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The Best Essay

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Best Essay

#71

Post by richrichie »

samsolomon wrote: post #56
kashyapc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent point on "Death of a pig" by E.B White. It's the perfect example of a timeless essay, without a "big scientific idea". For others unaware of it, that essay was written in 1948[1], go read it in full. It starts like this: "I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and th…

Would also like to mention that the Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B White is an all-time great book on non-fiction writing. It was required for my Newspaper Fundamentals class in college and I've used it so much since that the creases are wearing thin. There's another fantastic book—On Writing Well—that is a recurring read for me. An aside—I was in one of the early programing bootcamps, The Starter League…

+1

I also love “clear and simple as truth” by thomas and turner.

Re: The Best Essay

#72

Post by doesnt_know »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #55
gmd63 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There isn’t a need to read anything beyond introductory materials to acquire depth, if your competent enough. In fact that’s what I would consider the critical dividing line between a regular genius and a bonafide super-genius. Someone who almost supernaturally acquires expertise/intuition/depth/etc. with very little visible effort.

What you're describing as a "super-genuis" is just someone that thinks they know it all after reading some introductionary material. They don't know what they don't know so they think they're "done".

Re: The Best Essay

#73

Post by neilk »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #55
gmd63 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There isn’t a need to read anything beyond introductory materials to acquire depth, if your competent enough. In fact that’s what I would consider the critical dividing line between a regular genius and a bonafide super-genius. Someone who almost supernaturally acquires expertise/intuition/depth/etc. with very little visible effort.

In my experience, this is more of a fictional trope than a reality.

There aren't any Tony Starks who become experts in thermonuclear astrophysics overnight.

Richard Feynman was as close to this trope as you can get in reality, but insisted that his reputation for being able to solve difficult problems was due to having a "different box of tools" than others. And he obtained that by studying rather obsessively, well beyond assigned texts.

I have been lucky enough to know a few people who also might qualify as geniuses able to produce miraculous results. One of them decorated his laptop with the logos of defunct computer companies of the 1950s-1980s. He drew a lot of inspiration from papers and books that few others have read in thirty years.

Re: The Best Essay

#74

Post by tikhonj »

noqc wrote: post #65

This sounds like how I would write when I was on adderall. I mean, what the hell is this statement? "I love questions that seem naughty in some way — for example, by seeming counterintuitive or overambitious or heterodox. Ideally all three. This essay is an example. Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the…

That quote is also just factually wrong because we can have partial orders, or even just have a lot of totally different essays that happen to be equally good.

Re: The Best Essay

#75

Post by MichaelZuo »

doesnt_know wrote: post #72
MichaelZuo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn’t a need to read anything beyond introductory materials to acquire depth, if your competent enough. In fact that’s what I would consider the critical dividing line between a regular genius and a bonafide super-genius. Someone who almost supernaturally acquires expertise/intuition/depth/etc. with very little visible effort.

What you're describing as a "super-genuis" is just someone that thinks they know it all after reading some introductionary material. They don't know what they don't know so they think they're "done".

[flagged]

Re: The Best Essay

#79

Post by noqc »

tikhonj wrote: post #74
noqc wrote: post #65

This sounds like how I would write when I was on adderall. I mean, what the hell is this statement? "I love questions that seem naughty in some way — for example, by seeming counterintuitive or overambitious or heterodox. Ideally all three. This essay is an example. Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the…

That quote is also just factually wrong because we can have partial orders, or even just have a lot of totally different essays that happen to be equally good.

Honestly, nothing makes me want to write essays like reading Paul Graham. Someone needs to argue with him, since it's clear he's not going to do it.

Re: The Best Essay

#80

Post by coldtea »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #69
coldtea wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best possible essay at any given time would usually be one describing the most important scientific or technological discovery That sounds like a trekie concluding that the best literature is "Star Trek" licensed novels... Sorry, but PG didn't invent or define the essay. It is a form that is centuries old (and in prior incarnations, millenia old) and have its own long cultural history, classics, and canon, few…

I graded a lot of humanities papers in a previous career. One of the weirder genres of bad paper would come from very smart computer science/math/physics majors who didn’t have time to do any of the assigned reading and just kind of tried to answer the prompt from first principles without citing any primary sources or other scholarship. This feels like that paper, except the author isn’t a stressed-out college sophom…

You've probably already read this, but for those who haven't, it's a fun read: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
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