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The Best Essay
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Re: The Best Essay
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I never saw this essay before. Thank you to share. A choice quote:
> I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond.
> The whole genre reminds me of the the wooly business books one comes across at airports ("Management secrets of Gengis Khan", the "Lexus and the Olive Tree") that milk a bad analogy for two hundred pages to arrive at the conclusion that people just like the author are pretty great.Re: The Best Essay
#123Earlier 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.
Take this how you will but in my mind most of them are intellectual yet idiots. Little empathy and no social awareness. They may be technically smarter than their peers but so what?
These are the kind of people that would probably create weapons of mass destruction and if you might discuss with them with the scale of destruction of their products they have nothing to offer yet they will giddily discuss the technical achievements of their projects.
Re: The Best Essay
#124> 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…
...I don't think I get it. Like, if the angel is going to be a jerk, he could be a jerk with any question. The philosophers could have asked "What is the meaning of life?" and the angel would answer "Of course, it is the meaning of life," without any of this ordered pair nonsense.
There is (of course, philosophers are involved) some debate about whether the angel's answer is a valid answer to the question.
Re: The Best Essay
#125> 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…
...I don't think I get it. Like, if the angel is going to be a jerk, he could be a jerk with any question. The philosophers could have asked "What is the meaning of life?" and the angel would answer "Of course, it is the meaning of life," without any of this ordered pair nonsense.
I think it is a reference to Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
> What is the ordered pair whose first member is the best question to ask, and whose second member is the answer to that question?
Is isomorphic to:
> What is the highest cardinality set in the set of all sets?
"What is the best question in the set of all questions?" is itself "what is the best question in the set of all questions?"
"What is the highest cardinality set in the set of all sets?" is itself "the set of all sets".
"What is the answer to that question?" is an assumption of bounded size, and therefore isomorphic to saying "the largest set that is not itself."
> What is the answer to the best question we could ask?" Which was roundly criticized because of the possibility that the answer would give no hint to the question it answered. One philosopher cheekily pointed out that the angel might reply "42 of course."
42 is a valid answer because if you assume two contradictory statements are true at the same time, then all statements are true. The cheeky philosopher is pointing out that "What is the answer to the best question we could ask?" implies self reference, which implies a contradiction.
The philosophers asked a self referential question and got a self referential answer.
At least that's my take.
Re: The Best Essay
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does being competent enough mean? Do you have an example of bonafide super-genius?
Story from a friend who once was offered the first PhD in Computer Science. He once mentored a guy who was so ridiculously good at writing programs, that he wrote out (once) a 5 foot stack of punch cards (back when that was how you would code), to create a program that was needed by the company for some purpose. It worked, flawlessly, the FIRST time. This was his MO. Once, he wrote a program for an internal client, a…
Great at writing programs, but doesn't know how to debug?
You're pulling our leg or in denial.
Re: The Best Essay
#127Earlier 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…
That’s a really great endorsement. I had Zinsser as a textbook for a non-fiction creative writing class in university. It was one of the only textbooks I never had a compunction to sell. Haven’t read it since then, but your comment will make me give it a re-read.
Re: The Best Essay
#128> 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.
I think it's more like asking the angel to solve the halting problem.
Solving the halting problem requires solving the halting problem's halting problem.
Asking the best question requires the answer to what the best question is.
Re: The Best Essay
#129Really 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.
> or simply choosing not to write about or share
The default action for an autonomous entity or system is to do nothing. It’s really odd to phrase doing nothing as a choice. Anything other than doing nothing is a choice. Especially when it comes to work, most humans just don’t want to bother spending time thinking about work outside of paid work time.
Re: The Best Essay
#130> 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. Clea…
The pareto optimal essay?
If you accept the Pareto optimization framework, it is highly unlikely that there will be only one Pareto optimal solution.