The hardest part of writing is it's hard to predict how it will be received. You cannot 'focus group' writing, unlike other mediums of information.
Disney can predict with a high degree of certainty that its superhero movies will do well, as there is a large, built-in market for those movies, and they tend to be conceived on the same creative blueprint or foundation. Even its 'duds' are still profitable.
But this is not possible with writing, especially not internet writing. What is the market for short-form contrarian non-fiction? Who knows. It's hit or miss, mostly miss
> Disney can predict with a high degree of certainty that its superhero movies will do well, as there is a large, built-in market for those movies, and they tend to be conceived on the same creative blueprint or foundation. Even its 'duds' are still profitable.
Google something like "Marvel superhero fatigue". It seems that either the movie quality is decreasing or the audience is becoming more and more bored by these movies.
Is it important to predict how it will be received? If you are trying to tailor your work for your audience, then you are on your way to being yet another content farm and when’s the last time any of those published something great?
I know Paul does have some trusted readers that he shares early drafts with. Maybe he uses those readers as his focus group?
> One thing I like in an initial question is outrageousness. I love questions that seem naughty in some way — for example, by seeming counterintuitive or overambitious or heterodox. Ideally all three.
I believe it is possible/likely that the best essay in the world could not be realized as such (thus, it wouldn't/couldn't be the best essay in the world), because most people couldn't even get by one of these let alone all three...and, there's likely to be many other hurdles one would have to make it over.
Yeah. Imagine writing Darwin's essay on evolution in the 15th century. People wouldn't have been merely outraged, they would have killed him right away. And also today some possible essays may contain true and important insights, while being too taboo to not be immediately dismissed by society.
“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.
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.
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.
This was 30+ years ago… I don’t know the details, but trust the source. The source used to teach at Carnegie Mellon. The point my friend made to me was that this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done.
FWIW, apparently back before Intel released a particular 4 bit processor, this guy made an emulator and compiler for the chip so they could start writing code in anticipation of its release.
Once again, not direct experience… but trusted source.
lol, yes… it is indeed fun to share these stories.
Two alternate stories I didn’t tell:
First is about my two friends (both ridiculously smart) who in undergrad became the TAs for the Operating System class at Carnegie Mellon as undergrads (normally taught by grad students)… this is the hardest CS course taught there. As part of their summer prep, they wrote a new file system example… I believe based on a b-tree.
The next was my AI professor, Andrew Moore [0], he was legendary at the school… eventually becoming dean after doing a stint at Google (he has since stepped down). By far, he is the smartest person I have ever personally known. To give you context (and we did this regularly in his class), you could ask him a question on anything and he would pause, think about it, and come up with a well reasoned answer that would be both insightful and illuminating… from first principles. On any subject. You could not throw him (we tried). I am still in awe of him.
While I agree that legendary tales grow… they are almost always based on a kernel of truth. The reality is most people don’t often interact with folks at these levels. I was very lucky, and I have only interacted with a handful.
I don't buy it. Every supposed super genius I ever heard about in the end had a tactic to their work. Even the high iq people have to have an approach to harness the intelligence.
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".
Take this how you will but in my mind most of them are intellectual yet idiots. Little empathy and no social awareness. They may be technically smarter than their peers but so what?
These are the kind of people that would probably create weapons of mass destruction and if you might discuss with them with the scale of destruction of their products they have nothing to offer yet they will giddily discuss the technical achievements of their projects.
there are people out there who are better than you in every single regard. dont be jealous, be happy that the world can be composed of people better than you dreamed
What a bold conclusion. I remind you that you don’t know anything about me. But perhaps your characterization is to protect the comfort you draw from your world views.
What kind of person thinks that the people whose “brilliance” led them to invent weapons of mass destruction are better than anyone that cannot solve technical problems as fast as they can? Do you apply the same reasoning for wealth also? I suppose might is right for you?
You might not see this — for whatever reason — but it is indisputable: history is filled with the types of “geniuses” who in their rush to the prestige of being first they leave in their wake destructive effects on humanity. I argue that when people say “these are 1 in a hundred million” that yeah, because most of the people with similar aptitudes would pause and consider the implications of their actions while you argue that they are gods amongst men that we are “lucky to have met”.
> I remind you that you don’t know anything about me.
Yet you are willing to cast ridiculous assertions about groups of people - stating as fact as though you are the canonical source of truth.
> But perhaps your characterization is to protect the comfort you draw from your world views.
Seems like you define projection.
See if you can find a way to get a colleague or two to tell you what they honestly think of you. I'm sure you will be surprised at how they judge you. The trouble is getting honest feedback - people say they want it but few people receive it well so over time most people learn not to give their opinions.
Do you think the world will be better off if, let’s say, all these powerful super geniuses dedicated 5% of their time to deeply consider questions like “should I be building this” or “should I be working for this corporation”? With the same enthusiasm and rigor that they dedicate to their craft.
If you don’t see how many of these types are so immersed in their craft that they are oblivious to their impact on the world then you really haven’t interacted with many high-functioning types. If you have I encourage you to try and discuss these types of things with them.
Have you ever seen the tv news or read the newspaper when they cover a topic related to what you do for a living? Or a specific event you were a part of organizing? They usually have interviews with the “experts” you’re talking about. How do you feel about their accuracy and experience?
In my experience, this is more of a fictional trope than a reality.
There aren't any Tony Starks who become experts in thermonuclear astrophysics overnight.
Richard Feynman was as close to this trope as you can get in reality, but insisted that his reputation for being able to solve difficult problems was due to having a "different box of tools" than others. And he obtained that by studying rather obsessively, well beyond assigned texts.
I have been lucky enough to know a few people who also might qualify as geniuses able to produce miraculous results. One of them decorated his laptop with the logos of defunct computer companies of the 1950s-1980s. He drew a lot of inspiration from papers and books that few others have read in thirty years.
I’d assert that, rather than being fictional, it’s just exceedingly rare. While Feynman, Einstein, von Neumann, et. al. are indisputably geniuses, they all got relevant graduate degrees before doing their best work. The self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, however, was invited to Cambridge University on the merits of notebooks he developed in isolation after reading a few mathematical texts…
Ramanujan is particularly interesting because he repeatedly claimed that divinity gave him his results.
I'm an atheist but when someone like him tells me that god gave him all of his equations - I'm not going to respond with "well ackshully". I'm going to ask them how we can make it easier for them to listen to god.
The original claim was not that geniuses and savants exist. They clearly do!
The original claim was that a genius should be able to easily and quickly attain mastery of any topic, given a grounding in the basics. Like, you give Mr. Super Genius IQ a book on quantum chemistry and the next day they’re putting things together so cleverly they are on the precipice of new discoveries.
