I generally prefer the more direct {lesson, evidence}. I have on several occasions thought that Luke has implemented this well.
But - I think we have evidence that EY is a particularly good writer of narrative. While also getting the content across. The epiphany hit is pretty sweet too.
Embedding lessons in stories (like the Blue and Green) makes the mind labile to their content and makes it easier to hang on to the memory and to retell to others. I imagine it comes at the cost to extra thinking and writing time to package lessons so.
Is that cost worth the marginal effort? I'm pretty sure the answer is 'sometimes'.
And if you have a Luke and a Eliezer both on board, surely not everyone needs to their own lesson building, literature sweeps and narrative weaving (in the situations where those might be particularly useful).
Use comparative advantage?
For a long time, Eliezer has been telling me I should write more like he does. I've mostly resisted, preferring instead to write like this:
At the recent Effective Altruism Summit I tried to figure out which personal features predicted writing style preference.
One hypothesis was that people who read lots of fiction (like Eliezer) will tend to prefer Eliezer's story-like style, while those who read almost exclusively non-fiction (like me) will tend to prefer my "just gimme the facts" style. This hypothesis didn't hold up well on my non-scientific survey of ~10 LW-reading effective altruists.
Another hypothesis was that most people would prefer Eliezer's more exciting posts, while people trained in the sciences or analytic philosophy (which insist on clear organization, definitions, references to related work, etc.) would prefer my posts. This hypothesis fared a bit better, but not by much.
Another hypothesis was that people who had acquired an epiphany addiction would prefer Eliezer's style, whereas those who just want to learn everything efficiently would prefer my style. But I didn't test this.
Another hypothesis that occurs to me is that people with short attention spans could prefer my more skimmable style. But I haven't tested this.
Perhaps the community would like to propose some hypotheses, and test them with LW polling?