someone should train on all of pg essays and then ask LLM to write one essay per day using pg style.
The Best Essay
131–140 of 274 posts
Re: The Best Essay
#132[dead]
Re: The Best Essay
#133> 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, t…
How do you organize those notes?
Re: The Best Essay
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Of course you can—plenty of comments are doing it all the time, including in this thread. What's not ok is to post cheap one-liner putdowns about anybody.
Re: The Best Essay
#135I think the concept of a best essay is somewhat illogical, but exploring the idea like this makes an interesting post.
After all, the term "essay" was invented/popularized by Montaigne in a book of his writing called "Essays" - and "essay" is French for "to try." So from that context, essays shouldn't be concerned with finding answers or be the "best" but to make discoveries in the process of trying.
Re: The Best Essay
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I admired Paul Graham's blog posts.. when I was an impressionable college sophomore.
Then I guess after I went to grad school and actually read a lot and tried to do some science and research. I find this kind of popular writing superficial, flawed, inefficient, and even conceited. That's just my subjective experience. But it seems some young people in tech just lap it up, he functions as a kind of thought leader for the industry.
Re: The Best Essay
#137> 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, t…
How do you organize those notes?
Right now using Obsidian (without being good about connecting notes). I'm just writing, dumping into a folder, and leaving further organization / analysis for later.
Re: The Best Essay
#138[flagged]
What a weird comment that could extend to literally any post here.
Maybe we should just delete HN and replace it with a link to a climate change non profit, since apparently we're better off platforming that than discussing anything else.
Re: The Best Essay
#139Earlier 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
Definitely a fun read, but the author has an axe to grind with the references to "who gets bitches" and the unnecessary footnotes. Take what you will from it.
Re: The Best Essay
#140"It probably wouldn't be about this year's lipstick colors." Why not? "Death of a Pig" didn't convey any new scientific ideas, and might not even have been surprising in any kind of intellectual way. You could title this piece "Great Essays" and it would be entirely defensible. But Graham gave himself a higher goal here, and I don't think he's really presented a recipe for writing the Best essay. Look what he's up ag…
This wouldn't be a classic Paul Graham essay without his two great hallmarks -- many passages of provocative valuable insights -- paired with periodic, bewildering attempts to sabotage his own argument.
I'll add some fan mail later if necessary (because I do get value from reading him), but for the moment, here's where I believe he went off course.
1. When he says the best essays are "ineffective," he's chosen the wrong word. They are "premature." They arrive before the world is fully ready to acknowledge their power. But they catch at least a modest following right away. And then their work grows and grows.
2. Essays about new technology can be quite powerful, and that's Graham's wheelhouse, so it's fine for him to talk up this cohort. But any serious survey of legendary essays needs to look wider. The most powerful essays redefine our social, moral, political and religious norms. Here are a few favorites that didn't just win their year; they stood out for centuries.
70 AD: The Gospel of Mark. Chronologically the first book of the New Testament, and look what that unleashed
1778: Common Sense by Thomas Paine. The boldest, fiercest justification for the American Revolution, and one that's still a touchstone today for anyone with a deep interest in the theory or practice of democracy.
1963: Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King. Worth being on the list simply for its effect on the U.S. civil rights movement; even more significant as the unbreakable tuning fork for any civil or human rights movement anywhere.
We'll keep inventing new technologies, because that's what humans are good at, and I'm sure many strong essays will ensue. But it's the redefining of our social institutions that's likely to make the future so incredibly different from today. Anyone who can write a prescient reflection about society's new rules will get my vote for "Great Essays."