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Notes -
I think there's a problem that affects a lot of writers wherein they get so close to their ideas that they lose the distance and objectivity that would allow them to assess how these ideas would be met by someone encountering them fresh. "Because I understand it, it must be comprehensible to anyone of approximately my intelligence." But there's a world of difference between coming up with a smart idea and actually explaining it effectively, which is why you need beta readers to ensure that your ideas are coming off in the manner you intend. I'm sure if this was suggested to him, Moldbug would of course insist that he doesn't want his ideas to become diluted or "dumbed-down" by making them more accessible to the "lay person", but this defense smacks of insecurity to me. If you live in a democracy and you want to influence policy you have to meet the voters where they are, which means explaining your ideas in a way that makes sense to the biggest possible audience. Maybe Moldbug would claim he's not trying to influence a big audience, but rather a curated intelligentsia who are themselves powerful enough to influence public policy. Not to blow my (our) own trumpet, but this website is full of high-IQ autistic nerds with thousands of postgrad degrees between us who are not shy about giving controversial or even taboo topics/positions a fair hearing - if even we have trouble understanding what he's trying to say half the time, that suggests it's a deficiency with the writing style, not with the intelligence of the readers.
Richard Hanania wrote a good article arguing that it's rarely worthwhile reading non-fiction books about ideas (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, pop philosophy, pop psychology etc., as distinct from history books, biographies and so on). He argued that the core idea of such a book can usually be succinctly expressed in essay form (<10k words) with no loss of fidelity - but book publishers have no way to make money from essays, so they get the writer to pad out the essay with numerous examples of the phenomenon they're describing, personal anecdote, and filler passages to bring it up to book length. He gave the specific example of The Righteous Mind, a book which I enjoyed and agreed with the core premises of - but 400 pages, really? Scott has covered more ground than that book in a single blog post of a few thousand words.
Probably a lot of writers who get into the habit of doing this find that the habit starts to infect even their non-book writing, resulting in even the articles published on their own blogs becoming needlessly bloated.
I acknowledge that this comment itself may come off as an example of precisely the negative phenomenon I'm describing.
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