My guess is there is a huge spread in how much people read. SSC and the LessWrong sequences are indigestible if you cannot comfortably stomach 20000 or more words in a day. Lots of people read way less than that!
I suspect this is a big part of the reason we’re such a high IQ crowd: you have to be super verbal to absorb this stuff! Map and Territory, Consequentialism and even AI risk aren’t actually terribly complicated ideas, but we have a tradition of transporting them in long blog posts, and generally a culture of communication that optimizes for precision at the cost of conciseness.
I think you’ve discovered that Wikipedia is similarly more a “verbal elite” thing. My prediction would be that number of books read this year is very highly correlated with Wikipedia use, and number of academic papers read even higher. And both of those I would expect are also highly correlated with SSC / LW readership.
I’ve sat through quite a number of academic presentations that were obviously heavily based on Wikipedia articles (this can be easy to tell in humanities subjects and if you’re the person who wrote that article) but not mentioned to be so. I therefore suspect Wikipedia is the most-plagiarized source of information in the world. So I don’t think it is that important whether people get information from Wikipedia directly. If they can get information from somebody who got it from Wikipedia, that should be enough.
I suspect this is a big part of the reason we’re such a high IQ crowd: you have to be super verbal to absorb this stuff! …I think you’ve discovered that Wikipedia is similarly more a “verbal elite” thing.
Interesting. I suspect that even among verbal elites, there are further splits in the type of consumption. Some people are heavy on reading books since they want a full, cohesive story of what’s happening, whereas others consume information in smaller bits, building pieces of knowledge across different domains. The latter would probably use Wikipedia more.
Similarly, some people like opinion-rich material whereas others want factual summaries more. The factual summary camp probably uses Wikipedia more.
However, I don’t know if there are easy ways of segmenting users, i.e., I don’t know if there are websites or communities that are much more dominated by users who prefer longer content, or users who prefer factual summaries.
My guess is there is a huge spread in how much people read. SSC and the LessWrong sequences are indigestible if you cannot comfortably stomach 20000 or more words in a day. Lots of people read way less than that!
I suspect this is a big part of the reason we’re such a high IQ crowd: you have to be super verbal to absorb this stuff! Map and Territory, Consequentialism and even AI risk aren’t actually terribly complicated ideas, but we have a tradition of transporting them in long blog posts, and generally a culture of communication that optimizes for precision at the cost of conciseness.
I think you’ve discovered that Wikipedia is similarly more a “verbal elite” thing. My prediction would be that number of books read this year is very highly correlated with Wikipedia use, and number of academic papers read even higher. And both of those I would expect are also highly correlated with SSC / LW readership.
I’ve sat through quite a number of academic presentations that were obviously heavily based on Wikipedia articles (this can be easy to tell in humanities subjects and if you’re the person who wrote that article) but not mentioned to be so. I therefore suspect Wikipedia is the most-plagiarized source of information in the world. So I don’t think it is that important whether people get information from Wikipedia directly. If they can get information from somebody who got it from Wikipedia, that should be enough.
relevant.
Interesting. I suspect that even among verbal elites, there are further splits in the type of consumption. Some people are heavy on reading books since they want a full, cohesive story of what’s happening, whereas others consume information in smaller bits, building pieces of knowledge across different domains. The latter would probably use Wikipedia more.
Similarly, some people like opinion-rich material whereas others want factual summaries more. The factual summary camp probably uses Wikipedia more.
However, I don’t know if there are easy ways of segmenting users, i.e., I don’t know if there are websites or communities that are much more dominated by users who prefer longer content, or users who prefer factual summaries.