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His early essays are life changing, in fact many of the early readers of HN, myself included, were drawn here by pg’s essays.
Last couple of ones - not so much.
The Best Essay
111–120 of 274 posts
Re: The Best Essay
#112Really 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.
>You can easily accumulate depth of knowledge from reading in areas that are well documented.
Given that specific knowledge relevant to a field may be of a highly specific and hard to understand nature it increases the risk that any attempt to understand that knowledge by simply reading it will fail due to simple misunderstanding of what one reads.
In documenting things there are always points in which documenting minute details of a thing starts to detract from the purpose of documentation, that is to say the more in depth and detailed one documents the less readable the documentation becomes, therefore one leaves out things that should be easily understood by others when trying to use the documentation to actually work in the field or will quickly be imparted by other practitioners in the field if it is one with easy access to others.
Documentation by its nature is aimed at everyone, but there may be particular things that would be obvious to many people but not some specific person, and that specific person when reading the best documented guides to the area of knowledge will still not be as knowledgeable as they believe, because everybody is different.
Very many areas of knowledge have specific relation to things that people do with their bodies, martial arts, sex, cooking, etc. etc. In such cases there is of course muscle memory, thus no matter how precise and painstaking the documentation will be in these areas you will not be as knowledgeable as one that builds up muscle memory in the field by doing if you rely on only reading the documentation.
I could go on, but given my point about minute details it might be self-defeating.
Re: The Best Essay
#113[flagged]
His early essays are life changing, in fact many of the early readers of HN, myself included, were drawn here by pg’s essays. Last couple of ones - not so much.
PG's essays really have two topics: the nominal topic, and that PG is really really smart.
Sometimes I get the same impressions about PG as I do about Derek Sivers' essays: sometimes they are insightful, and sometimes I think they were the inspirations for the /r/IAmVerySmart subreddit.
Re: The Best Essay
#114> If you're willing to do a lot of rewriting, you don't have to guess right. You can follow a branch and see how it turns out, and if it isn't good enough, cut it and backtrack. I do this all the time.
I feel like even if you guess right, you can't help but do a lot of rewriting and exploration because otherwise you'll always feel that "something's missing", and that you're further from the truth than you could be, that there's a better explanation around the corner if you study this subtree a bit more.
In the process of an essay I'm currently writing, I've probably written a short book of meandering thoughts / notes. I can't imagine it any other way because doing so would be imagining me actively not exploring an interesting subtree / implication of something I wrote, that I feel could impact the crux of the essay.
And of course none of this is wasted effort, as PG talks also mentions. Identifying the next essays from those ideas I've left out of this one is simply an act of observation and organization based on the exploration I've already done.
And likely when I start the next essay, this process will repeat itself.
Re: The Best Essay
#115I'm struck by the parallelism between this process of writing the best essay, and the process of developing a successful startup. Both require starting with a good question, that sets the upper bound for the value to be created. Both require curiosity, and hopefully to reveal some unintuitive insight. Both are functions of their time, what is a good startup today is not timeless much as what makes a good essay today is not timeless. And so on...
Re: The Best Essay
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I've known people who appeared to be in the category you're describing on first blush. In the cases where I got to see them work later, I found that they weren't nearly as impressive as they looked at first. Yes, there really are people like Wozniak in the world. They seem to be around 1 per hundreds of millions, though. The odds of meeting one are ludicrously small.
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Re: The Best Essay
#117Interesting to see Sam Altman thanked. It's the first time since July 2020, 29 essays ago, and this is also Graham's first essay since the hullabaloo at OpenAI.
I wondered that too. A subtle endorsement of Sama perhaps. A way of saying there's no bad blood there despite what the press was saying about his 'firing' from YC. Sama did a great job running YC, and certainly made PG a boatload of money. Also seeing the success at OpenAi, hard to argue Sama didn't make the right call to leave and focus on it, could hardly have done that plus keep running YC. (my guess at what happened is Sama started openai on the side and gradually it became more and more of his focus until there was a conversation about whether he should focus exclusively on it, which they mutually decided should happen).
Re: The Best Essay
#118Earlier 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.
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 b…
I’d assert that, rather than being fictional, it’s just exceedingly rare. While Feynman, Einstein, von Neumann, et. al. are indisputably geniuses, they all got relevant graduate degrees before doing their best work. The self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, however, was invited to Cambridge University on the merits of notebooks he developed in isolation after reading a few mathematical texts…
Re: The Best Essay
#119> 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.
> No essay is true, or complete, including this on
- Gödel, a bastard and a cynic, having a bad essay day after attempting to out drink Hemingway, yet somehow expressing a surprising deep truth
Re: The Best Essay
#120> There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the one I started with. Instead of asking what would the best essay be? I should have asked how do you write essays well? Though these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer to the first question, as we've seen, isn't really about essay writing. The second question forces it to be. I'm reminded of a philosophy joke: An angel came dow…
This is like trying to access information buried inside a data structure. You need the right incantations to get the right information content and not just the headers.