# No One Reads the Original Work

Regularly, I'll wind up reading some work and wind up surprised that it bears little resemblance to its portrayal on the internet. Usually, it's a lot more nuanced than I thought, but at times it frequently says the opposite to what everyone else claims. What's going on?  
  
Answer: almost no one who talks about this work has ever read it. Instead, they read about it. And I don't even mean a book review. Oh, no. Most people who know about this work only have vague malformed memories, no doubt at dinner parties where they had rivetting conversations on Famous Work \[\] and its ilk as they sipped martinis and ate off smorgasbords or whatever it is they do at dinner parties. I wouldn't know, because while they partied, I studied the original. 

This is typical. Most people who know of a work will get it through secondary, or tertiary, sources e.g. a thread on Twitter, a discussion on a podcast, a not too accurate summary on Wikipedia etc. Naturally, memetic dynamics kick in and shave away the idea's details till it's a caricature of itself. This pressure towards slop is, at best, weakly countered by readers who've read the primary sources and can whack around the lowly secondaries with facts and logic, thereby acting as a constraint on the memetic forces abrading away the work's finer details. This means the caricature shares some mutual information with the original; but that's a weak constraint. Luigi and Waluigi share some mutual information. 

What's the upshot of all this? For writers, most discourse on your work is going to look like everyone is horribly caricaturing your ideas because participants know only of the caricature. It's not malicious. Don't take it personally, it's not malicious. After all, even [supervillains can't get people to listen to their monologues](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/azzEWbNncapwNzngx/supervillain-monologues-are-unrealistic). 

Only a few people will truly put in the work to understand your ideas, which involves active reading and even, gasp!, putting them into practice. These few may get significant value from your work, and spread the word about your work. You can make their job easier by planning for there to be memes or juicy quotes. You might even be able to shape the caricatured version of your ideas by selectively making parts of your work more/less memetic. If you're really galaxy brained, you might use the caricature as a smokescreen to hide the meaning of your work behind plain sight. Why bother? Ask the Straussians. 

For readers, while reading a work you've heard of second-hand won't necessarily be useful to you, it will probably teach you something. Yes, even works by that guy you totally hate. 

In fact, it's true even for works by that guy you love. Or for works that your information bubble won't stop raving about. Consider, say, the Sequences. Pop quiz: how many people on Less Wrong have read >half of the sequences? I'd guess <10%. This is in spite of how tsundere Lesswrong is for the guy. You'd think that such love or hate would be enough to get Lewssrongers to read the dang Sequences, but no, it's not. 

And The Sequences are pretty great. There's lots of valuable insight there, waiting for people to bother to read it. Likewise for other great works. If you can be bothered, there's the equivalent of epistemic $100 bills lying around everywhere on the street.