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The Best Essay

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Best Essay

#81

Post by aerophilic »

rnewme wrote: post #58
MichaelZuo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn’t a need to read anything beyond introductory materials to acquire depth, if your competent enough. In fact that’s what I would consider the critical dividing line between a regular genius and a bonafide super-genius. Someone who almost supernaturally acquires expertise/intuition/depth/etc. with very little visible effort.

What does being competent enough mean? Do you have an example of bonafide super-genius?

Story from a friend who once was offered the first PhD in Computer Science.

He once mentored a guy who was so ridiculously good at writing programs, that he wrote out (once) a 5 foot stack of punch cards (back when that was how you would code), to create a program that was needed by the company for some purpose.

It worked, flawlessly, the FIRST time.

This was his MO.

Once, he wrote a program for an internal client, and it got shipped. They ran the program and ran into a problem. My friend told him to debug it for them… he replied “I don’t know how”. Up to that point in his life, He had never had to debug a single piece of software…

My friend helped him debug the program: Turns out, the problem was not an issue with his code, the customer had given him the wrong spec for a critical interface… and that was the only reason it had not worked the first time.

There are truly people that qualify. The only note I will make is that generally if you are a super genius in one dimension, you likely have something you are absolutely terrible at in another. Hopefully it is in a dimension that either doesn’t matter, or you have enough complementary people around you to mitigate it.

Re: The Best Essay

#82

Post by LectronPusher »

gizmo wrote: post #26

> 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. What is the best car? Some cars are real stinkers. It's not hard to find cars that are better than Zastava Yugo in every way. For most cars you can find other cars that are in the same class, but just better. Clea…

The pareto optimal essay?

Re: The Best Essay

#83

Post by NateEag »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #75
doesnt_know wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing as a "super-genuis" is just someone that thinks they know it all after reading some introductionary material. They don't know what they don't know so they think they're "done".

[flagged]

I've known people who appeared to be in the category you're describing on first blush.

In the cases where I got to see them work later, I found that they weren't nearly as impressive as they looked at first.

Yes, there really are people like Wozniak in the world.

They seem to be around 1 per hundreds of millions, though. The odds of meeting one are ludicrously small.

Re: The Best Essay

#84

Post by ajkjk »

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 "day-trading commodities futures" or something. Or maybe a company does this and thinks the answer is "spin up a new product and sell it". (Or any situation where you're optimizing some other variable, like "altruism" or "security".)

Well, in almost every case, some of the best answers are "do something impossible". For instance, "write a story that is so good you get a 1 billion dollar book deal out of it". Or "write an essay that convinces everyone to give you all their money". Or "hack something that's considered unhackable and take all the money". What if the most altruistic thing you can do is... convince everyone to become pacifist? Or start a new religion? Etc.

Each of these has the property that rationality alone can't really model it. An algorithm can't analyze reality and say "write a story that is so good you get a 1 billion dollar book deal", or "write an essay that convinces everyone to become pacifist". (Maybe an actually-sentient AI can. But that's about it.) The only way you could come up with that as an actual strategy is to have an unrealistic belief that it is possible. Basically to have faith in yourself and your vision of the world despite the evidence for that strategy not being solid.

Yet the strategy can work. History shows that sometimes it does. And for a particular person at a particular time it might be the right answer. But it will never be the "right strategy" according to an outside computation.

I dunno. Always felt like that was interesting. Not sure if there's a word for it. If not I would call it the "miracle paradox": miracles occur, but you can't rationally justify them as a strategy, yet believing you can pull one off is necessary for them to happen, in which case they are the correct strategy.

Re: The Best Essay

#85

Post by DavidPiper »

basil-rash wrote: post #61
gmd63 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I think there's some truth to yours and some of the sibling comments here, I think a lot of the discourse around documentation is actually just motivated reasoning.

The trope that software projects are poorly documented is so pervasive as to be saying nothing at this point. Despite extremely useful and celebrated documentation projects (MDN and Python off the top of my head) that dramatically accelerate other peoples' learning and productivity.

But when the topic is raised, the response is always "But we don't have time for documentation".

And when that time is given it becomes "It will be useless or out of date soon anyway, just go read the code" (As if there is nothing between non-practical high-level docs and per-line code comments.)

And when forced it becomes "Fine, but it won't be any good" or "Other people won't read/benefit from it anyway".

And when it's done, often as little effort as possible is put into it.

All of which smell to me like cover stories for: "I just don't want to do it."

Re: The Best Essay

#87

Post by kazinator »

> What made it special would be what it was about.

I think the grammar we want here is:

"What would make it special would be what it is about."

Did he step off a refugee boat as Pavel Gramko?

Re: The Best Essay

#88

Post by Sn0wCoder »

nirmel wrote: post #64

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.

Thanks for leaving the link to the PDF and web site. Already had some fun playing with the site and think I will give the book a shot.

Re: The Best Essay

#90

Post by docfort »

geor9e wrote: post #30
timeagain wrote: post #12

> The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about. The premise is wrong (or at least not obviously right) IMO, so I have a hard time taking any of the rest of it seriously. Could the best essay not be the most emotionally moving? The best when heard aloud? The most convincing call to action? The most accurate? The highest grossing? Driving the most engagement? What…

Anyone can nitpick anyone by listing whatabouts they didn't intend. Whatabout this OTHER sense of the word "best". It's in the dictionary. You didn't address it, therfore you're a lazy man of straw. The only defense to that type of attack is to write everything in a way that never chooses any one path, spends all it's time mounting a defense to every whatabout, vaguely floating over eggshells, immune to attack. Who w…

I’m still surprised that this essay didn’t explore the nature of the audience. I’m not disagreeing with your take about the dangers of straw men, but PG does seem very much in the vein of essays are for communicating interesting stuff, or fun stuff, or provocative stuff. To someone! And it seems like too long of an essay to discover by the end this serious omission. A timeless essay is one that retains meaning to a person, or maybe many people, over the course of time. PG spent a while trying to explore the message in this essay and no time on trying to understand the audience.
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