Also applies to other writing based disciplines i guess
Do you mean if you’re a better writer, future generations will see your work as more historically reliable?
Yup. If your prose helps you be more convincing, your perspective becomes more dominant potentially, even if it might be less accurate.
of course! people fucking devour Jared Diamond even though he doesn't hold up to vigorous analysis. People still reproduce the attitudes & bias' reflected in Gibbon.
Readability translates into people reading your work, some books might have the research & robust argumentation to completely transform a field of study (and does among specialists) but that won't filter through to become common or casual knowledge if the work is a slog & technically demanding. Unfortunately it is quite rare for authors to blend exceptional research with riveting prose, but i can think of a few examples.
Lenin is quite possibly the best example of this.
Reading Marx can be like reading fucking Numbers. He occasionally breaks through when he finally connects an idea and you get some really beautiful writing that ties all these dozens of ideas together, but to get to those moments you need a lot of patience.
Lenin takes all of Marx's work and turns it into what's essentially a combination of prose and research. He hits all the data and examples and brings you through that Marxian journey in 1/100th as many words.
There's a reason Lenin's writings are in hundreds of languages and the backbone of socialist theory all around the world.
im not sure we do. its a function of both skill and material. material isnt always going to be easy to explain & interpret, ive yet to meet the writers who can make numismatics interesting--but some historical problems are always gonna need awful data like that. :shrug-outta-hecks:
Peole take yodkowsky and the slate star codex guy seriously because they are good writers. But it is ovious they are full of shit.
I think the best way is to considee 1 or more frameworks of how the world works, and contrast reality and what you read woth them. This is something the libs lack for example. Ask yourself about the implications of what is being said by this guy and so on. Be suspicious of conclusions that are too ideologically convinient.
