The Best Essay

One set of outrageous if solicited questions to a living legend seems enough for one day, and I'm very aware of the amount of non-public, first-hand knowledge I'm addressing here, so please take this in the highly respectful spirit in which it is intended from someone who recognizes that their entire career and adult life have been shaped by your and pg's achievements.

I do not find it at all obvious that either a trillion dollars in private investment or aggressive lobbying around regulation favorable to a particular for-profit entity are necessary or even possible paths to outcomes that are globally good for humanity or locally good for the community of people who spend time in threads like these.

I don't think that I'm part of a small minority in finding those means very dubious ways to accomplish things, the ends to which those means are being put of questionable public-mindedness, or the secrecy and apparent subterfuge with which this to all external appearances is being done acceptable ways to wield vast power.

I don't know if you'd make this argument, but others have when arguing for the same outcomes, so if I'm addressing them and not you please excuse me: we have institutions with a mandate from the public to deploy wartime budgets on Manhattan Project-scale undertakings attended by extreme risk. This cannot be ethically, morally, or legally delegated to unelected and unappointed individuals or private for-profit institutions via what was once called corruption.

Clearly I speak only for myself, but many others with far better credentials are saying similar things, in many cases much more stridently.

That site doesn't seem great, but according to Wiktionary "assay" is a doublet of "essay", i.e. the origin is the same but they were borrowed into English via two different sources.

"Assay" came via Norman, "essay" came via French.

There are lots of other examples like this where one word came from Norman and the other from French, e.g. warden + guardian, warranty + guarantee

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> It probably wouldn't be about this year's lipstick colors.

Women are so superficial (cringe)

This essay reads as if someone has too much time on their hands and is so self-absorbed that you get blog post titles like this and my god what on earth did I actually read?

Not surprised that pg proves once again that he is little more than a narrow-minded capitalist, who doesn't actually understand anything about culture, the humanities, literature, or what it is people actually value in those spaces.

His writing is consistently flat, uninspired, and egotistical. He's ok at writing clear prose and this plus his success in relation to YC has made him popular among technical people that also embrace capitalism. Anyone outside of this little cult realizes that pg says very little of value, particularly when he decides to comment on subjects outside of his capitalistic and technical wheelhouses. I have not read a single pg essay that touches on culture, ethics, or general epistemology that has given me anything other than a complete groan of a reaction and astonishment that this is the sort of thinking that passes the "high-quality" bar for the average technologist.

pg can try as hard as he can to write the "best essay". He will never convince this reader since he occupies a completely different world and basically isn't even capable of speaking to this audience in the first place.

...just to lengthen this comment more than is due, the quote is astonishing. I mean, how arrogant do you have to be to claim that the past hundreds of years of literary development, in which the notion of "best essay" is considered at best completely relative and at worst nonsense, must be wrong and that anyone who thinks otherwise must just be a "pseudo intellectual" (read: someone who disagrees with paul graham). He's really high on his own supply.