Part of the reason this is written like it is is that it is the work of a true master. (Like his opinions or not, he's come by them the hard way and really does know what he's talking about.) Mastery is just not as common as it used to be, probably in no small part because there is so much more to cover these days.

But when you find someone else who really knows their topic, inside and out -- they will probably write about it a lot like this.

Thanks to LLMs, the death of stylish writing in non-literary fields is assured. I agree, many people seem to view writing as a burden.

I have only met a handful of people that can lay out a complex argument from scratch in speech alone. For most of us, writing is thinking. If you avoid writing, your ideas will remain murky forever.

Up until recently, there always seemed to be a marked difference between the way people spoke vs how they conveyed thoughts in writing. These days, it often feels like most writing is just conversational and stream of consciousness and differs little from how many people speak.

It always makes me curious how we generally view the people of antiquity as speaking very eloquently and properly, but that's probably because we only have writings from their time, not recordings of how they actually spoke.

Well this is from the 80s when writing was still quite respected and practiced

This place really is good practice for all sorts of skills: expressive, physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual. And beyond learning about various zones of my beloved nerdtech, there are very subtle levels of sociology, anthropology, and psychology on display here, too.

But yeah, the decline is real, my friend. I declined to use IRC for all these years, and I'm afraid its descendant, texting, has not improved our society's level of anything beyond the most mundane trivial pursuits.

I think this is a poor example of "society writing well". It reads like a medical journal. I personally hate it and couldn't get through it.

[dead]