This is HN, PG posts will be instinctively and reactively upvoted.
That being said, this is pretty intellectually absent by the standards of a PG essay. "Writing good is hard" says man who has made his living off issuing advice that other people unconditionally obey. It feels less like a piece of solid writing advice and more like a selfish way to cover his ass now that the auspices of tech startups are shifting towards fascism. Like if the man behind the curtain started apologizing for the Emerald City and green-tinted glasses.
What how does that concept work in poetry or lyrics, for example? Something could be completely fictional (and artificial) and still be exceptionally well written.
It doesn’t, really, which is okay, because the subtext here is that Pg is writing about essayistic writing, or more specifically, communicating ideas in the form of written words. I don’t think he is commenting on “good writing” in the sense of a novel or line of poetry.
Moby Dick is my go-to example of a novel that is incredibly well-written, but I wouldn’t say it’s particularly clear or straightforward in its presentation of ideas.
An example, if you haven’t read it:
”The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”
My weird take on fiction is that much of the appeal is that the entire story is just an elaborate analogy to explain true facts about human nature that are otherwise hard to make clear.
You could try to write a non-fiction essay about how being a parent sets you up for potentially the worst pain and most intense grief you can imagine but yet also the experience is so meaningful and rewarding that it's worth it. But that essay would be abstract and wouldn't really hit you in the gut.
Or you could read Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" or watch Arrival which is nominally completely made up about aliens that don't experience time like us and it will convey the same concepts more effectively than an essay could.
Totally, it's not a weird take though. It's actually a pretty standard fare account of the purpose of fiction in literary theory that's been with us for a long time.
There's actually deeper arguments to be made that storytelling was the first form of human abstraction (we only get the essential details pertinent to the story, all else is abstracted away) and much of what's core to all our practices of representation stems from an originary impetus for storytelling as a means of sharing and replicating knowledge. The prosaic, scientific, nonfictional, non hyperbolic writing we have all gotten used to is kind of a late development.
Wow, is this ever out of touch. People are currently confronting smoothly delivered, glib sentences that are wrong at an unprecedented scale due to widespread adoption of language model AI.
Good writing has the benefit of helping others for many decades and centuries. That's a realization I came to recently. My goal now is to write a variety of essays, articles, and books on topics that I excel in.
There is a famous line about legal writing: “There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.” [1]
PG going for the "they're connected" angle, not too convincingly as shown mainly in the paragraph starting "This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas".
I believe that it is not that style helps the content to be more right, not in the way PG believes (like in the example about writing shorter sentences), it is that a richer style (so, not shorter, but neither baroque: a style with more possibilities) can reflect a less obvious way of thinking, that carries more signal.
I'll make an example that makes this concept crystal crisp, and that you will likely remember for the rest of your life (no kidding). In Italy there was a great writer called Giuseppe Pontiggia. He had to write an article for one of the main newspapers in Italy about the Nobel Prize in Literature, that with the surprise of many, was never assigned, year after year, to Borges. He wrote (sorry, translating from memory, I'm not an English speaker and I'm not going to use an LLM for this comment):
"Two are the prizes that each year the Swedish academy assigns: one is assigned to the winner of the prize, the other is not assigned to Borges".
This uncovers much more than just: even this year the prize was not assigned to Borges. And, honestly, I never saw this kind of style heights in PG writings (I appreciate the content most of the times, but having translated a few of his writings in Italian, I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs). You don't reach that kind of Pontiggia style with the process in the article here, but via a very different process that only the best writers are able to perform and access.
I think the intended implication goes the other way:
"But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
Hopefully that's not too much italianposting for the international audience :)
Yep I guess that's true, I often times see that the best papers are written better and make broader cultural references. However, recently, with all the non mother tongue English speakers around, especially from China, I often see great ideas exposed in a bad way. So this link starts to be weaker and weaker.
I’m not sure about that. Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them eloquently? While clarity of thought facilitates clarity of writing, that’s in principle orthogonal to the right/wrong axis, especially in the ethical sense implied by the Moretti quote. And as the sibling comment correctly observes, the existence of language barriers rather disprove that hypothesis.
Regarding the nobel prize quote above, while it provides some food for thought, I’m not sure what point exactly it is intended to make.
Sure, it's not a 1:1 map, but often who does an excellent job, does it along all the line: form, content, and the best papers are even shorter normally... They don't have to justify with many pages the lack of real content.
About the nobel price quote: it shows that the most powerful language is unexpected, breaks the obviousness of things, something that ancient greeks knew very well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
I was responding to “the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.”
About the nobel prize quote, it isn’t that powerful to me because I don’t really know what it wants to say, and it didn’t lead me to any notable insight either. But maybe that’s just me.
Pontiggia sometimes explained parts of other writers just using rethoric figures, and showing how their application provided new insights into things and concepts.
> Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them eloquently?
It's about the process, not the talent. When you've carefully thought through and refined an idea to understand whether it makes sense yourself, that usually provides a lot of guidance on how you can express the idea eloquently to others. You know the questions they'll have and the answers they'll find satisfying, because you already went through the same process. When you're just tossing out your first half-baked impression, it's a lot harder to communicate it well, although some people do have the orthogonal talent of making it up on the fly.
Writing, at a level sufficient to get your point across and be well read, is within reach of most people. The writing is not really an intelligence test.
