The Shape of the Essay Field

It's like the people who laud LLMs as a really powerful search tool.

Google used to be a really powerful and functional search tool! Then, the antagonistic process of SEO and the perverted incentives of the company building the search index also taking advertising dollars ensured it was always going to get shitty, and serve their needs above yours.

LLMs are the same. They WILL be made less effective for whatever you want. Because they are beholden to the people with the money. Those people don't want you to have an effective search tool.

Main claim made: You can write about widely-applicable topics and give the reader a strong sense of learning as long as your audience is young. For older audiences, you need to pick a trade-off between how general the topic is and how strong a learning experience you can expect.

The argument was built on a weak premise. Ignores that learning is time consuming. And in some cases, money consuming. So, it does not follow that 'If you're writing for smart people about important things, you're writing for the young'.

Also, simpler explanation for the author having a young audience: The author is associated with a popular VC firm and writes a lot about tech entrepreneurship.

[flagged]

I think a better analogy is to think of an essay as a set of diffs to be applied to a brain.

For example, if I write an essay about how the world is round, most people would ignore it because they already have that "diff". But the essay (the diffs) presuppose some knowledge: what we mean by "the world" and what "round" means. A 2-year old might not have the base knowledge for the diffs to be effective, and so it wouldn't affect them either.

The more knowledge you assume, the more likely it is for the essay to be novel. Science papers are like this. They are almost all novel because they only include the diffs from the current knowledge in the field. But, of course, only a small set of people are affected by the diffs because only a small set has the baseline knowledge.

Paul Graham's idea is that young people don't have a large knowledge base, so it is easy to create diffs for them that are novel (and therefore impact them). But that assumes that knowledge is a scalar quantity: young people have knowledge level 2 while older people have knowledge level 5.

Instead, I think knowledge is an n-dimensional field. There is knowledge about how to cook, how to dress, how to solve differential equations, etc. There's a vast sea of ideas that I never understood until I had kids. I understand exhaustion now in a way that I never could before. Fear too. And joy. Until I had that baseline, all those diffs failed to merge.

Reading one essay may not change much for you. Sometimes you can't even tell what the diffs were. But each essay you read adds more baseline knowledge that makes the next essay more impactful. Maybe that's why I like reading Paul's essays: now that I've read enough of them I have enough of a common baseline to understand the diffs.

I think it's not the shape of the essay field that matters, but the baseline in your brain.