Comment by tolerance

2 hours ago

You’re right. I was just riffing on the implied subject matter based on the title of Gwern's imaginary essay and how it reminds me of something that Devereaux would write about. In asking if he had anything that sounds as striking as the title that’s as far as I was taking the link between the two.

The ‘serialized’ voice that Devereaux uses works. Especially when you start from the beginning. I only hopped around a few posts while browsing his archive, but what I’m imagining is from the first post in 2019 all the way until the more recent one you shared, is an ongoing conversation. [1] Or something like a tour (“Welcome to my collection!”). Confident is a good way to describe the style. I like how I feel immediately orientated about the subject matter and the context surrounding how the writing came about.

Here’s a similar introduction from 2022:

> This week we’re going to start tackling a complex and much debated question: ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ This was the topic that won the vote among the patrons of the ACOUP Senate. The original questions here were ‘what caused the loss of state capacity during the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West’ and ‘how could science fiction better reflect such a collapse or massive change?’ By way of answer, I want to boil those questions down into something a bit more direct: how bad was the fall of Rome in the West?