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Comment by tolerance

6 hours ago

I just finished this response to a sibling comment of yours: > Gwern seems to be onto something about how to engage readers. What do you think that is?

I think that people read for different reasons; there are different kinds of readers. I think that there’s a dissonance between the point that he makes in this article and my perception of the rest of his work. That’s all. Of course defending my opinion so that it is received in good faith reveals more than I want to be taken as an assumption about what I think about Gwern the person, but these assumptions are inevitable when we’re talking about writing to incite intrigue in other human beings and how writing is peculiar form of expression and exchange not just of ideas but also of personality.

Some people may read Gwern’s work and find that its informational depth satisfies their interests as readers. “Embryo Selection For Intelligence” sounds like an interesting topic to me, but not interesting enough on its own to make me 1) wait for the page to load because the entire page took approximately 13 seconds to to yield almost 12MB of data and 2) read it all, in the form what is self-described as a “cost benefit analysis” on the issue, which makes it seem like more technical/scientifically-driven piece of writing as far as what we can expect by way of style. [1]

Lots of people on HN, I assume, are of the sort who are indeed engaged by technically-minded expositions on a subject and if they are at all interested in narrative then they reach for fiction writing and may even find non-fiction books that attempt to wind narratives as wastes of time unless they are immediately entertaining. And entertainment is not something that I intend to advocate for. But I suspect that there are a lot of readers on HN who view reading as a means to an end—the information; and the more the merrier and merit-worthy the writing is thought to be.

Gwern discusses a lot of topics. I’m probably sharing my reaction to the stuff that I’ve read from him that I think lacks personality. If my impression of the dominant literary bloc on HN is accurate then maybe I’ve only come across the information-dense-but-stylistically-lacking prose served on a Xanadu’s sled of a web page sort of work of Gwern's.

It’s been 4 hours. I am yet to come across an "Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” in his oeuvre.

> If you crack open some of the mustier books about the Internet—you know the ones I’m talking about, the ones which invoke Roland Barthes and discuss the sexual transgressing of MUDs—one of the few still relevant criticisms is the concern that the Internet by uniting small groups will divide larger ones.

Loading in 6 seconds and serving a little more than 4MB of content, "The Melancholy of Subculture Society” seems like a good candidate. [2]

[1] <https://gwern.net/subculture>

[2] <

3 comments

tolerance

Reply
mmooss  3 hours ago

That's a great response; thanks. I would guess you are right that Gwern particularly appeals to the HN crowd, though that might be saying the obvious. Personally - and I don't think my perception is somehow superior to anyone else's - I think Gwern's writing has a clear voice.

> I just finished this response to a sibling comment of yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46760312

I didn't write the parent comment there.

> the entire page took approximately 13 seconds to to yield almost 12MB of data

13 seconds doesn't seem like much to me compared to the time required to read those pages. I think that objectively, it doesn't have any economic impact. But that is relativley slow.