Comment by tibbar

Yes, a lot of pieces just aren't written for beginners, they are part of an ongoing and voluminous discourse. Writing something short just wouldn't be very interesting (for the experts), they want to engage with all of the prior art.

I think that when references to the prior work are only implicit, pieces tend to be nearly unreadable for casual readers.

However, when interesting counter arguments are stated explicitly, the long articles can still be kind of fun, and personally think this is something Scott Alexander does pretty well, for instance. He is not the main offender of unreadable long rationalist blog posts, of which there are many.