The gap is typically that if something is written poorly we can infer the underlying thinking that went into it wasn't well enough conceived to put out high quality text. You can understand this implicitly when you think about how you would write about a topic that you barely know about vs a topic that you are so comfortable with that the writing doesn't even seem like an effort. Ironically people often don't write about the stuff they know best because they presume it's obvious - and it is, to them. And then they write about the stuff they're trying to figure out - which is poorly understood and poorly expressed.
My answer would be: "eloquence" may be a too-strong requirement, but if you can't express your ideas at least clearly, how can you be sure that they are the right ideas? Because without a detailed description that another human being can understand, this is really hard to judge. Maybe there is a lot of overlooked flaws in your flow.
I have a suspicion that there is a subset of geniuses who just intuitively "grok" some important ideas without being able to describe them to other people. Some of the autistic savants come to mind. But I am not sure if they can be induced to actually cooperate efficiently with the rest of humanity. Whatever happens in their minds, seems to be locked there.
I can’t understand why it would be at all safe to conclude this. In any other field, you certainly wouldn’t conclude that good visual design, attention to detail, craftsmanship, etc. indicates anything about the factual or moral correctness of the beliefs of the creators. Do the most beautiful and expensive churches indicate the most moral or theologically correct religious groups? Do the best designed uniforms tell you something about the wartime behavior of soldiers or the military policy of the country? Do the pharmaceutical companies with the best produced television advertisements have the best intentions and products backed by the best medical research?
You have it backwards. PG agrees that you can't conclude from the fact that something is beautiful that it's also right--he says "we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true".
What PG is saying is that if something is ugly, you can conclude that it's most likely wrong as well.
You can’t safely conclude that either. It could be a hastily-written rough draft. It could be the result of effort, but written by someone who isn’t fluent in English.
Attention to detail is a signal of quality, but these things are just heuristics, not reliable truths.
> I understand what he is saying and it’s precisely what I am disputing.
I don't see how. Your post was disputing the claim that good design, craftsmanship, beauty, etc. are signs of correctness. And that's not the claim PG makes in the article. Your post never disputed the claim PG did make, which is that bad design and craftsmanship, ugliness, etc., are signs of lack of correctness.
In the first paragraph, he writes, ”I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.” So he does indeed make the claim you say he doesn’t make.
The essay itself lacks anything novel, despite the rather breathless framing: “So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true.” These ideas are a couple of hundred years old at least. Kant: “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good”. This is classic Age of Enlightenment stuff, repackaged in classic Silicon Valley VC style.
yep totes. good style is sometimes proximate to good ideas because both indicate the author has spent lots of 'thinking tokens' on the thing, which is a costly and therefore sometimes-more-reliable signal. but i believe it falls apart under intensive selection -- the things we read are popular, and so on average are selection-survivors, which means they'll approach the optimal ratio of thinking token spend on style/vs substance for survival, which may not be the same as the best ratio for precise or insightful communication.
but the best communication survives too because it touches universal truths by connecting them with specific real phenomena. the worst (most harmful) communication survives because it frantically goodharts our quality evaluation process, even when it contradicts truth or reality. e.g. Orwell on the good side, L Ron Hubbard on the bad side. Unfortunately these categories are often not well sorted until after the principals are all dead (probably because everyone has to die before you can tell whether the values are universal or just generationally interesting), and there's a style-bar that has to be cleared before you even get to join the canon for consideration; interestingly this this would tend to increase the illusion that style is associated with substance, especially in older writing.
> In the first paragraph, he writes, ”I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.”
But towards the end he backs away from that claim, and makes the claim I described:
"[W]hile we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
In the light of that, and of much of the rest of the essay, I think the sentence from the start that you quote was misstated. It should have been stated as "Writing that's right is likely to sound good."
> But towards the end he backs away from that claim, and makes the claim I described:
> "[W]hile we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
What do you mean, backs away? Those aren't different claims. If writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, it is necessarily the case that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
No, it is not.
If A -> B is Not logically equivalent as If Not A -> Not B. Many make this mistake.
It is equivalent to If Not B -> Not A.
In this case, if a writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right - leads to - if the writing is right the writing is likely to sound good, (and only that).
> If A -> B is Not logically equivalent as If Not A -> Not B. Many make this mistake.
But many people making a mistake won't show that everything anyone says is an example of that mistake. Your observation isn't relevant here, because a claim of that form hasn't been made. We don't have "not", we have "less", which behaves differently.
For the claim "f(a) > f(b) -> g(a) > g(b)", it is trivial to show that "f(a) < f(b) -> g(a) < g(b)". These two claims are identical to each other. The proof is one step long.
In the present context, we have f(x) representing "quality of the writing in x" and g(x) representing "likelihood that the ideas in x are correct".
Yes, they are. The first claim (the one he backs away from) is A implies B, where A = "this writing is beautiful" and B is "this writing is true". The second claim is Not A implies Not B. Those are not logically equivalent. The second claim is logically equivalent to B implies A, i.e., "this writing is true" implies "this writing is beautiful". But B implies A is not equivalent to A implies B.
> If writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, it is necessarily the case that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
No, it isn't. It could also be the case that both types of writing, sounding bad and not sounding bad, are less likely to be right (because, say, sophistry is very prevalent).
What is necessarily the case is that, if writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, writing that is right is less likely to sound bad. Which, as above, is not logically equivalent to "writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right".
> It could also be the case that both types of writing, sounding bad and not sounding bad, are less likely to be right (because, say, sophistry is very prevalent).
No, it cannot be the case that every type of writing is less likely to be right. Less likely than what?
