It took a few months for me to start reading LW and sequences after I first read some random texts here. Not that I didn’t like it, and I’d like to think of myself as knowledge-hungry, and I had entire time this goal to start reading more, but still… Dunno. Learning shock, maybe? Humans, at least some, don’t really learn all that fast. Grasping even simple things takes ridiculous amounts of time, and I feel that inferential distance between LW and thought patterns of ordinary nerd is big enough to warrant few months of thinking time.
But dunno. This topic could almost be discussed more, I remember vividly observing the huge inferential gap when I first came here, but now I can’t remember how did I think back then.
In general, reading an interesting article on a site you’ve been linked to and then leaving the site without reading more seems to be the default behavior for humans, unless the article in question has particularly interesting links. Since most sites have a lot of variance in the quality of the articles, this is pretty reasonable behavior: only reading a site when somebody bothers to link to it will increase the odds of you not wasting your time. It often takes several links to the same site before you get interested enough to actually start reading it.
It took a few months for me to start reading LW and sequences after I first read some random texts here. Not that I didn’t like it, and I’d like to think of myself as knowledge-hungry, and I had entire time this goal to start reading more, but still… Dunno. Learning shock, maybe? Humans, at least some, don’t really learn all that fast. Grasping even simple things takes ridiculous amounts of time, and I feel that inferential distance between LW and thought patterns of ordinary nerd is big enough to warrant few months of thinking time.
But dunno. This topic could almost be discussed more, I remember vividly observing the huge inferential gap when I first came here, but now I can’t remember how did I think back then.
In general, reading an interesting article on a site you’ve been linked to and then leaving the site without reading more seems to be the default behavior for humans, unless the article in question has particularly interesting links. Since most sites have a lot of variance in the quality of the articles, this is pretty reasonable behavior: only reading a site when somebody bothers to link to it will increase the odds of you not wasting your time. It often takes several links to the same site before you get interested enough to actually start reading it.
I was really interested even back then. Name of this site was enough to cause that.