This would be more powerful with some examples, e.g. "we've all learned that Lamarck thought species evolved by passing on acquired traits, but Darwin told us that species can't evolve that way but do so through selection on preinherited traits; but here's a quote from Origin of Species in which Darwin explicitly endorses Lamarckian selection." Repeat for Kuhn, Kant, etc.
1
1This is true. I think the for OP (and definitely for me) it feels obvious enough that that 'shouldn't' be necessary, but I agree it is. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere. But that only happens if you are one of the people who reads the original work.
One of the simpler, though fictional, classic examples is The Road Not Taken, which is very very short, yet even Frost himself complained about how people were misunderstanding it. And even people who do read it seem to keep misunderstanding it. Many people seem to completely gloss over the sentence structures and small-but-critical words in what they read, and end up parsing it incorrectly. Ditto for Mending Wall. I find literary examples useful because they're less technical (and therefore more accessible) and very easy to confirm.
One example I like is that Einstein wanted to call the theory of relativity the 'theory of invariants.' He understood that what matters, as a deep principle of physics, is which quantities and laws are truly fixed. Yes, he showed that some important things people had thought were invariant weren't, but what mattered were the things that were invariant that people hadn't realized. Instead even physics teachers talk about 'paradoxes' and end up confusing a lot of hapless undergrads, a century later.
I have heard nothing about Mending Wall, so here's my impressions as a first time reader:
Mending Wall React Comment
I can't quite parse "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall". It's repeated twice, so it's obviously important. I'm projecting my ambiguity to whether we should love the wall or not.
Later: oh, "Something there is" is equivalent to "There exists something", practically, entropy; poetically, ???elves???
Classic ambiguous Frost on whether hunters actually destroy walls or not.
It's obviously a commentary on "good fences make good neighbors", the same way Dulce et Decorum Est is a commentary on the Latin phrase. This neighbor appears to be good (annual mutual wall maintenance, out-door game), but his insistence on the wall where it serves no purpose (his father's saying, thus giving into tradition) gives the author the thought of his neighbor as an "old-stone savage armed", upon contemplating whether the wall is to keep things in or out.
But these thoughts are "mischief" by the author, so are possibly a problem for the sake of a problem.
Also, I don't think he tackles my interpretation of the phrase, which is about clear communication about boundaries. Frost focuses on the literal interpretation. Would apple trees outcompete pines, or vice versa? the neighbor's insistence on a clear boundary could make sense.
Summary:
Walls are victims to entropy and must be maintained. Perhaps actively destroyed by hunters?
The mere existence of a wall can be sufficient to imagine the Other as a threat.
Please question Appeal to Tradition.
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Good imagery and Frost style, but I still find The Road Not Taken to be more clear and more succinct.
AFAIK it's the origin of the saying that good fences make good neighbors. A saying the speaker pretty explicitly disagrees with, as a general principle. Yet it's the saying society remembers.
The Sorrows of Young Werther was a similar case. From the book it's very obvious that Goethe disapproves of Werther's clueless, self-destructive behavior under the guise of "romanticism". But tons of young people at the time took it the completely opposite way, and started dressing and expressing themselves like Werther.
Another case that kinda baffles me is Clavell's Shogun. In the book, early 1600s Japan is shown as a horrifying oppressive society where the weak are completely at the mercy of the strong. The Englishman who's the audience stand-in spends basically the whole book recoiling from one atrocity after another. Yet the book created a Japan-mania in the West, and lots of people describe it as pro-Japan.
Do we mean active LessWrong users? <10% would shock me, if you use a filter or weighting that solves the "probably there are a lot of people who look at LessWrong ever other than 'real' LessWrongers" aspect.
Maybe it's less than half though. There might be a large contingent that has only read like, HPMOR and the Sequences Highlights.
Fairly active Less wrong users? Probably not <10%, though I wouldn't be shocked, just surprised.
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.
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.