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?
How I sorta think about it, which might be a bit circular. I think the long content is a gullibility filter of two kinds. First, it selects for people who are willing to slog through all of it and eat it up, and defend their choice in doing so. Second, it’s gonna select people who like the broad strokes ideas, who don’t want to read all the content, but are able to pretend as if they had.
The first set of people are like scientologists sinking into deeper and deeper levels of lore. The second group are the actors in the periphery of scientology groups trying to network.
Like those “one weird trick” videos that go on and on without displaying playback controls. Only the rubes get to the end.