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?
I dont know, I have noticed however a pattern which occurs often in self help type of groups, eventually they start “bookclubs” where they try sort of speedreading books by having various members read a book, and then write a book report so others can learn the contents of the book by just reading the book notes.
It prob is something about how books are written for the greater public, and these bookclubs/blogposts (in the case of LW) are written for the enlightened insiders. So my guess would be it is a tribe thing, and not an attention span thing.
@Soyweiser @cornflake
Part of the book club thing might be because self-help books tend to be mostly anecdotes, so are probably good candidates for summarizing.
Sure, but they also (attempt at least) read real books.