Think of it this way: some percentage of writing that sounds bad is wrong, and some percentage of writing that does not sound bad is wrong. I am simply pointing out that it is perfectly possible for both percentages to be the same, so that whether or not the writing sounds bad gives no useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
I think you are taking "less likely" too literally. PG makes it clear that he is not talking about exact mathematical functions. His intent is much better captured by treating the statements as logical implications, as I and others have been doing.
> I think you are taking "less likely" too literally.
> I am simply pointing out that it is perfectly possible for both percentages to be the same
Come on. If you believe those percentages are the same, what's left of PG's claim?
> , so that whether or not the writing sounds bad gives no useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
He notes, and you stipulate, that if the writing sounds bad, that gives useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
> His intent is much better captured by treating the statements as logical implications, as I and others have been doing.
I have been treating them as logical implications. The difference is that I actually know what the implications are.
How do you think the argument "assuming badly worded papers are no more likely to be wrong than any other papers, it isn't necessarily the case that if badly worded papers are more likely to be wrong than other papers, conclusion X would follow" works? You want to use logic instead of algebra? Every conclusion follows from a contradiction.
> What is necessarily the case is that, if writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, writing that is right is less likely to sound bad.
That's true. You're 100% right about this.
But if you're able to prove it, you should be well aware that exactly the same proof will quickly show that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
> Which, as above, is not logically equivalent to "writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right".
And that, obviously, is false. They are the same statement; either is sufficient to prove the other. I don't know what happened in your comment.
It's a logical tautology, at least if we make the implications definite (i.e., "sounds bad" necessarily implies "not right", and therefore "right" necessarily implies "does not sound bad"). In other words, "A implies B" is logically equivalent to "Not B implies Not A". There's no need to give any further proof.
> you should be well aware that exactly the same proof will quickly show that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
No, it won't. You really need to learn some basic logic.
> They are the same statement
No, they're not. Again, please learn some basic logic. "A implies B" is not logically equivalent to "B implies A". You are claiming that it is. Any basic textbook on logic will tell you that you are wrong.
If you want to go around calling things basic math, maybe you should actually do the math. You're not going to impress anyone by just parroting the idea that you're an idiot.
I can do it for you:
+----------+--------+
| eloquent | clumsy |
+-------+----------+--------+
| true | A | B |
+-------+----------+--------+
| false | C | D |
+-------+----------+--------+
Imagine there are A papers that are eloquent and true, B papers that are badly worded and true, C papers that are eloquent and false, and D papers that are badly worded and false. We'll also assume none of these values are 0.
For convenience, I'll use the lowercase letters to refer to probabilities rather than counts: a = A / (A + B + C + D), b = B / (A + B + C + D), etc.
We are given the postulate "papers that sound bad [in our terminology, "clumsy"] are less likely to be true". There are two possible interpretations of this:
1. Clumsy papers are less likely to be true than the average of all papers.
2. Clumsy papers are less likely to be true than eloquent papers.
Fortunately for us, each of these implies the other, so I'll use interpretation (1), again for convenience.
We can now define our postulate precisely:
b / (b + d) < (a + b) / (a + b + c + d)
Observe here that the four values a, b, c, and d are all positive and their sum is 1.
We can use basic algebra to rearrange the postulate:
b / (b + d) < (a + b) [because a + b + c + d = 1]
b < (a + b)(b + d) [because (b + d) is positive]
b < (ab + ad + b^2 + bd) [algebra]
b < b(a + b + d) + ad [algebra]
b < b(1 - c) + ad [because a + b + c + d = 1]
b < b - bc + ad [algebra]
0 < 0 - bc + ad [algebra]
bc < ad [algebra]
Let's examine whether eloquent papers are more likely to be true. As an algebraic statement, this is:
a / (a + c) > (a + b) / (a + b + c + d)
Same process:
a / (a + c) > (a + b)
a > (a + b)(a + c)
a > a^2 + ac + ab + bc
a > a(a + c + b) + bc
a > a(1 - d) + bc
a > a - ad + bc
0 > 0 - ad + bc
ad > bc
We have now proven that eloquent papers are more likely to be true if and only if ad > bc. We've also proven that, if clumsy papers are less likely to be true, bc < ad. I'm really, really hoping you can fill in the rest of the proof.
Why did you insist - repeatedly - that a very basic and obvious fact was false? What were you thinking?
>In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
Nonsense. I've known many writers who are wonderfully eloquent at transmitting their essential message well with text, but fumble their way through live discourse as if they were high-schoolers in their first classroom presentation.
Some people just communicate better by certain means, and with writing, there's a breathing space that some can't manage with speech, in which you can better organize your otherwise interesting ideas.
Reminds me of a line by Douglas Adams describing some particularly crude alien invaders:
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
He could have written something like: “The blocky ships hovered seemingly in defiance of gravity.”
Instead he picked a phrasing that’s intentionally a little hard to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to get the joke, and remembers it.
Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick.
My take is that it's "writing that calls attention to itself" (or, if you want, writing that is clearly off the wall)
Not sure if it can't be applied to exposition, Pontiggia managed it as above?
Some pecunious would like it reduced to Jobs ("editing is all you need") but I'd argue Jony has the sparkle, the je ne sais quoi, the more than just functional
I think that the last time I ran across "haecceitas" in a literary context was in an essay by Randall Jarrell. My guess is that he was referring to William Carlos Williams. In that case, Jarrell meant writing that tried to engage each thing as it is, not as part of a larger class.
