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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.
> He also should have run this through a spell checker. What's an example of a spelling mistake in it? I read it carefully and didn't notice any.
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And a bad reader makes up concerns before even engaging with the authors ideas.
Wait, I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make here. Is it that I commented about Paul Graham's writing style in response to a PG essay on writing style? Is that "making up concerns before even engaging with the author's ideas"? The whole point of the essay we're discussing is writing style, and in particular a set of suggestions he has based on his own work. It's valid to criticize someone for not giving…
I am responding to the point that pg’s writing is too reductionist. Comments on these articles often include “what about [obvious exception that distract from the main idea]”.
These comments indicate they are trying to dismiss rather than understand (the author didn’t even consider my idea!)
As an example, “San Francisco is wealthier than Bakersfield”. Almost certainly a bad reader will complain that this does not apply to every resident. But we all know what is meant.
So my general takeaway is that making broad statements without qualification can be a strength, because you filter out bad readers who aren’t interested in big ideas. And catering to them (who cannot be satisfied) only worsens the experience for your interested audience.
This itself is of course a broad statement with exception.
I think a lot of that "shaking of the bin" to compress objects brings you closer to the final and concise level of talking about punching. That middle section is verbose, petty.
A great example of this is Nietzsche's "god is dead, and we have killed him." He just skips over the details, and nerd-bait debate about atheism that had been ongoing since Spinoza. There's no contribution he could have made to that debate. All had already been said. Nietzsche assumes the readers' familiarity, expresses his own take and opens up a possibility for a "what's next."
If Nietzsche had one more sentence, the entire impact would have been destroyed.
A more typical form of writing at this time would have been "By rationally examining the philosophical basis for belief in god..." This predictably yields a relitigation of the debate... the Richard Dawkins route, a very different book.
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Y'all, we definitely edit those posts. ;)
That the 'studiedly mussed' style of fly.io blog posts comes across as 'unedited' for some is a terrific compliment, even more so for being unintended.
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Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick. That's fine. The ideas transmit, the words are forgotten. He doesn't need to use memorable sentences if he's saying what he's trying to say. Paul Graham is a very skilled communicator. He's not a writer's writer like YKW, but he doesn't need to be.
Idk, I'm conflicted here because PG is the embodiment of a poor amateur writer with good ideas. He is literally the proof that writing can be bad (albeit we should define what good and bad writing are and agree on it) but still interesting because of the ideas.
That's good in my opinion - in the same sense that hammer which drives down nails flawlessly is good. PG is not trying to write colorful fiction, he wants to communicate something, and he succeeds in doing so. It is still a hammer, not a statue of David, but there are good and bad hammers, and this is a good hammer. You wouldn't want to drive nails into boards with a statue of David anyway.
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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…
My answer would be: "eloquence" may be a too-strong requirement, but if you can't express your ideas at least clearly, how can you be sure that they are the right ideas? Because without a detailed description that another human being can understand, this is really hard to judge. Maybe there is a lot of overlooked flaws in your flow.
I have a suspicion that there is a subset of geniuses who just intuitively "grok" some important ideas without being able to describe them to other people. Some of the autistic savants come to mind. But I am not sure if they can be induced to actually cooperate efficiently with the rest of humanity. Whatever happens in their minds, seems to be locked there.
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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…
> In the first paragraph, he writes, ”I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.” 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…
> "[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."
What do you mean, backs away? Those aren't different claims. If writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, it is necessarily the case that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
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Presumably, for this concept to stick with you your whole life, you'd have to have heard of "Borges"? From Googling that name, it appears the author you're referring to died in 86. Why would anyone expect him to win the current year's Nobel Prize in Literature?
Are the literature prizes generally handed out for works published that year? It sure doesn't work that way in the sciences.
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Reminds me of a line by Douglas Adams describing some particularly crude alien invaders: “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” He could have written something like: “The blocky ships hovered seemingly in defiance of gravity.” Instead he picked a phrasing that’s intentionally a little hard to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to get the joke, and remembers it. Paul’s…
FTA: > This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though. Descriptive writing, especially for fiction, seems out of scope.
It becomes more than that once it gets understood or comprehended.