obviously, different people prefer each style, and Eliezer and I were both falling prey to the typical mind fallacy.
Unstated in this post or the 'typical mind fallacy' link is the hypothesis that objectively not-better writing exists. To test this hypothesis, here is a sample of not-better writing that I have a high confidence will not be persuasive or interesting:
s lfas l sdkf jlds dj;lkg j;lasl dkjg lsakdjg ;lsasldkgj l;askd
If I have established that objectively not-better writing exists, that is a foundation to move away from. It is possible that in moving away from objectively not-better writing, we might move toward better writing. Further, we might move toward better writing that meets more than one preferred style of reading.
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?