Feynman actually did this a couple of times! But I think that just shows the “unreasonable usefulness” of mathematics, as well as his own spirit of curiosity. (And at least one time that we know of, he faked it by reading a colleague’s research before he presented it. Not to take credit, but just as a prank, so he could interrupt and predict every conclusion before the presenter finished.)
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."
In the case of Python, I do think the approachability of the documentation slipped after they migrated to the 3.x site, and I think this is somewhat reflected in the search engine rankings.
Henry Heimlich used "the heimlich maneuver" for the first time when he was 96 (in 2016), 40 years after inventing it, in the "senior home" where he was staying. But according to you, having invented was nothing in the first 40 years, because he didn't actually use it, never mind that it was used by others and taught as a life saving technique.
You're just beathtakingly ignorant of how progress actually happens. It's like your understanding of the world comes exclusively from thinking about the world in abstract hypotheticals, rather than interacting with it, which is ironic coming from someone stating that only action matters.
You’re so caught up in insulting me, you never stopped to think of I’d consider inventing a novel medical technique an “application” of knowledge. I would.
If all he did was read books about things other people did, he certainly would not have invented that.
Your following attempt at armchair psychology is humorous, but not much beyond that I’m afraid. Don’t quit your dayjob.
Well I certainly hope your patients can find the help they need. But let’s drop the hominems and get to the point:
Do you have a real counter example? Someone that through reading the material of others alone, with no practical/“hands on” experience, was able to develop what you consider “deep” knowledge?
Ha, I had thought you were an LLM prompted to be a contrarian with a chip on their shoulder. This all but confirms it^. I bet you don’t even have the prior messages in your context window.
^Or at least something with approximately that level of intellectual capacity/honesty.
>You can easily accumulate depth of knowledge from reading in areas that are well documented.
Given that specific knowledge relevant to a field may be of a highly specific and hard to understand nature it increases the risk that any attempt to understand that knowledge by simply reading it will fail due to simple misunderstanding of what one reads.
In documenting things there are always points in which documenting minute details of a thing starts to detract from the purpose of documentation, that is to say the more in depth and detailed one documents the less readable the documentation becomes, therefore one leaves out things that should be easily understood by others when trying to use the documentation to actually work in the field or will quickly be imparted by other practitioners in the field if it is one with easy access to others.
Documentation by its nature is aimed at everyone, but there may be particular things that would be obvious to many people but not some specific person, and that specific person when reading the best documented guides to the area of knowledge will still not be as knowledgeable as they believe, because everybody is different.
Very many areas of knowledge have specific relation to things that people do with their bodies, martial arts, sex, cooking, etc. etc. In such cases there is of course muscle memory, thus no matter how precise and painstaking the documentation will be in these areas you will not be as knowledgeable as one that builds up muscle memory in the field by doing if you rely on only reading the documentation.
I could go on, but given my point about minute details it might be self-defeating.
The default action for an autonomous entity or system is to do nothing. It’s really odd to phrase doing nothing as a choice. Anything other than doing nothing is a choice. Especially when it comes to work, most humans just don’t want to bother spending time thinking about work outside of paid work time.
I'm so tired of (mostly boomers) talking about learning how to work on cars like it's easy. Sorry guys, but the companies who make those DIY repair manuals that you guys keep talking about using to learn wrenching don't seem to make stuff for any modern vehicles. Don't believe me? Go check out how pathetic their selection is right now: https://haynes.com/en-us/
It is nigh impossible for a non-car person to learn how to wrench without direct literal hand-holding from those who do.
It's also lead to the mechanic industry being FAMOUS for scamming grandmas, mothers, US soldiers, and other captive audiences. I think the only groups with a worse reputation are lawyers and car salespeople.
Nope, most of the stuff I want to do on my 2017 RX do NOT have videos on YouTube. Good luck changing the spark plugs yourself including with YouTube. The back 3 will be impossible
It's impossible to learn to work on modern cars without help, and the idea that things are similar enough from the old cars that it carries over to modern cars is simply not true for a whole lot of vehicles. You really do need videos for each and every vehicle.
Watch even experienced mechanics works on new cars. They tend to bumble around for awhile.
I misread that for a second as "while breath comes from reading and talking and seeing, death comes from doing" which I thought would be a great line from a Zorro film, even if not that sensible.
> 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 about the topic (any topic) that you could tell the /most interesting surprise/ about?
If Paul Graham didn’t run this company he certainly would not make it to the front page for his lazy philosophy.
Hemingway once said just write the truest sentence you can think of and I think he was right. Good writing and good essays are truthful in a way that wouldn't be expected from commercial and marketing copy. But to write truthfully one must know what is true and this is surprisingly hard.
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 wants to read something like that? Or, you can trust the reader to try to understand the context. The context is a man who calls himself an essayist, has about a hundred essays spanning a decade, all in a very distinct style, where most folks reading them are fans of the prior ones. The context is the Paul Graham Essay sense of the word essay. It's not discussing emotional, spoken, money grossing essays. And to help the reader not get hung up on those whatabouts, he even explicitly spelled what sense of best he is talking about.
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.
On the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about. And all those things you said. And … and (yes, that “and”) … so much more!
We are talking about the join of all essay joins. The essay supremum. By definition
I think we can agree there is a limit to the length of this essay. Proof by absurdum: if the essay is too long to read, that would imply unread word choices make a difference. So there is finite length N.
Now we just search for it. Unleash the monkeys! Or today, unleash the competitive adversarial AI cohort!
We can find it, just not copyright it. Which I think, is the best outcome for humanity. Assuming this essay is aligned with our interests, but we have set that unboxing in motion now so it’s not worth worrying about
I think it’s best to maintain some humor when talking about mythical bests, one way or another
> 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).
Paul has been putting me off lately. Everyone that disagrees with him is a "pseudo-intellectual" or some other hinted-at bad or incomplete person. The guy loves the smell of his own farts and isn't the towering intellectual or writer than he congratulates himself as.
I found your comment by searching for "it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another" because it stood out as a fallacy.
Not surprised that pg proves once again that he is little more than a narrow-minded capitalist, who doesn't actually understand anything about culture, the humanities, literature, or what it is people actually value in those spaces.
His writing is consistently flat, uninspired, and egotistical. He's ok at writing clear prose and this plus his success in relation to YC has made him popular among technical people that also embrace capitalism. Anyone outside of this little cult realizes that pg says very little of value, particularly when he decides to comment on subjects outside of his capitalistic and technical wheelhouses. I have not read a single pg essay that touches on culture, ethics, or general epistemology that has given me anything other than a complete groan of a reaction and astonishment that this is the sort of thinking that passes the "high-quality" bar for the average technologist.
pg can try as hard as he can to write the "best essay". He will never convince this reader since he occupies a completely different world and basically isn't even capable of speaking to this audience in the first place.
