i.e. put the main point upfront. It's a writing choice, not a language feature.
> Why did you write so many words then?
I wasn't claiming to be succinct.
> The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me
I agree, and I don't say otherwise. I still though don't agree that someone else should characterise the piece as "succinct" because of that thoughtfulness. These are different qualities of writing, are they not?.
> The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective.
Yes, it's a good concise argument, to third parties who read it. I see that. It's a different thing to a succinct reply to Mr Mosley - that is what the words "in some ways" mean in the comment above.
That would not convey nearly the depth of emotion, sincerity, etc. nor would it demonstrate Russell's own innate good will the way he would like to see it characterized.
While I agree with that, does that in itself make the writing "succinct" ?
You confuse "succinct" with "laconic".
"F off" has exactly zero semantic meaning (unless you actually believe this is a literal expression). Without context, it barely even has emotional meaning.
It's no less or more a spontaneous expression of emotion than yelling some curse word when you step on a piece of Lego.