Yepp the "academic" flavour of it is ... slightly different (& less relevant imho to parent thread) ... than the pop-cultural one, should have stressed that it exists ntheless. Thank you for providing more context for "context elision" :)!
Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick.
That's fine. The ideas transmit, the words are forgotten. He doesn't need to use memorable sentences if he's saying what he's trying to say.
Paul Graham is a very skilled communicator. He's not a writer's writer like YKW, but he doesn't need to be.
Idk, I'm conflicted here because PG is the embodiment of a poor amateur writer with good ideas.
He is literally the proof that writing can be bad (albeit we should define what good and bad writing are and agree on it) but still interesting because of the ideas.
I write for living (albeit in Czech) and I don't think that PGs writing is bad. It is not artistically brilliant (unlike Douglas Adams'), but he gets his points clearly across, and uses a language that even foreigners with limited command of English can parse.
That's good in my opinion - in the same sense that hammer which drives down nails flawlessly is good. PG is not trying to write colorful fiction, he wants to communicate something, and he succeeds in doing so. It is still a hammer, not a statue of David, but there are good and bad hammers, and this is a good hammer. You wouldn't want to drive nails into boards with a statue of David anyway.
I don't share that fully, and I've read every single one of his essays, his arid style gets tough after few paragraphs, it's too dense and harsh, sentences are consistently very short so it feels like reading a machine gun.
Dave Barry writes like that, all the time (a lot less so, these days). He uses it for comedic twists, and usually integrated with other tricks.
His writing is known for a very smooth cadence. You reach these “lumps” in the narrative, and can almost miss them, which, for me, multiplies their impact.
I’ve always considered him one of the best writers that I’ve read. He probably gets less credit than he deserves (although I think he’s won a Pulitzer), because of his subject matter; sort of like Leslie Nielsen, or Victor Borge, who were both masters of their art.
He was a columnist for the Miami Herald, for many years, and has written a number of books. The site will let you read a number of his columns. His books read about the same, but longer.
> “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
That is probably my favourite phrase from the whole book. For some reason I find it hilarious. It has stuck in my brain in much the same way that names don't.
Paul Graham is a very good writer, but one of the things I admire most about him is that, when he happens upon a truly excellent writer, he doesn't show the jealousy for which writers are infamously known. There has never been a case of a truly excellent writer being penalized, harassed, and eventually banned here.
I find Paul Graham's writing style to be a bit off. I think he is too overly reductive and simplistic in his use of language and imprecise in his choice of words, and I genuinely don't understand the praise for his writing. You should read his work because these are the thoughts of a highly influential VC, not because they are gems of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Sometimes a longer, more nuanced word has all the right connotations, and sometimes a more complex sentence carries the perfect rhetorical structure. Paul Graham's writing seems to ignore (or perhaps purposely eschew) such details.
> I think he is too overly reductive and simplistic
I personally feel this is a great filter. The exceptions to the rule are obvious and don’t need to be stated. It increases the signal to noise ratio to leave them out. And the people that complain are signaling their inability to get into the author’s pov.
Wait, I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make here. Is it that I commented about Paul Graham's writing style in response to a PG essay on writing style? Is that "making up concerns before even engaging with the author's ideas"? The whole point of the essay we're discussing is writing style, and in particular a set of suggestions he has based on his own work.
It's valid to criticize someone for not giving a piece of writing a charitable read before criticising the author's style, but that does not seem to apply when the topic of the essay is the author's style. Writing style is largely about figuring out how to direct the reader to your ideas, so it seems axiomatic that any piece of writing that needs a high-effort charitable read is poorly written (this, by the way, is in TFA).
As to your original point, being too vague also doesn't increase signal to noise ratio. It just lets you write as though a lot of noise is signal.
> Is that "making up concerns before even engaging with the author's ideas"?
I am responding to the point that pg’s writing is too reductionist. Comments on these articles often include “what about [obvious exception that distract from the main idea]”.
These comments indicate they are trying to dismiss rather than understand (the author didn’t even consider my idea!)
As an example, “San Francisco is wealthier than Bakersfield”. Almost certainly a bad reader will complain that this does not apply to every resident. But we all know what is meant.
So my general takeaway is that making broad statements without qualification can be a strength, because you filter out bad readers who aren’t interested in big ideas. And catering to them (who cannot be satisfied) only worsens the experience for your interested audience.
This itself is of course a broad statement with exception.
PG's writing is often so reductionist it muddies his points and HN commenters are often pedants about meaningless issues. Both can be true.
I don't blame PG for the pedantry over the minutiae. That's on the readers, and people on HN specifically are prone to this kind of pedantry. I do blame him for weakening his points by using bad language to express them.
TFA isn't about how to read, though. It's about writing.
Yes I think I know what you are getting at. Although PG essays are great if the idea is new to you. But for this one I am thinking "yes I know" skim skim skim! I have experienced the same thing. Anyone who has has their writing edited probably has.
Presumably, for this concept to stick with you your whole life, you'd have to have heard of "Borges"? From Googling that name, it appears the author you're referring to died in 86. Why would anyone expect him to win the current year's Nobel Prize in Literature?
> I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs
I describe it as inverse purple prose. The over-engineered simplicity stands out and distracts from the content.
Simplicity in the naive sense of minimal word count increases cognitive load because we have neural circuits that got used to a particular middle ground.
I'm not a native English speaker and learned the majority of it from technical and fantasy books. It may be me, but the majority of his writing feels like powerpoint slides. You can feel the idea, but the medium is to bland to pay attention to it. I would take a more complicated and nuanced prose that would elicit some virtual landmarks in my memory.
