301–310 of 345 posts
What kind of illogical nonsense is this? I found the speed my car produces the best MPG and simultaneously found the best volume for the stereo.
I suppose his overall conclusion works in one way, the article is both poorly written, and devoid of anything useful. Nobody would read it if it wasn't from pg.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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." 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…
Yes, they are. The first claim (the one he backs away from) is A implies B, where A = "this writing is beautiful" and B is "this writing is true". The second claim is Not A implies Not B. Those are not logically equivalent. The second claim is logically equivalent to B implies A, i.e., "this writing is true" implies "this writing is beautiful". But B implies A is not equivalent to A implies B.
> 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.
No, it isn't. It could also be the case that both types of writing, sounding bad and not sounding bad, are less likely to be right (because, say, sophistry is very prevalent).
What is necessarily the case is that, if writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, writing that is right is less likely to sound bad. Which, as above, is not logically equivalent to "writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right".
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.
i don’t think he was rich when he first started? also other rich people also write stuff. nobody reads that shit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was wondering if I’m the only one who thinks that way. He might be a better writer than some (including myself), but that’s a pretty low bar. The ideas are neither novel nor deep, and the writing is subpar. I pasted the essay into ChatGPT, and this is what it said (just for fun; I’m not taking ChatGPT’s evaluation seriously.) The essay is superficial, mildly derivative, and wrapped in a tone that suggests insight w…
I'm VERY curious as to what your prompt was. Because I just did the same thing, simply asking "do you think this is an example of good writing?" and it responded with this Yes, this is an example of good writing—in terms of clarity, structure, insight, and style. But it’s worth breaking that claim down, because "good writing" is context-dependent. Strengths Clarity and Flow: The essay is easy to follow, despite discu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Dave Barry writes like that, all the time (a lot less so, these days). He uses it for comedic twists, and usually integrated with other tricks. His writing is known for a very smooth cadence. You reach these “lumps” in the narrative, and can almost miss them, which, for me, multiplies their impact. I’ve always considered him one of the best writers that I’ve read. He probably gets less credit than he deserves (althou…
This is wrong in so many different ways it's like an art piece. Every part of it that tries to defend the central thesis is actually disproving it. It's kind of funny actually. Here's a dude that's been writing for 30 years, and not only is his writing bad, his ideas are crap. It has the feel of somebody who's completely convinced of his own ideas, despite the fact that they're based solely on his personal experience…
I don't think your proof works. Here is a line from the article where he elaborates on what he means: > By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas right means developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail. So getting the ideas right is not just a matter of saying true things, but saying the right true things. I'm guessing that a moron…
Historical recipes are terrible because they lack details. They don't tell you to add salt, they don't include accurate measurements (of temperature, time, ingredients, etc), they don't explain methods. Yet people of the time they were written can still follow those recipes and cook the intended dish. Writers always leave out details that are assumed by the reader. At the time those recipes were written, those people reading them would have already known all the left-out details.
If I write you a book on programming, I'm not going to explain to you what a computer is, how it works, how to copy software onto it, how to power it. You're going to already understand all that, or you probably wouldn't be reading a book on programming. Depending on what you understand, and depending on what ideas I try to convey, and how I do that, may change the end result of the information you come to understand. But they don't make the ideas less or more valid because I wrote it this way or that way.
Writing is only the communication of an idea from an author to a reader. Style, form, method, construction, etc are all inherent to writing. But the validity of the expressed idea is not. The content of the idea is completely separate from the "art" of writing. A painting of a blue sun does not affect the sun, nor does a painter's ability to depict the sun affect the sun. But a bad painter can still paint a bad painting that a viewer will understand to be the sun.
"Good writing" is like "Good art". It's subjective. As long as the recipient got what the producer intended, it's good enough.
>You can't simultaneously optimize two unrelated things; What kind of illogical nonsense is this? I found the speed my car produces the best MPG and simultaneously found the best volume for the stereo. I suppose his overall conclusion works in one way, the article is both poorly written, and devoid of anything useful. Nobody would read it if it wasn't from pg.
In your example, the best volume for the stereo will change based on how fast you're going. Noise from air going around your car will require a slightly louder volume. It technically goes the other way too, I'm sure louder music will affect your mileage slightly, reducing your MPG due to increased power draw. Realistically it won't matter, but they do exist in the same system.
You can absolutely optimize for two things at the same time in different systems. The ideal speed optimizing for MPG in different cars aren't really linked and can be found independently.
>You can't simultaneously optimize two unrelated things; What kind of illogical nonsense is this? I found the speed my car produces the best MPG and simultaneously found the best volume for the stereo. I suppose his overall conclusion works in one way, the article is both poorly written, and devoid of anything useful. Nobody would read it if it wasn't from pg.
> 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.
So, we have 1) Can't conclude that beautiful writing is true, and 2) Writing that is not beautiful usually has bad ideas too.
But he immediately follows this up with:
> Indeed, the two senses of good writing are more like two ends of the same thing.
How does this idea logically follow from the previous statement? Indeed?
I don't agree with other commenters that PG's writing here is good. The writing is bad, and so are the ideas.
What are people smoking to think PG is such a great thinker and/or writer?
This is wrong in so many different ways it's like an art piece. Every part of it that tries to defend the central thesis is actually disproving it. It's kind of funny actually. Here's a dude that's been writing for 30 years, and not only is his writing bad, his ideas are crap. It has the feel of somebody who's completely convinced of his own ideas, despite the fact that they're based solely on his personal experience…
I think the the essay is largely about exploring ideas deeply. And in much the same way a chef might stress that you must add the eggs one-by-one or whatever other culinary unfounded superstition they employ, your farm moron will stress always plowing east-to-west or something---both processes may yield a perfectly fine product, but neither has actually understood what's actually going on. They may be expert practitioners, but they are no experts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would like to imagine that pg's obsession with pared-down, simple sentences is a post-traumatic stress response to an early encounter with Kant's prose.
Kant was an awful writer and _nobody_ thinks otherwise.
And yet to this day I suspect that Kant got a lot right, or at least set the terms of debate for hundreds of years. The reason why his writing is so obtuse is because he is grappling with a rigorous approach to concepts that are intuitively simple but entirely unexamined by most people.
For example, I was trying to make my way through just the intro of a Critique of Judgment and I already encountered an idea so blindingly obvious and yet never really examined. Kant set up a dialectic between two ideas that people all believe but never really examine together:
1) Matters of taste are subjective and there is no reason to argue about them. People like what they like and you can't question that.
2) People argue about matters of taste as if their lives depended on.
I wish I had the time and focus to really try to read through this book, but I know I don't. Still, even getting a glimpse at what was going on in that guy's mind is gratifying.