The Internet deluges us with information, Arnold Kling notes:
Martin Gurri terms it a tsunami.
Tyler Cowen, who has speed-reading superpowers, says that he finds Twitter to be information dense, by which he means that for him, it contains more information per line he reads than do other media. I disagree with him about Twitter, but I like the term information dense.
I wish that Tyler Cowen would switch his essays to Substack. Same with Martin Gurri.
For several months now, I have found Substack to be more information dense than books. For 2022, I could not even come up with a list of best nonfiction books of the year. But I subscribed to a few dozen Substacks.
I am reading fewer books that I did before Substack came along. The most recent book I read was Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, by Randolph Nesse. Relative to what I wanted, the book did not disappoint. But boy, it felt like it took a long time to get there. The book is not information dense. I had the annoying sense that in the time it took me to read the book I could have profitably explored many substacks.
[…]
Actually, showing off erudition is more of a bug than a feature. Professors who enjoy citing a wide range of references in their lectures and writing are kidding themselves if they think the rest of us have the patience for it. Niall Ferguson’s The Cash Nexus had a major, lasting influence on my view of banking and finance. But re-reading it now, it’s really painful. I want to say, “Stop showing off and get to the point.”
People used to talk about the enjoyment they get from “curling up with a good book.” There might be people for whom that is still be true for novels. It is not what we are looking for in non-fiction works.
Even good short pieces can benefit from being edited down…
I still prefer my RSS feed reader both for high information density and a consistent look&feel across a wide variety of sites.
Jargon. Twitter is not dense. Twitter is trivial, as are most “one liners”. Twitter is just parroting the popular jargon. Anything worth the involvement will be complex, requiring some development. That isn’t Twitter. Twitter is, “Look at me”. At best best it is a flag to something interesting that you might want to look up elsewhere. That is not “dense”.
“showing off erudition”…it’s not just in academia. Years ago, I was in a marketing & sales staff meeting at which we had a guy come in to give us a presentation. It was more than a little confusing, and none of us could figure out where he was going with it. Finally, the exec running the meeting said:
“Fred, you don’t need to convince us that you’re smart. We already *know* that you’re smart. **Just tell us what you want to do!**”
A little brutal, but called for.
The internet used to be and still mainly is, a feast of free, quality information. Substack is a retrograde move. Opinion piece blogging is mainly vanity. Why should I pay you for your self-overrated opinion? I would go for Substack if you could take one subscription that let you anywhere within it.