121–130 of 182 posts
― Ernest Hemingway
I get that this guy is like rich and famous and founded this website or something so people always post his stuff here but his writing always has this weird veneer of pseudo intellectual philosophy that I find very off putting.
If that's true, please count me as pseudo intellectual also, because pg is one of the smartest people I've met and I continue to be in awe of how his mind works. I know it's silly to post such a thing, as the bias/conflict of interest is obvious and it will inevitably come across wrong—but I've thought and said this long before I met pg or had any connection to YC, so if there's a causal arrow it goes the other way.…
> Out with the long
> “Short words are best”, said Winston Churchill, “and old words when short are the best of all”
> Oct 7th 2004
full article here: https://web.archive.org/web/20230201081635/https://www.econo...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that's true, please count me as pseudo intellectual also, because pg is one of the smartest people I've met and I continue to be in awe of how his mind works. I know it's silly to post such a thing, as the bias/conflict of interest is obvious and it will inevitably come across wrong—but I've thought and said this long before I met pg or had any connection to YC, so if there's a causal arrow it goes the other way.…
Conditional on who you are and what you do, dang, there is no information content in the fact that you admire pg.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
" Why use many word, when few word do trick. " ~Kevin Malone, The Office. I agree with you.The point of language is to get an idea from my head into your head with as little loss-of-signal as possible. That is much more challenging than it might sound. Note: an idea might be an emotion. If I were to write that as simply as possible , I might say: "Yes. Talk is communication. That is hard" , or even more simply " Talk…
That joke spoils itself by adding "trick". But if it didn't, then it wouldn't work, since "Why use many words when few will do" is perfectly grammatical.
If anything, your point makes the joke funnier - he's managed to make the sentence longer than has to be, in addition to grammatically incorrect, to express the same idea.
This may be good advice for an instruction manual or children's books, but I think good prose is something of an art in and of itself. Some of the most successful writers do the opposite. Look at the articles that go viral ..you see that the prose is varied and even complicated, not just simple. The best prose is that which conveys the intended message for the intended audience in the best way possible. I think it's…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really buy this idea of "thinking for yourself". We are nothing more than the product of our experiences: there are no axioms at the root of at any of our beliefs; fundamentally everything that goes through our heads is cobbled together from other sources that's cobbled together from other sources before that. And that's good! Because if we were attempting to derive everything from axioms that would be 1) imp…
I don't know about this. If what you're saying is true, strictly speaking, novel thought would be impossible. I think the whole game of thinking is picking a set of existing words and concepts you inherit and independently reasoning through/with them to arrive at novel or useful conclusions. The "thinking for yourself" part is all the thinking that goes on in the gap between the existing ideas and the reasoned conclu…
In a world of a million concepts, there are a trillion of possible directed associations between pairs of them, and each of them may be multi-valued. Say, what's a real-world relation between "ChatGPT" and "nighmare"? A good thinker will be able to find or come up with many that nobody has seen before, beyond the ones which, due to our 'social prior', are evident. What happens when instead of two, there are three or four concepts?
I would go further and say that parroting is often more complicated than being creative, you have to find those ideas to rehash first, and then rank them by popularity and efficacy at your goal, e.g. publicity or acceptance. In other words, you need to be able to "read the room", or "compute the social prior".
This may be good advice for an instruction manual or children's books, but I think good prose is something of an art in and of itself. Some of the most successful writers do the opposite. Look at the articles that go viral ..you see that the prose is varied and even complicated, not just simple. The best prose is that which conveys the intended message for the intended audience in the best way possible. I think it's…
"Write simply" is given as advice because, well, it's good advice. Too many writers try to ball before they crawl. A memorable critique, from an English professor, of my writing: "stop trying to sound smart". He meant that I should stop trying to use big words and stop trying to construct complex sentences. >People state they want/like simple writing but revealed preferences show otherwise. Simplicity isn't what you…
> I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.
They don't go hand in hand. Quite the contrary, I'm arguing they are in conflict.
Drawing from a larger vocabulary allows greater precision, results in shorter sentences and enables the writer to express complex ideas concisely.
Ironically, artificially restricting what words one can use puts a far greater cognitive burden on the reader. It's superfluous to quote the relevant xkcd.
There's no cure for unclear prose: it's the necessary consequence of unclear thoughts.