The quote reminds me of Tucholsky, a German journalist known for this style. An example that comes to mind was his review of James Joyce's Ulysses: "It's like meat extract: you can't eat it, but many soups will be made with it".
I think putting a bit of fun writing into reports of everyday events or reviews can go a long way. Tucholsky again, I'm paraphrasing and translating from memory where he wrote a trial against dada artist Grosz who depicted army officials as grotesque and ugly: "To demonstrate that there are no faces like this in the Reichswehr (the army), they brought in lieutenant so-and-so. They shouldn't have done that."
Who reads the latest "Nobel winner" anyway? Or, think about the person complaining "why didn't this movie get an Oscar?" in the Youtube comments. There's only 5 people in the Nobel literature committee and the person they elect says more about them than about what good writing is.
For me the issue with PG's writing, is that it has tiny hints of Narcissism, and that, by itself, hurts his ability to convey ideas. In classic writing, and in my opinion, also in great modern writing, there is a lot of humbleness and even some self deprecation. Sometimes the more the author doubts themselves, the more convincing they are, as it shows self critique, and lack of "Dunning-Kruger effect".
p.s. I wonder how many here are not aware you are the creator of Redis. (I assume most do, but chances are many have no idea).
> But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.
I wouldn't phrase it exactly this way, but this is an important point that I really struggle to get across. I regularly see proposals and such that are very challenging to reason about because of their writing. But when I ask for terms to be more rigorously defined, or for the document to be reordered into a more principled structure, some people seem to have a strong instinct that I'm just being difficult for the sake of it. I still remember one guy who insisted that I need to make a specific technical criticism or sign off, and absolutely refused to accept the answer that my structural feedback was intended to help us reason about the technical details.
...I find it a bit surprising that Paul Graham of all people, writing in May of 2025, managed to get through this entire essay without mentioning LLMs.
Because I think LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis. They are quite good at the craft of writing--not perfect, but probably much better than the median human--and they are just as good when the content is true as when it's false. This quality ruins a lot of my heuristics for evaluating whether writing is trustworthy, because LLMs are so good at bullshitting.
So while I agree that for humans, writing that sounds good tends to also be logically correct, that clearly isn't inherent in all writing.
> LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis.
No, they don't. His thesis is not that writing that looks good--that seems plausible and convincing, like the output that LLMs often produce--actually is. He says explicitly in the article: "we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true".
His actual thesis is in the very next clause of that sentence: "it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
> what does it says about the clarity of PG's essay?
This seems pretty clear to me:
"[W]hile we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
And I'm not the only one who has quoted that passage in this discussion.
It's the second to last paragraph, when someone reading the essay may have already formed a hard to dislodge opinion on the kind of writing PG means. And indeed, many people here on HN did so.
The order of paragraphs, how early in the text ideas or clarifications are introduced, etc, all make for clear writing.
I'd say this is an example of an essay that lacks clarity, i.e. one that is not "good writing".
> His actual thesis is in the very next clause of that sentence: "it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
This analysis in the article feels woefully uncharitable and is incompatible with HN guidelines, ironically, but if internalized leads directly to the nitpicking style frequently seen on HN as a substitute for elucidation of ideas not well expressed on the way to deeper analysis. Dismissing mediocre writing out of hand seems classist more than anything.
I had the same reaction. I spend an increasingly large part of my day reading and being required to edit AI slop. Part of what makes that hard as well as annoying is that it is all reasonably well written and plausible. Just not factual. That’s the real problem I think all of society is likely to face soon if not already. Not to mention the upcoming problem of new AI models trained on the internet of slop.
...and your comment communicates a much more believable idea than the one PG is attempting to communicate, which is not quite the same: " I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right."
Your comment also makes clear that this requires that the writer is attempting to make a true core point, rather than (for example) convince people of something it would be convenient for them to believe. If you are dealing with writers who are using their powers for ill purposes, then the skill of the prose may well be inversely correlated with their truth.
There are two sentences in this essay that I couldn't understand. Can someone help me?
1. "An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation"
I thought dialogue and conversation were the same thing. What is the difference between them besides one being a cleaned up version of the other?
2. "If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs."
What does this even mean? Is it an exemple or an analogy? It sounds like at this point in the text there should be an analogy, but this sentence sounds like an example. So, which one is it?
Slots at Harvard may be limited but slots at excellent institutions of higher education are not. Seats at ball games are not. Medical residencies are only limited by fiat. That could be fixed if we wanted to. The problem is the artificial limit, not the people getting the limited placements.
What people fail to understand is that immigrants add to both the supply and demand side. An immigrant sitting in a stadium seat is taking a place that could have gone to someone else. But their presence also drives the capacity to build more seats. More demand for higher education results in more capacity for higher education.
Even construction work in Europe is limited. People from Eastern Europe are undercutting German tradespeople and frankly deliver inferior work.
You could hire a German craftsman with the quality of work that was present 30 years ago and the work would last for 30 years. But who is embarking on learning a trade only to be replaced by Poles, Romanians or (in the future) Ukrainians, who will then replace Poles and Romanians once Ukraine is in the EU?
Dialogue and conversation are not the same thing, though they’re related, just in the same way that stress and anxiety are related but not the same. The task of reading comprehension involves being able to track important distinctions between synonyms.
The second is a counterfactual, and it is correctly deployed to help show the difference between a valid argument and a sound argument. Graham is saying that a good liar presents pleasing and valid but unsound arguments, or rather sophistry.