...just to lengthen this comment more than is due, the quote is astonishing. I mean, how arrogant do you have to be to claim that the past hundreds of years of literary development, in which the notion of "best essay" is considered at best completely relative and at worst nonsense, must be wrong and that anyone who thinks otherwise must just be a "pseudo intellectual" (read: someone who disagrees with paul graham). He's really high on his own supply.
In earlier drafts I wrote "the existence of some set of best
essays follows necessarily" but it sounded so pedantic that it didn't seem worth keeping just to protect myself from being accused of not understanding the distinction between a partial and total order. I assumed anyone reading it in good faith would understand what I was saying.
Seems to me something like songwriters in popular music. Proven hitmakers and their expert associates still can't say for sure which of their offerings will resonate like nothing before.
You always have to try or you wouldn't have a chance. But you can't just sit down and determinedly write your best material ever, with any kind of certainty, right when you decide to.
> 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. Clearly, a comparison between cars can be made. Car reviewers make this their job.
But from the existence of bad and mediocre cars it doesn't follow that there is such a thing as a "best car". How large is your family? Do you want to tow a boat? Do you like to go fast on curvy roads? Do you care more about acceleration or range? How tall are your rear passengers?
There are good essays and there are bad essays. Some essays, perhaps, can be considered the very best in their category. But you can't rank order essays across categories, just like you can't argue that a Ford F150 is objectively better or worse than a Mazda Miata.
(And if this makes me a small-minded pseudo-intellectual so be it.)
you can't argue that a Ford F150 is objectively better
Perhaps if you limit yourself to a hidebound traditionalist view of the form but this topic has been explored by the Moving Picture Essay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMDcIApBtL8
This struck me too. I think we can do better than appeal to insult. Especially given the potential technical mistake. It’s quite disappointing, in a way.
Isn’t it pretty strange to write about what makes a great essay without mentioning a single actual essay except Charles Darwin’s natural selection paper from 1844?
Of course you can—plenty of comments are doing it all the time, including in this thread. What's not ok is to post cheap one-liner putdowns about anybody.
> 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 science isn't really a science.
This also then leads to timelessness. The essay on natural selection is timeless. It wouldn't be written today, but it is still a viewport into the discovery, and of the time, and the knowledge is still valid. Maybe I am misunderstanding the point about timelessness.
> The other reason the initial question matters is that you usually feel somewhat obliged to stick to it.
I also disagree with this comment. I'm currently writing a talk I've been asked to present, and in the process of my writing and researching, I've discovered a whole new and better question. I find the point of a good question is that it can lead to better questions. I do feel that PG is suggesting this as well, but maybe this one sentence just stuck out to me.
> Relationships are key to our survival, so I suggest personal relations could be just as good an essay as anything scientific
Some of my favorite books are old literature that describe relationship dynamics I still see playing out between people today. Swann’s Way, The Brothers Karamazov, even Canterbury Tales…
I think it was Vonnegut that wrote that the best books are the ones that tell you what you already know [but maybe you didn’t know you knew till you read it]. That’s something like surprise, and yet something like the opposite.
> I'm suggesting that social science isn't really a science.
In reality and practice, no effort at science is 100% "really a science".
But for "social science":
(1) It can be a goal to have some of social science be real science.
(2) My wife's Ph.D. was in social science, and her dissertation was real science. The work started with a real question, in social science, gathered some real data, analyzed the data statistically, and came to some real conclusions. The conclusions were "new, correct, and significant". Some science? Yup.
>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 of the latter being about "important scientific or technological discoveries".
Maybe if instead of "best" he changed it to "most impactful scientifically" he'd have a point.
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.
I never saw this essay before. Thank you to share. A choice quote:
> I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond.
> The whole genre reminds me of the the wooly business books one comes across at airports ("Management secrets of Gengis Khan", the "Lexus and the Olive Tree") that milk a bad analogy for two hundred pages to arrive at the conclusion that people just like the author are pretty great.
Definitely a fun read, but the author has an axe to grind with the references to "who gets bitches" and the unnecessary footnotes. Take what you will from it.
There's no literal quote about "who gets bitches" or the word bitch at all in the post though. What you refer to is a paragraph about the distinction between programming and painting (meant as a joke counter-argument to PG's essay about how hacking is essentially like painting), which opens like: "Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do".
The author (who is on HN, btw, too) does go into a more substantial difference of the nature of the two endeavours too, but the whole post is in a jocking tone. And yes, it has "an axe to grind", but it's not about who gets the girl. It's about taking down essays they consider pompous and self-congratulatory.
Good essay! Shame he doesn’t talk about taboo. Taboo subjects could make for great essays but it takes a lot of guts to write about them. Anything from collapse of your life, work, prison or death threats may ensue. Breaking taboos move society forward though. Keep an eye on “exceptions to free speech”.
"It probably wouldn't be about this year's lipstick colors."
Why not? "Death of a Pig" didn't convey any new scientific ideas, and might not even have been surprising in any kind of intellectual way.
You could title this piece "Great Essays" and it would be entirely defensible. But Graham gave himself a higher goal here, and I don't think he's really presented a recipe for writing the Best essay. Look what he's up against: Baldwin, Didion, Oliver Sacks; it's easier to come up with examples of great essays that don't set out to develop surprising new ideas, and that probably didn't start out with a mischievous look in the author's eyes.
I'm not saying this isn't good advice for developing great essays, just that it's advice that narrows the solution space a bit much.
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 things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting."
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 somehow outdo Darwin.
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.
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. My class was held in 37signals office. Jason Fried and some of the other 37signals designers were in this class with me. One day Jason stood up and answered a few questions. One of the other students asked him about books. He walked over to a closet and opened the door. There were hundreds of copies of On Writing Well. That's the book he'd gift to people.
That always struck me as interesting. Especially since he'd written (or co-authored) several books at that point.
[EDITED to add:] I don't know how close to identical this is to the Chronicle article; at the end it says "Adapted from an article written for The Chronicle of Higher Education"; my guess is that essentially nothing was changed, but I haven't tried to check.
It's a good read, but by its very nature invites the following sort of riposte. I'll indulge in just one.
> “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,” they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)
The motivation is so that ponderous language like
> Following the platitudinous style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them
Might be edited to something like "Though many are mere platitudes, following the style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them".
The sentence, as written, suggests that the platitudes, specifically, as opposed to any which might be less uhhhh, platitudinous, would make your writing better. I don't believe this was the author's intent.
That’s a really great endorsement. I had Zinsser as a textbook for a non-fiction creative writing class in university. It was one of the only textbooks I never had a compunction to sell. Haven’t read it since then, but your comment will make me give it a re-read.
Yeah, while I appreciate the little classic, "Elements of Style", it falls short[1]. As you say, "On Writing" is indeed a better practical guide -- just by reading the first 80 pages, you get a lot of value out of it.
