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The Best Essay

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Best Essay

#171

Post by bruturis »

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

In Spanish we have ensayo = attempt or try, frequently is used to refer to attempts before the real show or performance (in a music festival, a theater, ..). Also ensayo is just equivalent to what Montaigned introduced when referred to a text composition.

Re: The Best Essay

#172

Post by euroderf »

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…

This is the use case for Tufte-format layout. Notes, footnotes, and other stuff go into a comfortably-wide right-hand margin.

Re: The Best Essay

#173

Post by czue »

tptacek wrote: post #34

"It probably wouldn't be about this year's lipstick colors." Why not? "Death of a Pig" didn't convey any new scientific ideas, and might not even have been surprising in any kind of intellectual way. You could title this piece "Great Essays" and it would be entirely defensible. But Graham gave himself a higher goal here, and I don't think he's really presented a recipe for writing the Best essay. Look what he's up ag…

Did you see this part later on?

"Almost any question can get you a good essay. Indeed, it took some effort to think of a sufficiently unpromising topic in the third paragraph, because any essayist's first impulse on hearing that the best essay couldn't be about x would be to try to write it. But if most questions yield good essays, only some yield great ones."

Sounds like you have a challenge in front of you.

Re: The Best Essay

#174

Post by maleldil »

bruturis wrote: post #171
robocat wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In Spanish we have ensayo = attempt or try, frequently is used to refer to attempts before the real show or performance (in a music festival, a theater, ..). Also ensayo is just equivalent to what Montaigned introduced when referred to a text composition.

Similarly, Portuguese's "ensaio", which means "rehearsal".

Re: The Best Essay

#175

Post by coldtea »

ephemeral-life wrote: post #139
coldtea wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've probably already read this, but for those who haven't, it's a fun read: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Definitely a fun read, but the author has an axe to grind with the references to "who gets bitches" and the unnecessary footnotes. Take what you will from it.

There's no literal quote about "who gets bitches" or the word bitch at all in the post though. What you refer to is a paragraph about the distinction between programming and painting (meant as a joke counter-argument to PG's essay about how hacking is essentially like painting), which opens like: "Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do".

The author (who is on HN, btw, too) does go into a more substantial difference of the nature of the two endeavours too, but the whole post is in a jocking tone. And yes, it has "an axe to grind", but it's not about who gets the girl. It's about taking down essays they consider pompous and self-congratulatory.

Re: The Best Essay

#176

Post by ricardobeat »

maleldil wrote: post #174
bruturis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Spanish we have ensayo = attempt or try, frequently is used to refer to attempts before the real show or performance (in a music festival, a theater, ..). Also ensayo is just equivalent to what Montaigned introduced when referred to a text composition.

Similarly, Portuguese's "ensaio", which means "rehearsal".

It also carries the same literary meaning, “ensaio sobre …” == essay, usually only seen in academia, or alternative cinema.

Re: The Best Essay

#177

Post by bryanrasmussen »

dpc94 wrote: post #10

Really liked this quote. “While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes from doing. The way to really learn about some domain is to have to solve problems in it”

I misread that for a second as "while breath comes from reading and talking and seeing, death comes from doing" which I thought would be a great line from a Zorro film, even if not that sensible.

Re: The Best Essay

#178

Post by andai »

ajkjk wrote: post #84

I often think about this as a sort of counterargument for rationalism. Or maybe it's more of a paradox than a counterargument: Suppose you were trying to answer the question: "what is the best way to make as much as money as possible in the next year?" You imagine optimizing yourself or your company or your algorithm or whatever to answer this question. Maybe it does a bunch of calculations and decides the answer is…

I had a tangential insight recently. Your "best" isn't actually all you can do, because your idea of what your best is, is limited by your self-concept. Similarly, it is possible to do some things that are widely considered impossible.

From this it seems that the best strategy for doing impossible things is to assume that impossible things are actually possible. It's only by doing that that you'll find out.

It's a risky strategy though, since many things are actually impossible, and even for possible things, they may be difficult, or the easy way may be hard to discover.

Maybe there's some hueristic for sorting the actually possible, and from there, for sorting the reasonably doable.

But I'd be wary of hueristics because (barring unusual personal experience) they're likely to suffer from the same bias that led people to dismiss things as impossible in the first place.

Re: The Best Essay

#179

Post by nonrandomstring »

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.

So you're saying that Paul Graham is trying? :)

From that same Wiki definition I notice that "In English, essay first meant a trial or an attempt.

That implies an iteration on some seed, or maybe just the intent to grow and iterate on the initial essay.

Personally I find that true. Most of my "essays" I keep for myself, or sometimes share just with close friends who I trust to bounce ideas off as they mature.

Later they become collections of essays in a folder, and I might join the dots between them to perhaps see the potential for something of a book, or a new essay that synthesises them.

So I think calling something an "essay" grants the author one special privilege; the right to revise and "re-attempt" the same piece without moral judgement.

That's problematic in the Internet age, where the provenance of a document is judged by dates, by diffs to archived versions etc. It wouldn't seem right to actually change the contents at the same URL.

Nor would it seem right to insist on tracking edits, because a writer always has the right to forget and disown old and weak ideas they've moved beyond.

So I think essayists have our permission to keep approaching the same idea over and over. The way composers would sometimes write ten different versions of the same piece.

What makes a "best" essay then is its improvement with respect to the author's previous attempts.

All we can ask is, "Is this Mr Graham's best essay so far?"

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