I think your confusion here is from reading comprehension problems.
Scott's 'legibility' comes with a very explicit consumer - a large power structure like a state. Written style is not like that at all - pg can't force to anyone to write in his preferred way nor is anyone obliged to like it.
If you understand some area and would like to explain it and use writing as a tool, you need to make it legible to the reader. Good writing is distilling and simplifying and forcing things through an explanatory process that rubs off some of the rough edges while at the same time clarifying.
That loses specific things. Understandability and nuance can be in conflict. Legibility is not specific to governments.
I’m pretty sure that “Seeing Like a State” legibility and writing legibility are totally different concepts that happen to share a word. State legibility is all about categorizing and simplifying to allow information processing to happen in a distributed fashion among a large number of bureaucrats. Writing legibility is about conveying information to the individual reader. A hundred pages of prose about a single person is incompatible with the former but can be a great example of the latter if written well.
Perhaps ironically, I'm not communicating my point well.
There's a book called 80/20 running and the concept is you should do 80% of your running running slow. To me, that's a very legible concept. It's very clear and small and easy to explain.
I think his book is well packaged by having a title that condenses all of his thoughts into one little sound bite concept.
But actually you know his advice about training for running is much more complex. And you know he puts together running plans and they have a thousand types of running and it's not always 80% slow running. Sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that. It's rarely exactly 80% slow running. There's a million pieces of nuance to how he would train people to run faster but to get the concept across to write it down, he makes it more legible. He simplifies it to 80% of your running should be slow.
To me, and perhaps I'm learning only to me, that concept is very related to the concept of legibility in seeing like a state. You're taking the complicated forest with many different types of trees and you're simplifying it down to one uniform thing. That's much easier to understand and easy to track and communicate. 97 trees in this area.
The same thing can happen to concepts. They have a lot of nuance and complexity but to write them it down so that they can best be communicated, you often need to remove a lot of that.
> ... he writes mostly to justify his luck in amassing capital as something of intellectual consequence.
Strange take, given PG made his billions from actually building something of immense consequence (YC) & provably codifying a blueprint on building fast-growing companies in SV.
If PG was a prof at HBS, it is likely he'd be considered in the same bracket as Clayton Christensen.
It's really the self-confidence of a successful person. He doesn't need to prove anything to anyone at this point, so he's unafraid of criticism. There was another submission here recently ("Find Your People") that touched on that: be immune to rejection.
Of course, this video is just stupid accent comedy, but we should be careful not to draw too much from it. (Let's also set aside the specifics of making fried rice.) The implication of the section of the clip you linked is that the presenter (Hersha Patel) does not know how to make rice properly, and this is evidenced by her cooking it in too much water and draining it.
But this is not correct.
There are, in fact, many different varieties of rice, different cuisines that incorporate rice as a major component, and different styles of cooking rice. Cooking (certain varieties of long-grained? rice) in an open vessel, cooking with an excess of water, and draining the water afterwards is an extremely common and popular way to prepare it for use in some cuisines: e.g.,
https://youtu.be/TARO_R4cE24?t=420
When this video first made the rounds some years ago, it was surprising to see how confidently people would weigh-in on this topic, despite demonstrating very little background or knowledge. (There's a big difference between saying “that's not the appropriate way to do this in this circumstance” and “that's completely wrong,” and the former creates space to derive knowledge. After all, the dish in the video is a popular one, even in cultures that predominantly eat jasmine or basmati rice, and there are interesting variations in technique and flavour that arise as a consequence!)
I similarly do not understand why these kind of reaction videos are popular. There are slightly better versions of this format (e.g., https://youtu.be/DsyfYJ5Ou3g?t=182) but they are drowned out by this kind of fluff. What does one really gain from interacting with such criticism?
Perhaps there is something to be learnt from these situations: ones where, equipped with just a little bit of knowledge, we derive unearned confidence, and use this confidence not to venture forth more boldly in search of knowledge, but to convince ourselves of our own superiority.
Paul Graham is a good writer. He's not an elite-tier writer's writer like "the dead guy" who's not actually dead, but he's still better than 99% of business executives, and he's better in the skills that businessmen want.
For me the beauty of idlewords's own blog (https://idlewords.com/) is that it's so good it makes me want to write.
Similarly, I find Graham's writing so bad that it also makes me want to write.
(note: idlewords, if you see this, your blog is misbehaving at the moment. For example, PHP is complaining bitterly on this page right now: https://idlewords.com/2018/10/ )
Writing wise I have a great deal of respect for you (and other top commenters) because you don't have people edit and review what you say you just write it (and take lumps or accolaydes).
Something I've mentioned before is I can't get over the fact that Paul has mulitiple people review his essays prior to publishing (which others have defended when I've made the same comment before).
I (as most people do) write clients every day with proposals or results or reports. Nobody reviews my writing first and the end recipients they either like what I say and pay me money and refer others to me or they don't. I certainly don't have the time to perseverate over the perfect phrase or paragraph '50 or 100 times' but yet I get results more often than I don't.
What is wrong with having someone edit and review? It is just feedback. If the writing itself is an assignment editing is normal. If the writing is part of another process maybe not.
For fly.io I can see the appeal of unedited content as it can be rougher (as in breaks style guides and whatnot) and I like that roughness in blogs. E.g. you might get a British idiom come through or a more conversational style.
Having an editor isn't wrong, but it's an luxury for something as small as a Hacker News comment or an email.
