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The Best Essay

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Best Essay

#61

Post by basil-rash »

gmd63 wrote: post #21
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”

Much of the restricted depth of this nature is a consequence of deliberate obfuscation or neglect by the people who are involved in the doing, such as trade secrets, or simply choosing not to write about or share the actual things that impact their craft. You can easily accumulate depth of knowledge from reading in areas that are well documented.

How can you claim your knowledge of the field is actually deep, if you’ve never even done anything with it? Knowledge without application is nothing, imo.

True “depth” comes from the know-how acquired in digging through all the minutia nobody else though to document, on your way to producing a new creation nobody else thought to build.

Re: The Best Essay

#62

Post by tptacek »

bongodongobob wrote: post #51
tptacek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to be careful not to pummel a straw man, because it's sort of clear that Graham doesn't believe the Best essay must come from an exploration of science or of exciting new ideas (though most of the advice he gives is for that kind of essay). If I have a concern, I think it's about the chemistry his writing has with this community, how threads here will bleach it down to a game of prog-rock writing, trying to so…

I cannot decipher your second sentence here.

I think that Graham's essays have a special significance to HN, and that the community here has a tendency to project things Graham says further along a direction of HN-think than Graham intends in his writing, so that you can imagine threads about how the only contenders for "Best" essays, like, prove P!=NP or something.

I'm mostly motivated to comment by that phenomenon, not by the plain text of Graham's essay.

Re: The Best Essay

#63

Post by tptacek »

samsolomon wrote: post #56
kashyapc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent point on "Death of a pig" by E.B White. It's the perfect example of a timeless essay, without a "big scientific idea". For others unaware of it, that essay was written in 1948[1], go read it in full. It starts like this: "I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and th…

Would also like to mention that the Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B White is an all-time great book on non-fiction writing. It was required for my Newspaper Fundamentals class in college and I've used it so much since that the creases are wearing thin. There's another fantastic book—On Writing Well—that is a recurring read for me. An aside—I was in one of the early programing bootcamps, The Starter League…

Though, with respect to Strunk & White, Pullum's timeless takedown:

https://www.chronicle.com/article/50-years-of-stupid-grammar...

Re: The Best Essay

#64

Post by nirmel »

I wrote hundreds of essays based on content from my hobby of performing offensive standup comedy. I put this all in a filterable website www.urrong.com and self-published it in an illustrated book, Correct Me If You're Wrong (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09FRR76YK), the full PDF is here, free: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ujpr5klpwtmxve/book%20-%20DRAFT.p.... I'm a YC alum. Over.

Re: The Best Essay

#65

Post by noqc »

This sounds like how I would write when I was on adderall. I mean, what the hell is this statement?

"I love questions that seem naughty in some way — for example, by seeming counterintuitive or overambitious or heterodox. Ideally all three. This essay is an example. Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another."

That's not what "follows necessarily" means Mr. Graham. Are these pseudo-intellectual spectres literally just you strawmanning your own counterfactual? I can't imagine you actually listening to anyone you would call a pseudo-intellectual.

Re: The Best Essay

#66

Post by shmageggy »

superb-owl wrote: post #25

> Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another. Not to be a pseudo-intellectual, but this confuses partial orderings and total orderings. It makes for a fun discussion, but I hope Paul would agree that there's obviously no "best essay", real or hypothetical.

Not to mention that "best" is subjective, so there is no single ordering, but "How to write Paul Graham's favourite essay" wouldn't get as many clicks on HN (ironic for a site with anti-clickbait rules).

Re: The Best Essay

#67

Post by James_K »

noqc wrote: post #65

This sounds like how I would write when I was on adderall. I mean, what the hell is this statement? "I love questions that seem naughty in some way — for example, by seeming counterintuitive or overambitious or heterodox. Ideally all three. This essay is an example. Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the…

[dead]

Re: The Best Essay

#68

Post by cristoperb »

superb-owl wrote: post #25

> Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another. Not to be a pseudo-intellectual, but this confuses partial orderings and total orderings. It makes for a fun discussion, but I hope Paul would agree that there's obviously no "best essay", real or hypothetical.

Even worse, it mistakes the possibility of partial ordering to imply an actual total ordering.

Re: The Best Essay

#69

Post by libraryofbabel »

coldtea wrote: post #46
pedalpete wrote: post #29

> The best possible essay at any given time would usually be one describing the most important scientific or technological discovery To a hammer, everything is a nail. I love technology and science, but that doesn't mean that is what makes the best essay. Relationships are key to our survival, so I suggest personal relations could be just as good an essay as anything scientific - yes, I'm suggesting that social scien…

> The best possible essay at any given time would usually be one describing the most important scientific or technological discovery That sounds like a trekie concluding that the best literature is "Star Trek" licensed novels... Sorry, but PG didn't invent or define the essay. It is a form that is centuries old (and in prior incarnations, millenia old) and have its own long cultural history, classics, and canon, few…

I graded a lot of humanities papers in a previous career. One of the weirder genres of bad paper would come from very smart computer science/math/physics majors who didn’t have time to do any of the assigned reading and just kind of tried to answer the prompt from first principles without citing any primary sources or other scholarship.

This feels like that paper, except the author isn’t a stressed-out college sophomore but a 59 year old “thought leader” with a large audience who gets Sam Altman to read his drafts. No attempt to engage with the history of the genre at all, or with the many other writers who have considered the form, and no examples cited except a famous scientific article by Darwin.

Re: The Best Essay

#70

Post by richrichie »

It is not enough to ask novel questions. Trick is to ask questions that do not offend the delicate sensibilities of the overlords of public discourse. This has been a challenge since time immemorial. Darwin was not exactly feted then.
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