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How to Write Usefully

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Write Usefully

#301

Post by kashyapc »

On the essay form, I don't yet see a mention of the excellent Essays of E. B. White[1]. Yes, the same one from 'Strunk and White' of The Elements of Style.

Two essays that I still vividly remember from the book (both were written around 1940s):

(1) Coon Tree

(2) Death of a Pig

These are indeed essays with an "an odor of durability", as White puts it while he ruminates in the preface about what he was considering to publish.

Get the entire book[1], his writing reeks with humanity.

[1]https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060932237/essays-of-e-b-wh...

Re: How to Write Usefully

#302

Post by CaptArmchair »

kragen wrote: post #267
CaptArmchair wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fallacy is in the premise: "An essay should be useful." Well, useful is always in the eye of the beholder. There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all. And pretending there is, and it's even attainable, is intellectually dishonest. Sure, an essay could be a formal piece that approaches an almost "mathematical" approach. After all, an essay a first and foremost an argument presented by the autho…

> There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all. In a relative sense, it's true that there's no such thing as an absolute truth, but it's also true that there is such a thing as an absolute truth. However, in an absolute sense — the sense in which, for example, real-number multiplication is commutative — it is only true that there is such a thing as an absolute truth, and the assertion that "there's no such…

Entire libraries, fields of study and lives have been dedicated to the topic with no formal conclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth

With great minds such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Baudrillard_(1929%E2%80%... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Foucault_(1926%E2%80%931...

I'm not interested in discussing various epistemic theories of truth as such. That's entirely besides the point I'm trying to make.

It's that the word "useful" used by PG hides a potential tyranny of truth. The notion that one can refute any argument or claim with the criticism "not useful" because it was "not novel, not important, too florid" and so on. As if there is some universal definition or bar that describes what "useful" is outside of our experience. A false presumption. "useful" in this context risks being used as a crutch to dismiss any opinion without having to critically consider your own thoughts and feelings.

An essay geared towards making a formal argument based on falsifiable facts may be "useful" to a specific audience, or may enshrine a particular genre - academic publishing - but how PG constructs his article may - erroneously - be applied to any form of essay writing. Which would be quite a reductionist take.

Re: How to Write Usefully

#303

Post by [deleted] »

AgentME wrote: post #299
roryokane wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interpret that quote differently. To me, it says, “some people mistake being right for being impolite; don’t listen to those people.” I can imagine that someone could confuse being right for impoliteness would happen if the other person were right about an inconvenient truth. I don’t think the quote says anything about ways of being impolite that don’t consist solely of being right, such as being impolite by sweari…

I read it all again with your interpretation in mind and it looks like that one was intended. I think I missed or skipped past that interpretation to another because I think luord's original framing was a very misleading/unuseful way of looking at a situation. The post he linked to (elsewhere in the thread, that prompted his original post) wasn't complaining just about someone's certainty, but their impoliteness whil…

[deleted]

Re: How to Write Usefully

#304

Post by firatcan »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #90
firatcan wrote: post #87

Hello guys, I don't know if it's right place to ask this, but do you guys have any other resources that I can learn how to write great essays. Because I have started to write essays at our startups blog which is called www.jooseph.com . It is basically playlists for learning. This resources would be really helpful for me to create a list for how to write great essay and also teach myself to how write great essays. Th…

You want to read Umberto Eco's seminal "How to write a thesis". Not quite the same as an essay. But it does contain tons of good stuff on writing.

Thank you for your suggestion :)

Re: How to Write Usefully

#305

Post by sneak »

firethief wrote: post #237
Psyladine wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Policing tone is passive aggressive censorship & bias. It's as hideous a concept as 'culture appropriation' or the cult of positivity. https://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977

Can't you call it microcensorship or something? Actual censorship is still very much a thing.

Censorship doesn't always mean government censorship, or restriction of rights. Spam filters are censorship, for example.

Re: How to Write Usefully

#306

Post by Klonoar »

luord wrote: post #128

Interestingly, I saw an example of the phenomenon of people getting mad at the certainty of an essay in this very site, a few days ago. Someone was telling the author that he would achieve more if he phrased his point in a more "polite" way, just because the certainty of the writing made the critic mad. Thankfully, the author was here in the comments responding, and he didn't budge. That interaction was very refreshi…

To be very clear here (I missed this thread when it came up, sadly): I don't care that he's right (and I'm willing to buy that he's right!), I just believe he went about positioning his argument in the wrong way.

There is a very serious problem in any privacy/security discussion right now where, like it or not, the average person is poking their head in and wanting to learn more. There's a wealth of misinformation and paranoia strewn all over, and a tone like this is needlessly rude and condescending... which doesn't help provide a place where people can learn.

His entire point is that people ("technologists") need to stop recommending encrypted email, but the tone with which the article is written will drive away anybody who's actually recommending it. It's (IMO) effectively shouting into the void.

People seem to have this idea that I'm personally offended by what he wrote, when I couldn't care less (as I don't LARP, myself) - I genuinely (usually) like reading stuff from him, whether it's comments on here or elsewhere. ;P

Re: How to Write Usefully

#307

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Re: How to Write Usefully

#308

Post by kragen »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #302
kragen wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all. In a relative sense, it's true that there's no such thing as an absolute truth, but it's also true that there is such a thing as an absolute truth. However, in an absolute sense — the sense in which, for example, real-number multiplication is commutative — it is only true that there is such a thing as an absolute truth, and the assertion that "there's no such…

Entire libraries, fields of study and lives have been dedicated to the topic with no formal conclusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth With great minds such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Baudrillard_(1929%E2%80%... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Foucault_(1926%E2%80%931... I'm not interested in discussing various epistemic theories of truth as such. That's entirely besides the point I'm trying…

> Entire libraries, fields of study and lives have been dedicated to the topic with no formal conclusion.

On the contrary, many formal conclusions have been reached. One of them is that it is self-contradictory to say that it is an absolute truth that there is no absolute truth, which is what you seemed to be saying, and that it is meaningless to say that it is a relative truth that all truth is relative. These are ontological propositions, not epistemological propositions.

I don't think the reductionism/wholism axis is really relevant here. I don't read Paul as making any reductionist claims; I think they're much more easily read as wholist claims.

It's true that Paul is making objectivist normative claims about essays, which is to say, claims about what is good or bad in an essay — what kinds of essays people should or shouldn't write. That seems to be what you object to; you're a subjectivist. The same self-contradiction objection applies: you're implicitly claiming that it's objectively bad to make claims about what is objectively bad. (So it is not in fact entirely beside the point you were trying to make.) If you really believed that, you wouldn't be doing it.

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