Paul having an editor isn't a luxury. His essays are edited because it's important for his business. He can easily justify a paying someone.
More to the point, we're contrasting Paul's essays to people who don't have the luxury. Paul's essays could be seen as less genuine, even if they seem wiser.
> His essays are edited because it's important for his business. He can easily justify a paying someone.
First he is not paying someone to edit these (any person I've seen appears to be unpaid and affiliated with HN in some way). Second he's not (as far as I can tell) angling these posts for business purposes (for example if the head of some corporation were doing that that would make sense).
That the 'studiedly mussed' style of fly.io blog posts comes across as 'unedited' for some is a terrific compliment, even more so for being unintended.
I see nothing wrong at all with asking people for feedback on an essay that will be broadly published and read. That just seems prudent.
What is more concerning is that I don't think many people who have read widely would consider Paul Graham to be a good writer, and yet people who care about him let him publish this article... He's definitely not a bad writer, and he generally communicates good ideas clearly, which is surely sufficient - and perhaps even appropriate - for his purposes. But he's not a Good Writer.
I've read many (perhaps even most) of his essays and there isn't a single one of them that I can actually remember, let alone any particular line or phrase that stands out. Though surely some of the ideas remain an influence in my general thought.
Conversely, there's plenty of writers who have seared many lines - and entire concepts - into my mind forever. I come back to them endlessly, even without pulling up the actual writing.
> I see nothing wrong at all with asking people for feedback on an essay that will be broadly published and read.
Is he really 'broadly published and read'? Most people outside of tech have no clue (and no interest) in what PG says.
Yes there is 'nothing wrong' except if you put yourself out there as having good unique thoughts why does it not show that you are lacking confidence to have others (again in this situation maybe in another I'd agree) always review what you are posting on your personal site or blog?
And very importantly he doesn't allow comments (on his blog) the only comments are on HN which he doesn't link to. It's unknown if he even reads the HN comments anymore. Or (last interaction over a year ago) comment on HN anymore (to defend his thoughts or position).
Many reasons for this of course but if you can't handle criticism and think so little of what people on HN says why are you publishing at all? That's your biggest audience isn't it?
(Side note YES HN is can be a brutal crowd for sure. Would be interesting if he ever publishes the changes he makes in the essays or what the people reviewing the essay have to say).
There's probably not many people who write essays generally focused in tech who have a larger audience (or even following). Though it's beside the point how generally popular he is. It can only be helpful to get feedback on anything that we ever do - it doesn't mean we have to incorporate it.
And seeking feedback from specific people who you respect is a vastly different thing than opening up your digital home to the slovenly masses to come and shit in with their comments.
Though, I think he probably should have sought feedback from some actual good writers for a topic like this...
So, this would seem to be fairly easy to test empirically. Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing, and use it on something where you know if it's true:
1) court testimony which we know (from outside evidence) is either true or not true
2) scientific papers which we know to have been reproducible, or not
3) stock pundits predictions about the future of some company or other, which we know with hindsight to have been accurate or not
Much more convincing to me than any amount of good writing about writing, would be to have some empirical evidence.
> Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing
There are objective features of writing, but quality is subjective.
Of course, as to the thesis of the essay, it is both trivial and uninteresting that people, including PG, tend to have views of the correctness of an idea and the quality of the presentation that are correlated.
It is interesting that PG thinks that this is anything more than a cognitive bias to be cautious about, though.
So one thing to note is that the essay mentions that it refers specifically to "writing that is used to develop ideas" vs. "writing meant to describe others ideas".
The way I interpret this is that it refers to claims that build on each other to come to a conclusion. So the way to test for truth is to somehow test each claim and the conclusion, which could vary in difficulty based on the kind of claims being made.
As this essay exemplifies, it is difficult to test for truth if you make broad claims that are so imprecise that they can't be verified or don't tell you anything interesting when verified using reasonable assumptions.
The issue with this article is that it is very imprecise.
Are the standards for whether something “sounds bad” based on the average person’s reading or the intended audience.
In its most general form (how the median article sounds to the median person), the argument is pretty vacuous.
Most writing discusses simple ideas and they should sound good (familiar, easy, pleasurable) to the median person.
But the most valuable kind of writing could sound tedious and filled with incomprehensible terminology to the median person but concise and interesting to the intended audience.
The current way the idea is stated doesn’t sound correct because you can convincingly defend all 4 quadrants of the truth table.
Thanks. The way you describe the topic, a dimension is missing in the article: who am I writing for?
Related: I think pg would benefit from graphics here and there. Creating visuals like the 2x2 matrix you describe help tremendously to make ideas more comprehensible.
> Are the standards for whether something “sounds bad” based on the average person’s reading or the intended audience.
As pg describes it in the article, it's neither; it's based on the writer's judgment. The writer of course is writing for some intended audience, and their judgment of what sounds good or sounds bad should be influenced by that. But pg is describing the writer's process of judging what they write.
> The reason is that it makes the essay easier to read. It's less work to read writing that flows well. How does that help the writer? Because the writer is the first reader
Note that the writer's judgement only serves as an initial proxy for how well the essay reads. This implies that the reader, whoever that is, is the true judge of how well it reads. My point is that that group is ill defined.
If it were sufficient for the writer to be the only judge of how well something reads, surely PG wouldn't feel the need to have other proofread his essays. And surely it is not sufficient for someone who lacks taste to judge their own writing as good.