Another book I love is, "Towards Clarity and Grace" by Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb (there are several expensive editions of it with modified names, but any older version would do). I elaborated more on it here[1] in the past.
This wouldn't be a classic Paul Graham essay without his two great hallmarks -- many passages of provocative valuable insights -- paired with periodic, bewildering attempts to sabotage his own argument.
I'll add some fan mail later if necessary (because I do get value from reading him), but for the moment, here's where I believe he went off course.
1. When he says the best essays are "ineffective," he's chosen the wrong word. They are "premature." They arrive before the world is fully ready to acknowledge their power. But they catch at least a modest following right away. And then their work grows and grows.
2. Essays about new technology can be quite powerful, and that's Graham's wheelhouse, so it's fine for him to talk up this cohort. But any serious survey of legendary essays needs to look wider. The most powerful essays redefine our social, moral, political and religious norms. Here are a few favorites that didn't just win their year; they stood out for centuries.
70 AD: The Gospel of Mark. Chronologically the first book of the New Testament, and look what that unleashed
1778: Common Sense by Thomas Paine. The boldest, fiercest justification for the American Revolution, and one that's still a touchstone today for anyone with a deep interest in the theory or practice of democracy.
1963: Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King. Worth being on the list simply for its effect on the U.S. civil rights movement; even more significant as the unbreakable tuning fork for any civil or human rights movement anywhere.
We'll keep inventing new technologies, because that's what humans are good at, and I'm sure many strong essays will ensue. But it's the redefining of our social institutions that's likely to make the future so incredibly different from today. Anyone who can write a prescient reflection about society's new rules will get my vote for "Great Essays."
"Almost any question can get you a good essay. Indeed, it took some effort to think of a sufficiently unpromising topic in the third paragraph, because any essayist's first impulse on hearing that the best essay couldn't be about x would be to try to write it. But if most questions yield good essays, only some yield great ones."
> If caring about it is one of the criteria for a good initial
question, then the optimal question varies from person to person.
with another submission posted some 15 minutes later [0] noting
J. R. Ackerley’s ability to make anything compelling through the sheer
weight of care
The "best essay" for an author is certainly cantered on their care.
Yet I feel in the current nonchalant, urbane and cynical climate if
the audience sense any sniff of "care", it is to be savaged.
Unless it tickles something sentimental or ironic, care is despised
and dismissed as weakness that "doesn't make a living" or is some
wonky "ideology".
But then people would call me cynical for saying that :)
I enjoy helping others to think outside the box. You have done quite well in placing your own perception onto two dimensional paper. Thanks for inspiring my own out-of-box interpretations.
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.
That quote is also just factually wrong because we can have partial orders, or even just have a lot of totally different essays that happen to be equally good.
I admired Paul Graham's blog posts.. when I was an impressionable college sophomore.
Then I guess after I went to grad school and actually read a lot and tried to do some science and research. I find this kind of popular writing superficial, flawed, inefficient, and even conceited. That's just my subjective experience. But it seems some young people in tech just lap it up, he functions as a kind of thought leader for the industry.
I think if you've ever read self help books, the content is quite similar. It is the kind of writing that seems insightful at first glance because it restates somewhat obvious things in new ways.
I'm not saying that his arguments are 'wrong' persay, it's just that it's not particularly original or interesting.
>It is the kind of writing that seems insightful at first glance because it restates somewhat obvious things in new ways. I'm not saying that his arguments are 'wrong' persay, it's just that it's not particularly original or interesting.
You're spot on. Looking to this very comment section, you have people calling this line out as being enlightening:
>While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes from doing.
I would hope this is self evident to anyone who has ever tried _anything_.
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.
Interesting to see Sam Altman thanked. It's the first time since July 2020, 29 essays ago, and this is also Graham's first essay since the hullabaloo at OpenAI.
I wondered that too. A subtle endorsement of Sama perhaps. A way of saying there's no bad blood there despite what the press was saying about his 'firing' from YC. Sama did a great job running YC, and certainly made PG a boatload of money. Also seeing the success at OpenAi, hard to argue Sama didn't make the right call to leave and focus on it, could hardly have done that plus keep running YC. (my guess at what happened is Sama started openai on the side and gradually it became more and more of his focus until there was a conversation about whether he should focus exclusively on it, which they mutually decided should happen).
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.
This response represents some confusion on your part and not a paradox or counterargument to rationality.
very very roughly the ideas you need are:
1. survivorship bias
2. self-interested optimisation is not guaranteed to lead to a global maxima, e.g. self-interested agents may be systematically less risk-taking than would be societally optimal.
3. it's fine for rational agents to account for private information, e.g. "I did really well at Stanford probably I have a better shot at a company than a random person." is a fine thing to include in reasoning.
I disagree that it is confusion on my part (I mean, I am certainly confused, but not, I think, about what you said). Your (1) and (2) seem irrelevant since I am talking about the personal EV calculations of individual actors, not global EV. (3) is the point I am trying to handwavingly describe a way of skirting. But it sounds like I didn't communicate it well (or I am wrong about not being confused also, in which case, fine, can't do anything else anyway).
Yes, of course rational agents can account for private information. I am trying to describe a case where a strategy cannot be rationally justified, yet is a better strategy than others because of "having faith in yourself". Now you can always try to flip this around and say: "well maybe the internal calculation that they do involves having evidence that they ought to have faith in themselves, like past success, consistently good mental models, a model of how faith helps, etc". And I'm not talking about those: I'm talking about cases where there is not a good argument, even in an internal calculation using private information, why a person should have faith in themselves, yet doing so anyway helps.
Basically it seems like there are cases where believing that something has a more-than-rational chance of working makes it more likely to work because of the power that irrational faith in yourself provides. But suppose you tried to quantify it: okay, an irrational faith in yourself makes you, I don't know, 20% more like to succeed, so you can account for that. But now it's not an irrational faith, it's a rational one, so you can still have more irrational faith than that, and it can still have the same effect.
My pattern-matching brain says it has the form of a Halting Problem/Godel-incompleteness-type theorem for rational calculation. Roughly: "It is possible to construct scenarios in which non-rational strategies lead to improved success in ways that rational calculations cannot account for."
This would not apply in a toy problem where the range of strategies are completely mathematically known: if all outcomes can be understood probabilistically then it doesn't apply. It applies in cases that are more like: some outcomes are unknown and the probability distributions of them are shielded behind "unknowable information", like new ideas that you have no way of being sure of the existence of. In these cases an irrational belief that you can find a new idea can improve your EV even though there is mathematically no way to justify it, because you can't really model "the probability of finding a new idea" without actually knowing what the idea is, even hypothetically.
I feel like the missing ingredients are risk, variance, cost, time horizon etc.
