Fortunately, you don't need a detailed model of which people prefer which writing style to encourage people to write posts on LW in a variety of styles!
Rather than "abstract stuff first, examples later" or "examples first, abstract stuff later" I prefer a hybrid approach: give as much of the abstract stuff as is necessary to motivate why you're looking at the examples (which may be no abstract stuff at all), then give the examples, then give the rest of the abstract stuff. The main application I have in mind is mathematical writing, where sometimes a definition is very hard to motivate without examples, but sometimes the examples are very hard to motivate without looking at a previously well-understood abstraction first. The problem I have with always giving examples first is that I often don't know what to do with the examples if they haven't been properly introduced: where, in the filesystem of my brain, should I be filing these things?
Paul Halmos!
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?