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a riddle: why do people who hate reading books thrive on impenetrably long essays? (awful.systems)
submitted 10 months ago by cornflake@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems
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One of the first things about the LW crowd is how they just absolutely drown you in prose, from EY to SSC on down. There are several tactical advantages to this style for a group that is concerned foremost with winning debates, so it makes sense. I and many others find their refusal to edit off-putting and so don't engage, but I suppose that's part of the point too, to self-select a readership of freaks who put the work in to digest your entire stream of conscience.

But, it just occurred to me this morning, the readers of this drivel are often the same exact SV/STEM grads who don't just read fewer books than they should (who among us), but denigrate the activity as useless. They want the cliff's notes of any idea outside of their hothouse, but have endless attention for each other's first draft ramblings about any subject under the sun.

What explains this? How can someone with the (quite typical) obliterated attention span that prevents them from picking up an adult book slog through HPMOR or even like the average Scott Alexander post? Does it just calm down their addled brains to see "epistemic certainty: 37%" at the beginning of a tome?

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[-] YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The Sequences are inherently short, there are just massively many of them - the fact that each one is woefully inadequate to its own aims is eclipsed by the size of the overall task.

The longer stuff, Siskind included, is precisely what you get from people with short attention spans who find it takes longer than that to justify the point that they want to make themselves. There’s no structure, no overarching thematic or compositional coherence to each piece, just the unfolding discovery that more points still need to be made. This makes it well-suited for limited readers who think their community’s style longform writing is special, but don’t trust it in authors who have worked on technique (literary technique is suspicious - splurging a first draft onto the internet marks the writer out as honest: rationalism is a 21st century romantic movement, not a scholastic one).

Besides which, the number of people who “read all of” any of these pieces is significantly lower than the number of people who did so.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 10 months ago

precisely what you get from people with short attention spans who find it takes longer than that to justify the point that they want to make themselves. There’s no structure, no overarching thematic or compositional coherence to each piece, just the unfolding discovery that more points still need to be made.

I feel attacked (also yes (also, needs more mentions of sidetracks))

this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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