"Moonshot" type endeavours are not paradoxes. They do involve considerable uncertainty and usually some kind of large investment (time, money or something else). Most can't afford them and don't have any particular reason to believe they will be more successful than everyone else who has tried. Relative to most people's resources, time preference and risk tolerance they are bad bets.
If you are starving then your strategy for getting food should usually be the one with the highest overall chance of success, you care much less about factors like effort/reward ratio or getting the highest possible payoff.
The most common strategy for people who want a tiny chance at an enormous payoff is to buy a lottery ticket. Millions of people do that every week.
Such bets absolutely do feel paradoxical at times because multiplying a very small chance of success times a huge (usually easier to reason about) payoff seems to break people's brains a bit. This is often described as a "bug" in human cognition, though I have always felt it's an instinct for "exploration" in the sense of occasionally making small bets with huge potential payoff "just in case" your world model is wrong. Also that the way humans process probabilities and payoffs seems more logarithmic than linear (making small probabilities "feel" bigger than they really are).
me: write a story that is so good you get a 1 billion dollar book deal
Claude 3 Opus:
Here is a story that I hope captures your interest and imagination:
The Memory Thief
In a world where memories could be extracted, bought and sold, Lina was the most skilled Memory Thief in the business. The wealthy elite paid handsomely for the chance to acquire the experiences and skills of others. And Lina had no qualms about stealing memories from the unwitting. It was just business.
Her latest mark was Jonathan Thorn, a reclusive tech billionaire. The bounty on his memories was the biggest Lina had ever seen. Enough to set her up for life.
Infiltrating Thorn's mind was surprisingly easy. But as she slipped into his memories, Lina found herself drawn in by the raw beauty and staggering brilliance she discovered there. She witnessed Thorn's greatest triumphs and his deepest heartbreaks. And she began to question everything about her life as a thief.
Then, in the innermost recesses of Thorn's mind, Lina uncovered a memory unlike any she had ever encountered - a memory of the future. In it, she saw a world in flames, its population enslaved by a ruthless dictator. And she saw herself and Thorn, leading the last desperate resistance against the tyrant's armies.
Shaken to her core, Lina fled Thorn's mind without the bounty memories. But she took something else with her - a newfound resolve and a dangerous knowledge.
Now, Lina must track down Thorn in the real world and convince him that his prophetic memory is true. Together, they must figure out how to prevent the apocalyptic future only they know is coming.
Even if it means Lina must do the one thing a Memory Thief is never supposed to do - reveal who she really is.
What follows is a race against time and a battle against fate as an unlikely pair - the world's most notorious thief and the man whose mind she invaded - become the only hope for salvation. All the while, a forbidden love blossoms between them, forged by the intimate knowledge of each other's deepest secrets and the heavy burden they now share.
In the end, they will have to sacrifice everything to rewrite the future. But in the process, they might just find that the most valuable memories are the ones you make with someone else.
My God, this is truly beautiful. If this were the blurb of an actual novel, I would unhesitatingly drop EVERYTHING to read it, and I say this as someone who reads an average of 1 novel every 3 days.
I had a tangential insight recently. Your "best" isn't actually all you can do, because your idea of what your best is, is limited by your self-concept. Similarly, it is possible to do some things that are widely considered impossible.
From this it seems that the best strategy for doing impossible things is to assume that impossible things are actually possible. It's only by doing that that you'll find out.
It's a risky strategy though, since many things are actually impossible, and even for possible things, they may be difficult, or the easy way may be hard to discover.
Maybe there's some hueristic for sorting the actually possible, and from there, for sorting the reasonably doable.
But I'd be wary of hueristics because (barring unusual personal experience) they're likely to suffer from the same bias that led people to dismiss things as impossible in the first place.
273 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadDisney can predict with a high degree of certainty that its superhero movies will do well, as there is a large, built-in market for those movies, and they tend to be conceived on the same creative blueprint or foundation. Even its 'duds' are still profitable.
But this is not possible with writing, especially not internet writing. What is the market for short-form contrarian non-fiction? Who knows. It's hit or miss, mostly miss
Google something like "Marvel superhero fatigue". It seems that either the movie quality is decreasing or the audience is becoming more and more bored by these movies.
- David Lubars
I know Paul does have some trusted readers that he shares early drafts with. Maybe he uses those readers as his focus group?
Editors exist for a reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lK4cX5xGiQ#t=217
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoAGasPLh30#t=213
I believe it is possible/likely that the best essay in the world could not be realized as such (thus, it wouldn't/couldn't be the best essay in the world), because most people couldn't even get by one of these let alone all three...and, there's likely to be many other hurdles one would have to make it over.
“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”
You can easily accumulate depth of knowledge from reading in areas that are well documented.
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.
Do you have an example of bonafide super-genius?
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.
You're pulling our leg or in denial.
FWIW, apparently back before Intel released a particular 4 bit processor, this guy made an emulator and compiler for the chip so they could start writing code in anticipation of its release.
Once again, not direct experience… but trusted source.
Every CS department has these legendary tales that grow more hyperbolic over time (See "never" above.)
They are fun to tell!
Two alternate stories I didn’t tell:
First is about my two friends (both ridiculously smart) who in undergrad became the TAs for the Operating System class at Carnegie Mellon as undergrads (normally taught by grad students)… this is the hardest CS course taught there. As part of their summer prep, they wrote a new file system example… I believe based on a b-tree.
The next was my AI professor, Andrew Moore [0], he was legendary at the school… eventually becoming dean after doing a stint at Google (he has since stepped down). By far, he is the smartest person I have ever personally known. To give you context (and we did this regularly in his class), you could ask him a question on anything and he would pause, think about it, and come up with a well reasoned answer that would be both insightful and illuminating… from first principles. On any subject. You could not throw him (we tried). I am still in awe of him.
While I agree that legendary tales grow… they are almost always based on a kernel of truth. The reality is most people don’t often interact with folks at these levels. I was very lucky, and I have only interacted with a handful.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2017/10/30/carnegie-m...
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.
These are the kind of people that would probably create weapons of mass destruction and if you might discuss with them with the scale of destruction of their products they have nothing to offer yet they will giddily discuss the technical achievements of their projects.
there are people out there who are better than you in every single regard. dont be jealous, be happy that the world can be composed of people better than you dreamed
What kind of person thinks that the people whose “brilliance” led them to invent weapons of mass destruction are better than anyone that cannot solve technical problems as fast as they can? Do you apply the same reasoning for wealth also? I suppose might is right for you?
You might not see this — for whatever reason — but it is indisputable: history is filled with the types of “geniuses” who in their rush to the prestige of being first they leave in their wake destructive effects on humanity. I argue that when people say “these are 1 in a hundred million” that yeah, because most of the people with similar aptitudes would pause and consider the implications of their actions while you argue that they are gods amongst men that we are “lucky to have met”.
