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I'm solidly in the camp that believes that if Graham wasn't rich no one would read this stuff or claim to admire it. He also should have run this through a spell checker.
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What is wrong with having someone edit and review? It is just feedback. If the writing itself is an assignment editing is normal. If the writing is part of another process maybe not. For fly.io I can see the appeal of unedited content as it can be rougher (as in breaks style guides and whatnot) and I like that roughness in blogs. E.g. you might get a British idiom come through or a more conversational style.
Y'all, we definitely edit those posts. ;)
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That writing that sounds bad is likely to be wrong.
The issue with this article is that it is very imprecise. Are the standards for whether something “sounds bad” based on the average person’s reading or the intended audience. In its most general form (how the median article sounds to the median person), the argument is pretty vacuous. Most writing discusses simple ideas and they should sound good (familiar, easy, pleasurable) to the median person. But the most valuab…
As pg describes it in the article, it's neither; it's based on the writer's judgment. The writer of course is writing for some intended audience, and their judgment of what sounds good or sounds bad should be influenced by that. But pg is describing the writer's process of judging what they write.
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> LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis. No, they don't. His thesis is not that writing that looks good--that seems plausible and convincing, like the output that LLMs often produce--actually is. He says explicitly in the article: "we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true". His actual thesis is in the very next clause of that sentence: "it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something…
To be fair, most people commenting on it here on HN seem to understand the first meaning (looks good => is good). I can guess what this says about the readership of HN, but what does it says about the clarity of PG's essay?
This seems pretty clear to me:
"[W]hile we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
And I'm not the only one who has quoted that passage in this discussion.
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> I understand what he is saying and it’s precisely what I am disputing. I don't see how. Your post was disputing the claim that good design, craftsmanship, beauty, etc. are signs of correctness. And that's not the claim PG makes in the article. Your post never disputed the claim PG did make, which is that bad design and craftsmanship, ugliness, etc., are signs of lack of correctness.
In the first paragraph, he writes, ”I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.” So he does indeed make the claim you say he doesn’t make. The essay itself lacks anything novel, despite the rather breathless framing: “So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true.” These ideas are a couple of hundred years old at least. Kant: “the beautiful is the symbol of…
But towards the end he backs away from that claim, and makes the claim I described:
"[W]hile we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
In the light of that, and of much of the rest of the essay, I think the sentence from the start that you quote was misstated. It should have been stated as "Writing that's right is likely to sound good."
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I think the intended implication goes the other way: "But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too." In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa. Hopefully that's not too much italian…
I can’t understand why it would be at all safe to conclude this. In any other field, you certainly wouldn’t conclude that good visual design, attention to detail, craftsmanship, etc. indicates anything about the factual or moral correctness of the beliefs of the creators. Do the most beautiful and expensive churches indicate the most moral or theologically correct religious groups? Do the best designed uniforms tell…
Maybe it’s true that writing that sounds good is also more likely to be right. But I’m pretty sure this doesn’t hold for speech.
> Maybe it’s true that writing that sounds good is also more likely to be right. That's not what PG is saying in the article. He explicitly says that you can't conclude this.
Please don’t get me wrong here, it’s nothing personal:
I think you might need to consider that the article isn’t as "good" and concise as you think it is.
If so many people misunderstood the concept then maybe it’s not the readers’ fault.
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I think the intended implication goes the other way: "But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too." In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa. Hopefully that's not too much italian…
I’m not sure about that. Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them eloquently? While clarity of thought facilitates clarity of writing, that’s in principle orthogonal to the right/wrong axis, especially in the ethical sense implied by the Moretti quote. And as the sibling comment correctly observes, the existence of language barriers rather disprove that hypothesis…
The gap is typically that if something is written poorly we can infer the underlying thinking that went into it wasn't well enough conceived to put out high quality text. You can understand this implicitly when you think about how you would write about a topic that you barely know about vs a topic that you are so comfortable with that the writing doesn't even seem like an effort. Ironically people often don't write about the stuff they know best because they presume it's obvious - and it is, to them. And then they write about the stuff they're trying to figure out - which is poorly understood and poorly expressed.
Paul Graham, as a writer who writes sentences that sound bad and who promulgates ideas that are stupid, is an expert in neither good sounding sentences nor sound ideas, hence is unqualified to hold forth on the topic.
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