[flagged]
The Best Essay
201–210 of 274 posts
Re: The Best Essay
#202Re: The Best Essay
#203[flagged]
source?
Re: The Best Essay
#204Earlier 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…
I don't buy it. Every supposed super genius I ever heard about in the end had a tactic to their work. Even the high iq people have to have an approach to harness the intelligence.
Re: The Best Essay
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though, with respect to Strunk & White, Pullum's timeless takedown: https://www.chronicle.com/article/50-years-of-stupid-grammar...
Ah yes, as Pullum timelessly put it, "To continue reading for FREE, please sign up". An un-walled version is (legitimately, so far as I know) at https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-file-manager/fil... . [EDITED to add:] I don't know how close to identical this is to the Chronicle article; at the end it says "Adapted from an article written for The Chronicle of Higher Education "; my guess is that essentially…
Your link was the one I was looking for anyways.
Re: The Best Essay
#206While comparing ordinary human activity to language modeling is perhaps the greatest intellectual cliche of 2024, what PG describes in the essay-writing process itself essentially boils down to beam search. Autocomplete, find wrongness, backtrack, predict more consistent series of next tokens. The fact that only one of those options is actually reflected on the screen doesn't change the fact that the writer is probability-weighting continuations in their head.
I remember running across a tweet that said, in essence, you always have access to your own optimal policy if you simply ask. A similar technique might be the key to wresting good ideas from an ambiguous starting point: "What would be the most consistent answer to the original question, given what I've learned and written so far?"
Re: The Best Essay
#207[deleted]
Re: The Best Essay
#208I 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-intellect…
> 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.
Preemptive dismissal of any criticism of the idea of a best essay is stupid. In particular, even though I buy the "possibility of one essay being better than another", the criteria for ordering will be necessarily subjective.
As someone who has read many essays in the European tradition (Montaigne, Sartre, etc.), I cannot bring myself to see the essays by E. B. White, for example, to be superior in any sense. Yet, I know that White's essays are held in high-regard in this part of the world. This points to the fact that there is no universal ordering function for essays, which mostly invalidates Graham's argument above.
Re: The Best Essay
#209[flagged]
This reeks of bad faith. If you care to change that, be less vague in your off-topic accusation and don't require me to gather your sources for you.
Re: The Best Essay
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you be specific enough that interested parties have some way to find out what you're referring to, please?
Michael O Church, I think.
This Michael O Church? https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/why-i-didnt-...