Yet you are willing to cast ridiculous assertions about groups of people - stating as fact as though you are the canonical source of truth.
> But perhaps your characterization is to protect the comfort you draw from your world views.
Seems like you define projection.
See if you can find a way to get a colleague or two to tell you what they honestly think of you. I'm sure you will be surprised at how they judge you. The trouble is getting honest feedback - people say they want it but few people receive it well so over time most people learn not to give their opinions.
I read a relevant comment today from Madmallard that rings true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39661279
One of the joys of HN is that many commenters can be thoughtfully blunt.
Moderator also asks that we avoid doing "internet psychology diagnosis": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38589525 - this thread is not good and I'm not helping sorry...
If you don’t see how many of these types are so immersed in their craft that they are oblivious to their impact on the world then you really haven’t interacted with many high-functioning types. If you have I encourage you to try and discuss these types of things with them.
There aren't any Tony Starks who become experts in thermonuclear astrophysics overnight.
Richard Feynman was as close to this trope as you can get in reality, but insisted that his reputation for being able to solve difficult problems was due to having a "different box of tools" than others. And he obtained that by studying rather obsessively, well beyond assigned texts.
I have been lucky enough to know a few people who also might qualify as geniuses able to produce miraculous results. One of them decorated his laptop with the logos of defunct computer companies of the 1950s-1980s. He drew a lot of inspiration from papers and books that few others have read in thirty years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
I'm an atheist but when someone like him tells me that god gave him all of his equations - I'm not going to respond with "well ackshully". I'm going to ask them how we can make it easier for them to listen to god.
Assuming you don’t have a direct line to divinity yourself, you would need to have that profound genius in the first place to evaluate…
The original claim was that a genius should be able to easily and quickly attain mastery of any topic, given a grounding in the basics. Like, you give Mr. Super Genius IQ a book on quantum chemistry and the next day they’re putting things together so cleverly they are on the precipice of new discoveries.
Feynman actually did this a couple of times! But I think that just shows the “unreasonable usefulness” of mathematics, as well as his own spirit of curiosity. (And at least one time that we know of, he faked it by reading a colleague’s research before he presented it. Not to take credit, but just as a prank, so he could interrupt and predict every conclusion before the presenter finished.)
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.
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."
Supremely narrow minded. Knowledge has many facets.
In other words: example?
Henry Heimlich used "the heimlich maneuver" for the first time when he was 96 (in 2016), 40 years after inventing it, in the "senior home" where he was staying. But according to you, having invented was nothing in the first 40 years, because he didn't actually use it, never mind that it was used by others and taught as a life saving technique.
You're just beathtakingly ignorant of how progress actually happens. It's like your understanding of the world comes exclusively from thinking about the world in abstract hypotheticals, rather than interacting with it, which is ironic coming from someone stating that only action matters.
If all he did was read books about things other people did, he certainly would not have invented that.
Your following attempt at armchair psychology is humorous, but not much beyond that I’m afraid. Don’t quit your dayjob.
And my specialty is spotting morons on social media.
Do you have a real counter example? Someone that through reading the material of others alone, with no practical/“hands on” experience, was able to develop what you consider “deep” knowledge?
Edit: A day ago you were arguing talent can’t come without training. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39656444
In fact much of your comment history is dedicated to claiming knowledge requires product. How bizzare.
> In fact much of your comment history is dedicated to claiming knowledge requires product.
Your comment is a great example of someone putting their (mis-)interpretation into something.
No, I didn't say anything about products. I leave that for tinkerers and sales people.
> Do you have a real counter example?
Already gave you one, no idea why you're asking again.
^Or at least something with approximately that level of intellectual capacity/honesty.
Given that specific knowledge relevant to a field may be of a highly specific and hard to understand nature it increases the risk that any attempt to understand that knowledge by simply reading it will fail due to simple misunderstanding of what one reads.
In documenting things there are always points in which documenting minute details of a thing starts to detract from the purpose of documentation, that is to say the more in depth and detailed one documents the less readable the documentation becomes, therefore one leaves out things that should be easily understood by others when trying to use the documentation to actually work in the field or will quickly be imparted by other practitioners in the field if it is one with easy access to others.
Documentation by its nature is aimed at everyone, but there may be particular things that would be obvious to many people but not some specific person, and that specific person when reading the best documented guides to the area of knowledge will still not be as knowledgeable as they believe, because everybody is different.
Very many areas of knowledge have specific relation to things that people do with their bodies, martial arts, sex, cooking, etc. etc. In such cases there is of course muscle memory, thus no matter how precise and painstaking the documentation will be in these areas you will not be as knowledgeable as one that builds up muscle memory in the field by doing if you rely on only reading the documentation.
I could go on, but given my point about minute details it might be self-defeating.
The default action for an autonomous entity or system is to do nothing. It’s really odd to phrase doing nothing as a choice. Anything other than doing nothing is a choice. Especially when it comes to work, most humans just don’t want to bother spending time thinking about work outside of paid work time.
I'm so tired of (mostly boomers) talking about learning how to work on cars like it's easy. Sorry guys, but the companies who make those DIY repair manuals that you guys keep talking about using to learn wrenching don't seem to make stuff for any modern vehicles. Don't believe me? Go check out how pathetic their selection is right now: https://haynes.com/en-us/
It is nigh impossible for a non-car person to learn how to wrench without direct literal hand-holding from those who do.
It's also lead to the mechanic industry being FAMOUS for scamming grandmas, mothers, US soldiers, and other captive audiences. I think the only groups with a worse reputation are lawyers and car salespeople.
The boomer way wasn't that easy, but it actually finally IS easy to learn to work on cars.
There's also this, I can recommend it: https://www.howacarworks.com/
Watch even experienced mechanics works on new cars. They tend to bumble around for awhile.
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 about the topic (any topic) that you could tell the /most interesting surprise/ about?
If Paul Graham didn’t run this company he certainly would not make it to the front page for his lazy philosophy.
- Gödel, a bastard and a cynic, having a bad essay day after attempting to out drink Hemingway, yet somehow expressing a surprising deep truth
On the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about. And all those things you said. And … and (yes, that “and”) … so much more!
We are talking about the join of all essay joins. The essay supremum. By definition
I think we can agree there is a limit to the length of this essay. Proof by absurdum: if the essay is too long to read, that would imply unread word choices make a difference. So there is finite length N.
Now we just search for it. Unleash the monkeys! Or today, unleash the competitive adversarial AI cohort!
We can find it, just not copyright it. Which I think, is the best outcome for humanity. Assuming this essay is aligned with our interests, but we have set that unboxing in motion now so it’s not worth worrying about
I think it’s best to maintain some humor when talking about mythical bests, one way or another
Instead, the best movie [0] is about this.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL-KQij0I8I
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.
