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The Best Essay

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Best Essay

#21

Post by gmd63 »

dpc94 wrote: post #10

Really liked this quote. “While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes from doing. The way to really learn about some domain is to have to solve problems in it”

Much of the restricted depth of this nature is a consequence of deliberate obfuscation or neglect by the people who are involved in the doing, such as trade secrets, or simply choosing not to write about or share the actual things that impact their craft.

You can easily accumulate depth of knowledge from reading in areas that are well documented.

Re: The Best Essay

#23

Post by clooper »

timeagain wrote: post #12

> The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about. The premise is wrong (or at least not obviously right) IMO, so I have a hard time taking any of the rest of it seriously. Could the best essay not be the most emotionally moving? The best when heard aloud? The most convincing call to action? The most accurate? The highest grossing? Driving the most engagement? What…

Hemingway once said just write the truest sentence you can think of and I think he was right. Good writing and good essays are truthful in a way that wouldn't be expected from commercial and marketing copy. But to write truthfully one must know what is true and this is surprisingly hard.

Re: The Best Essay

#24

Post by nedbat »

herdst wrote: post #2

Paul’s blog looking a bit different!

I don't know if it looks different, or what it looks different from. To me, it looks like it was designed in 1999 (which it may have been).

Re: The Best Essay

#25

Post by superb-owl »

> Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another.

Not to be a pseudo-intellectual, but this confuses partial orderings and total orderings. It makes for a fun discussion, but I hope Paul would agree that there's obviously no "best essay", real or hypothetical.

Re: The Best Essay

#26

Post by gizmo »

> Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another.

What is the best car? Some cars are real stinkers. It's not hard to find cars that are better than Zastava Yugo in every way. For most cars you can find other cars that are in the same class, but just better. Clearly, a comparison between cars can be made. Car reviewers make this their job.

But from the existence of bad and mediocre cars it doesn't follow that there is such a thing as a "best car". How large is your family? Do you want to tow a boat? Do you like to go fast on curvy roads? Do you care more about acceleration or range? How tall are your rear passengers?

There are good essays and there are bad essays. Some essays, perhaps, can be considered the very best in their category. But you can't rank order essays across categories, just like you can't argue that a Ford F150 is objectively better or worse than a Mazda Miata.

(And if this makes me a small-minded pseudo-intellectual so be it.)

Re: The Best Essay

#29

Post by pedalpete »

> The best possible essay at any given time would usually be one describing the most important scientific or technological discovery

To a hammer, everything is a nail. I love technology and science, but that doesn't mean that is what makes the best essay. Relationships are key to our survival, so I suggest personal relations could be just as good an essay as anything scientific - yes, I'm suggesting that social science isn't really a science.

This also then leads to timelessness. The essay on natural selection is timeless. It wouldn't be written today, but it is still a viewport into the discovery, and of the time, and the knowledge is still valid. Maybe I am misunderstanding the point about timelessness.

> The other reason the initial question matters is that you usually feel somewhat obliged to stick to it.

I also disagree with this comment. I'm currently writing a talk I've been asked to present, and in the process of my writing and researching, I've discovered a whole new and better question. I find the point of a good question is that it can lead to better questions. I do feel that PG is suggesting this as well, but maybe this one sentence just stuck out to me.

Re: The Best Essay

#30

Post by geor9e »

timeagain wrote: post #12

> The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about. The premise is wrong (or at least not obviously right) IMO, so I have a hard time taking any of the rest of it seriously. Could the best essay not be the most emotionally moving? The best when heard aloud? The most convincing call to action? The most accurate? The highest grossing? Driving the most engagement? What…

Anyone can nitpick anyone by listing whatabouts they didn't intend. Whatabout this OTHER sense of the word "best". It's in the dictionary. You didn't address it, therfore you're a lazy man of straw. The only defense to that type of attack is to write everything in a way that never chooses any one path, spends all it's time mounting a defense to every whatabout, vaguely floating over eggshells, immune to attack. Who wants to read something like that? Or, you can trust the reader to try to understand the context. The context is a man who calls himself an essayist, has about a hundred essays spanning a decade, all in a very distinct style, where most folks reading them are fans of the prior ones. The context is the Paul Graham Essay sense of the word essay. It's not discussing emotional, spoken, money grossing essays. And to help the reader not get hung up on those whatabouts, he even explicitly spelled what sense of best he is talking about.
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