I’ll try to respect your preference for brevity ;)
a shorter version would be very useful—yes, fully agree
at least there is readthesequences.com without the comments (10x as much text as the articles)
there were summaries at LW wiki, but those were too short; we need something medium-sized
there are some good reasons why Eliezer wrote a long text
there wasn’t rationalist community yet, lines had to be drawn to separate it from many existing adjacent communities (atheists, skeptics, libertarians, sci-fi fans, self-help, contrarians, academia...)
emotional, near-mode appeal—why should we even care about “being rational”?
popular bad memes/patterns (mysterious answers, applause lights, “trust the science”...)
tl;dr—writing for an already existing rationalist(-ish) community is different from writing in order to create a rationalist community
I’ll try to respect your preference for brevity ;)
a shorter version would be very useful—yes, fully agree
at least there is readthesequences.com without the comments (10x as much text as the articles)
there were summaries at LW wiki, but those were too short; we need something medium-sized
there are some good reasons why Eliezer wrote a long text
there wasn’t rationalist community yet, lines had to be drawn to separate it from many existing adjacent communities (atheists, skeptics, libertarians, sci-fi fans, self-help, contrarians, academia...)
emotional, near-mode appeal—why should we even care about “being rational”?
popular bad memes/patterns (mysterious answers, applause lights, “trust the science”...)
tl;dr—writing for an already existing rationalist(-ish) community is different from writing in order to create a rationalist community