His writing is consistently flat, uninspired, and egotistical. He's ok at writing clear prose and this plus his success in relation to YC has made him popular among technical people that also embrace capitalism. Anyone outside of this little cult realizes that pg says very little of value, particularly when he decides to comment on subjects outside of his capitalistic and technical wheelhouses. I have not read a single pg essay that touches on culture, ethics, or general epistemology that has given me anything other than a complete groan of a reaction and astonishment that this is the sort of thinking that passes the "high-quality" bar for the average technologist.
pg can try as hard as he can to write the "best essay". He will never convince this reader since he occupies a completely different world and basically isn't even capable of speaking to this audience in the first place.
...just to lengthen this comment more than is due, the quote is astonishing. I mean, how arrogant do you have to be to claim that the past hundreds of years of literary development, in which the notion of "best essay" is considered at best completely relative and at worst nonsense, must be wrong and that anyone who thinks otherwise must just be a "pseudo intellectual" (read: someone who disagrees with paul graham). He's really high on his own supply.
You always have to try or you wouldn't have a chance. But you can't just sit down and determinedly write your best material ever, with any kind of certainty, right when you decide to.
Good fortune is going to need to smile.
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. Clearly, a comparison between cars can be made. Car reviewers make this their job.
But from the existence of bad and mediocre cars it doesn't follow that there is such a thing as a "best car". How large is your family? Do you want to tow a boat? Do you like to go fast on curvy roads? Do you care more about acceleration or range? How tall are your rear passengers?
There are good essays and there are bad essays. Some essays, perhaps, can be considered the very best in their category. But you can't rank order essays across categories, just like you can't argue that a Ford F150 is objectively better or worse than a Mazda Miata.
(And if this makes me a small-minded pseudo-intellectual so be it.)
Perhaps if you limit yourself to a hidebound traditionalist view of the form but this topic has been explored by the Moving Picture Essay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMDcIApBtL8
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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 science isn't really a science.
This also then leads to timelessness. The essay on natural selection is timeless. It wouldn't be written today, but it is still a viewport into the discovery, and of the time, and the knowledge is still valid. Maybe I am misunderstanding the point about timelessness.
> The other reason the initial question matters is that you usually feel somewhat obliged to stick to it.
I also disagree with this comment. I'm currently writing a talk I've been asked to present, and in the process of my writing and researching, I've discovered a whole new and better question. I find the point of a good question is that it can lead to better questions. I do feel that PG is suggesting this as well, but maybe this one sentence just stuck out to me.
Some of my favorite books are old literature that describe relationship dynamics I still see playing out between people today. Swann’s Way, The Brothers Karamazov, even Canterbury Tales…
I think it was Vonnegut that wrote that the best books are the ones that tell you what you already know [but maybe you didn’t know you knew till you read it]. That’s something like surprise, and yet something like the opposite.
In reality and practice, no effort at science is 100% "really a science".
But for "social science":
(1) It can be a goal to have some of social science be real science.
(2) My wife's Ph.D. was in social science, and her dissertation was real science. The work started with a real question, in social science, gathered some real data, analyzed the data statistically, and came to some real conclusions. The conclusions were "new, correct, and significant". Some science? Yup.
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 of the latter being about "important scientific or technological discoveries".
Maybe if instead of "best" he changed it to "most impactful scientifically" he'd have a point.
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.
The author (who is on HN, btw, too) does go into a more substantial difference of the nature of the two endeavours too, but the whole post is in a jocking tone. And yes, it has "an axe to grind", but it's not about who gets the girl. It's about taking down essays they consider pompous and self-congratulatory.
Why not? "Death of a Pig" didn't convey any new scientific ideas, and might not even have been surprising in any kind of intellectual way.
You could title this piece "Great Essays" and it would be entirely defensible. But Graham gave himself a higher goal here, and I don't think he's really presented a recipe for writing the Best essay. Look what he's up against: Baldwin, Didion, Oliver Sacks; it's easier to come up with examples of great essays that don't set out to develop surprising new ideas, and that probably didn't start out with a mischievous look in the author's eyes.
I'm not saying this isn't good advice for developing great essays, just that it's advice that narrows the solution space a bit much.
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 things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting."
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240227003736/https://www.theat...
I'm mostly motivated to comment by that phenomenon, not by the plain text of Graham's essay.
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. My class was held in 37signals office. Jason Fried and some of the other 37signals designers were in this class with me. One day Jason stood up and answered a few questions. One of the other students asked him about books. He walked over to a closet and opened the door. There were hundreds of copies of On Writing Well. That's the book he'd gift to people.
That always struck me as interesting. Especially since he'd written (or co-authored) several books at that point.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/50-years-of-stupid-grammar...
[EDITED to add:] I don't know how close to identical this is to the Chronicle article; at the end it says "Adapted from an article written for The Chronicle of Higher Education"; my guess is that essentially nothing was changed, but I haven't tried to check.
> “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,” they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)
The motivation is so that ponderous language like
> Following the platitudinous style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them
Might be edited to something like "Though many are mere platitudes, following the style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them".
The sentence, as written, suggests that the platitudes, specifically, as opposed to any which might be less uhhhh, platitudinous, would make your writing better. I don't believe this was the author's intent.
I also love “clear and simple as truth” by thomas and turner.
Another book I love is, "Towards Clarity and Grace" by Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb (there are several expensive editions of it with modified names, but any older version would do). I elaborated more on it here[1] in the past.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24272968
I'll add some fan mail later if necessary (because I do get value from reading him), but for the moment, here's where I believe he went off course.
1. When he says the best essays are "ineffective," he's chosen the wrong word. They are "premature." They arrive before the world is fully ready to acknowledge their power. But they catch at least a modest following right away. And then their work grows and grows.
2. Essays about new technology can be quite powerful, and that's Graham's wheelhouse, so it's fine for him to talk up this cohort. But any serious survey of legendary essays needs to look wider. The most powerful essays redefine our social, moral, political and religious norms. Here are a few favorites that didn't just win their year; they stood out for centuries.
70 AD: The Gospel of Mark. Chronologically the first book of the New Testament, and look what that unleashed
1778: Common Sense by Thomas Paine. The boldest, fiercest justification for the American Revolution, and one that's still a touchstone today for anyone with a deep interest in the theory or practice of democracy.
1963: Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King. Worth being on the list simply for its effect on the U.S. civil rights movement; even more significant as the unbreakable tuning fork for any civil or human rights movement anywhere.
We'll keep inventing new technologies, because that's what humans are good at, and I'm sure many strong essays will ensue. But it's the redefining of our social institutions that's likely to make the future so incredibly different from today. Anyone who can write a prescient reflection about society's new rules will get my vote for "Great Essays."
