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The Best Essay

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Best Essay

#181

Post by nonrandomstring »

robocat wrote: post #159
lubujackson wrote: post #135

I 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.

> is French for "to try." Which looks to be where the English word assay comes from too: https://www.etymonline.com/word/assay

The distinction seems to be different expected outcome for the subject

To "assay" is to engage in an "investigative (analytic) procedure" upon some thing [0].

To "essay" (je vais essayer) is an attempt to achieve a specific thing.

The former seems more like an exploration without initial expectations, like a fact finding, focus group, or initial prototype.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assay

Re: The Best Essay

#183

Post by tlb »

benreesman wrote: post #162

As someone who owns a weathered copy of Hackers and Painters and routinely says things like “a rare miss from pg”, I think this is a big miss from pg. And the real shame is that he gets so close: he talks about discovery, about the intersection of science and technology and the broader world, he identifies the importance of doing things to learn enough to write about them, and most importantly : having an outrageous…

Sam went through the garage startup stage in 2005-2007, and again in 2015-2017 with OpenAI. He was good at it -- I saw both firsthand. At OpenAI he was scrounging GPUs when that's what we needed most, and wangled a prototype DGX-1 long before you could buy one. More importantly, he convinced people to leave multi-million dollar salaries at Google & DeepMind for a tiny startup no one had heard of. Now OpenAI needs to build a trillion dollars of infrastructure and lobby governments for favorable regulation, so he's doing whatever that involves. It wouldn't make sense for him to be running Ethernet cables today.

YC's public content focuses on early-stage startups. Should it have more on late-stage startups? Maybe, but it doesn't seem as impactful. The reason to produce public content is that it can scale to reach more people than the partners can talk to one-on-one. There are fewer late-stage startups, so the scaling problem hasn't hit yet. YC follows its own advice of doing things in ways that don't scale until scaling becomes necessary.

Re: The Best Essay

#184

Post by acka »

rmnwski wrote: post #170
fhe wrote: post #165

I find the separation between the body of the essay and notes makes it harder to read. When I read PG's essay, I always have two tabs open, one on the essay and the other on the Notes section. When I come across a note reference, e.g. "the answer turns out to be completely different. [4]", I switch to the Notes tab to look it up. This back and forth between the two tabs disrupt the reading experience. Wouldn't it be…

You can click on [4] which brings you to the footnote and when done you can just use the back button which brings you back to [4] in the text. Works for me.

Sadly some of us (including me) have forcibly unlearned this method after discovering that too many combinations of browsers and webpages don't support this reliably. Having to manually scroll or search back to where one was reading after clicking an intra-page link and finding out that the back button doesn't work or navigates to somewhere unexpected is just too annoying in the long run.

Re: The Best Essay

#185

Post by barrkel »

superb-owl wrote: post #25

> 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.

I found your comment by searching for "it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another" because it stood out as a fallacy.

Re: The Best Essay

#186

Post by isolli »

fhe wrote: post #165

I find the separation between the body of the essay and notes makes it harder to read. When I read PG's essay, I always have two tabs open, one on the essay and the other on the Notes section. When I come across a note reference, e.g. "the answer turns out to be completely different. [4]", I switch to the Notes tab to look it up. This back and forth between the two tabs disrupt the reading experience. Wouldn't it be…

I couldn't help but think of Nicholson Baker's first novel [0].

> The Mezzanine tells this story through the extensive use of footnotes—some of them comprising the bulk of the page—as the narrator travels through his own mind and past. The footnotes are quite detailed and sometimes diverge into multiple levels of abstraction. Near the end of the book, there is a multi-page footnote on the subject of footnotes themselves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mezzanine

Re: The Best Essay

#187

Post by MichaelZuo »

callalex wrote: post #142
MichaelZuo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Have you ever seen the tv news or read the newspaper when they cover a topic related to what you do for a living? Or a specific event you were a part of organizing? They usually have interviews with the “experts” you’re talking about. How do you feel about their accuracy and experience?

Why do you think such ‘experts’ are anywhere close to bonafide super genius?

Re: The Best Essay

#189

Post by edanm »

arketyp wrote: post #156
lubujackson wrote: post #135

I 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.

Good comment. It surprised me that a definition of essay wasn't sought before asking questions about the supposed best. But that tentative approach actually struck the essence in an interestingly performative manner.

Well pg has written a lot about what essays are and what they're for before this one.

Re: The Best Essay

#190

Post by edanm »

lubujackson wrote: post #135

I 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.

> I think the concept of a best essay is somewhat illogical, but exploring the idea like this makes an interesting post.

pg does specifically address this objection btw:

> 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 possibility of one essay being better than another.

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