"Almost any question can get you a good essay. Indeed, it took some effort to think of a sufficiently unpromising topic in the third paragraph, because any essayist's first impulse on hearing that the best essay couldn't be about x would be to try to write it. But if most questions yield good essays, only some yield great ones."
Sounds like you have a challenge in front of you.
> If caring about it is one of the criteria for a good initial question, then the optimal question varies from person to person.
with another submission posted some 15 minutes later [0] noting J. R. Ackerley’s ability to make anything compelling through the sheer weight of care
The "best essay" for an author is certainly cantered on their care. Yet I feel in the current nonchalant, urbane and cynical climate if the audience sense any sniff of "care", it is to be savaged.
Unless it tickles something sentimental or ironic, care is despised and dismissed as weakness that "doesn't make a living" or is some wonky "ideology".
But then people would call me cynical for saying that :)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39663046
"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.
Then I guess after I went to grad school and actually read a lot and tried to do some science and research. I find this kind of popular writing superficial, flawed, inefficient, and even conceited. That's just my subjective experience. But it seems some young people in tech just lap it up, he functions as a kind of thought leader for the industry.
I'm not saying that his arguments are 'wrong' persay, it's just that it's not particularly original or interesting.
You're spot on. Looking to this very comment section, you have people calling this line out as being enlightening:
>While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes from doing.
I would hope this is self evident to anyone who has ever tried _anything_.
— some shiny demon in the middle of some long and lonely road
All it takes is motivation. A lesson there for all of us, I think
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.
very very roughly the ideas you need are:
1. survivorship bias
2. self-interested optimisation is not guaranteed to lead to a global maxima, e.g. self-interested agents may be systematically less risk-taking than would be societally optimal.
3. it's fine for rational agents to account for private information, e.g. "I did really well at Stanford probably I have a better shot at a company than a random person." is a fine thing to include in reasoning.
Yes, of course rational agents can account for private information. I am trying to describe a case where a strategy cannot be rationally justified, yet is a better strategy than others because of "having faith in yourself". Now you can always try to flip this around and say: "well maybe the internal calculation that they do involves having evidence that they ought to have faith in themselves, like past success, consistently good mental models, a model of how faith helps, etc". And I'm not talking about those: I'm talking about cases where there is not a good argument, even in an internal calculation using private information, why a person should have faith in themselves, yet doing so anyway helps.
Basically it seems like there are cases where believing that something has a more-than-rational chance of working makes it more likely to work because of the power that irrational faith in yourself provides. But suppose you tried to quantify it: okay, an irrational faith in yourself makes you, I don't know, 20% more like to succeed, so you can account for that. But now it's not an irrational faith, it's a rational one, so you can still have more irrational faith than that, and it can still have the same effect.
My pattern-matching brain says it has the form of a Halting Problem/Godel-incompleteness-type theorem for rational calculation. Roughly: "It is possible to construct scenarios in which non-rational strategies lead to improved success in ways that rational calculations cannot account for."
This would not apply in a toy problem where the range of strategies are completely mathematically known: if all outcomes can be understood probabilistically then it doesn't apply. It applies in cases that are more like: some outcomes are unknown and the probability distributions of them are shielded behind "unknowable information", like new ideas that you have no way of being sure of the existence of. In these cases an irrational belief that you can find a new idea can improve your EV even though there is mathematically no way to justify it, because you can't really model "the probability of finding a new idea" without actually knowing what the idea is, even hypothetically.
"Moonshot" type endeavours are not paradoxes. They do involve considerable uncertainty and usually some kind of large investment (time, money or something else). Most can't afford them and don't have any particular reason to believe they will be more successful than everyone else who has tried. Relative to most people's resources, time preference and risk tolerance they are bad bets.
If you are starving then your strategy for getting food should usually be the one with the highest overall chance of success, you care much less about factors like effort/reward ratio or getting the highest possible payoff.
The most common strategy for people who want a tiny chance at an enormous payoff is to buy a lottery ticket. Millions of people do that every week.
Such bets absolutely do feel paradoxical at times because multiplying a very small chance of success times a huge (usually easier to reason about) payoff seems to break people's brains a bit. This is often described as a "bug" in human cognition, though I have always felt it's an instinct for "exploration" in the sense of occasionally making small bets with huge potential payoff "just in case" your world model is wrong. Also that the way humans process probabilities and payoffs seems more logarithmic than linear (making small probabilities "feel" bigger than they really are).
Claude 3 Opus:
Here is a story that I hope captures your interest and imagination:
The Memory Thief
In a world where memories could be extracted, bought and sold, Lina was the most skilled Memory Thief in the business. The wealthy elite paid handsomely for the chance to acquire the experiences and skills of others. And Lina had no qualms about stealing memories from the unwitting. It was just business.
Her latest mark was Jonathan Thorn, a reclusive tech billionaire. The bounty on his memories was the biggest Lina had ever seen. Enough to set her up for life.
Infiltrating Thorn's mind was surprisingly easy. But as she slipped into his memories, Lina found herself drawn in by the raw beauty and staggering brilliance she discovered there. She witnessed Thorn's greatest triumphs and his deepest heartbreaks. And she began to question everything about her life as a thief.
Then, in the innermost recesses of Thorn's mind, Lina uncovered a memory unlike any she had ever encountered - a memory of the future. In it, she saw a world in flames, its population enslaved by a ruthless dictator. And she saw herself and Thorn, leading the last desperate resistance against the tyrant's armies.
Shaken to her core, Lina fled Thorn's mind without the bounty memories. But she took something else with her - a newfound resolve and a dangerous knowledge.
Now, Lina must track down Thorn in the real world and convince him that his prophetic memory is true. Together, they must figure out how to prevent the apocalyptic future only they know is coming.
Even if it means Lina must do the one thing a Memory Thief is never supposed to do - reveal who she really is.
What follows is a race against time and a battle against fate as an unlikely pair - the world's most notorious thief and the man whose mind she invaded - become the only hope for salvation. All the while, a forbidden love blossoms between them, forged by the intimate knowledge of each other's deepest secrets and the heavy burden they now share.
In the end, they will have to sacrifice everything to rewrite the future. But in the process, they might just find that the most valuable memories are the ones you make with someone else.
In the end, the true Billion Dollars was the friends we made along the way.
I never knew SOTA LLMs have gone this far. Wow!
From this it seems that the best strategy for doing impossible things is to assume that impossible things are actually possible. It's only by doing that that you'll find out.
It's a risky strategy though, since many things are actually impossible, and even for possible things, they may be difficult, or the easy way may be hard to discover.
Maybe there's some hueristic for sorting the actually possible, and from there, for sorting the reasonably doable.
But I'd be wary of hueristics because (barring unusual personal experience) they're likely to suffer from the same bias that led people to dismiss things as impossible in the first place.