The way I read that statement is the same as the startup advice of "build what you would yourself want". However you still have to validate that the market exists and is big.
There is really nothing profound in that paragraph anyway, all it is saying is that a writer should edit and proofread their work. That whole paragraph could be deleted honestly. It is obvious table stakes for one to edit their work. What differentiates good from bad is a matter of taste + who is judging it.
Don't we? What about the music that plays in the elevator, or while you're on hold on the phone?
Similarly for writing, I would imagine you read plenty of emails that are of more-or-less median writing quality. And yet, these emails may discuss pivotal decisions, where it is very important whether their arguments are logically correct.
Get a median human to write some elevator or hold music and see how that goes. There's an entire business of making and licensing such music which would not be the case if any rando could just crank it out.
Emails, etc, are just 'communication but over text' - it's 'writing' in the very basic sense but it's not the sort of writing people concerned with style and quality care about, either as consumers or producers. Me talking to the cashier at the store is not 'public speaking', neither I nor the cashier care it's not the Gettysburgh Address.
I think emails summarizing meetings, or making a case for something, or describing something, match the kind of writing PG means in his essay.
And like the commenter you're replying to, I think that LLMs today can write far better than your average coworker (assuming they don't go on a hallucinated tangent; then again some coworkers also do!).
So it's fair to compare LLMs and work emails.
Not to speak of work wiki pages (Confluence etc) describing technical things, decisions, policies, etc.
Why do you think pg is writing about emails and meeting notes? I don't readily see anything in the piece to suggest that. 'making a case for something' or 'describing something' covers the bulk of writing, the piece is quite explicit about not being about all writing.
It seems to me there is no difference in kind between an email arguing for or examining an important decision or idea, and an "essay" on an important decision or idea.
I definitely don't think these documents are just "written speech". Some emails are—a quick message asking if you'll be in the office tomorrow, for example—but major ones require significantly more thought.
It seems to me there is no difference in kind between an email arguing for or examining an important decision or idea, and an "essay" on an important decision or idea.
Why are there people who make a living as, say, newspaper opinion columnists or magazine staff writers? Or hell, why aren't we all rich substackers given that writing a substack is literally email?
The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time, they often become convinced they can succeed at anything. Musk is a glaring recent example - and now Paul. I do appreciate his essays on tech and related subjects, but not for their literary merit. If I’m seeking advice on writing, I’d turn to actual writers - people who’ve earned recognition and acclaim specifically for their work in that field.
Impossible to decouple the quality (or not) of his writing from the fact that he had already sold Viaweb to Yahoo at that point. Surely that drew early founders to YC as well.
I've commented many times before how I've become a bit disillusioned with pg's writing over the past decade or so, because it always seemed to lack anything beyond a surface level of introspection. He always seemed to be pushing the idea that qualities that make a person great at startups are the most important thing in the world - not surprising given his industry, but to me many of his essays just felt more and more self-serving, while never commenting on (or, in my opinion, really even understanding) the real societal negatives that I think have been a consequence (admittedly unexpected) of the startup boom.
But, in pg's defense, when it comes to his writing style and the quality of his prose, I think he's generally top notch, and even though I may disagree with him more often now, I appreciate the structure and clarity of his writing. Given how influential his essays have been, I think he's qualified to write about how his communication style makes an impact.
He is the quintessential tech bro. His selective caring about “free speech” only when it serves to feed into right wing outrage was when he showed his true colors years ago. The recent essay on “Wokeness” just confirmed it.
"pg's writing... always seemed to lack anything beyond a surface level of introspection"
with
"when it comes to his writing style and the quality of his prose, I think he's generally top notch"?
And "Given how influential his essays have been, I think he's qualified" - do you not see a problem with equating influence/popularity with quality/truth (let alone morality)?
Paul Graham's essays read like typical self-help books. Considering how popular self-help books are, I guess you can call that "good writing" for general population?
Paul Graham doesn’t moon-light as a writer, rather, writing is one of the core skills that made YC what it is.
He spends months chiseling each essay because he understands that clear thinking is expressed through clear prose. Dismissing that craft because he also knows Lisp is like trashing Stephen King’s storytelling because he can ride a bike.
If you only grant “literary merit” to people who never shipped a line of code, your definition’s too narrow for the real world—where ideas, not résumés, decide who we read.
I like Graham's writing, and defend it elsewhere in this thread, but that has such an obsequious and somehow macho smack to it, wow. One imagines Hercules chiseling his abs. If that's what his writing does for you, fair enough, but it sure is intense.
The commenter did not say Paul Graham writes quickly, so I'm not sure why you keep fixating on that point.
> I pity you and the likes of you who are coming here to shit all over as if there aren't any better things to do during the day.
Good lord. They said they like his writing, but found the particular tweet you shared pretentious. Your response to that light criticism is so disproportionate it reads sycophantic. This is a thread about good writing, I think criticizing anything is fair game.
I have learned about YCombinator, hacker news, Paul Graham, and startups in general through one of his essays. I was first blown away by the brilliance and clarity of his writing, and only then did I learn that he's a prominent tech figure.
So many years later, I still haven't read a better writer (except maybe Scott Alexander). So, at least from my perspective, if anyone has the authority to write about good writing, it's this guy.
> The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time, they often become convinced they can succeed at anything.
I think at the core the problem (if you want to call it that) can be boiled down to the following:
"I am smart.
That's why I was successful at what I did.
So I need to prove to myself and others that it wasn't luck it was I am damn smart"
The problem with hubris is that if you took someone like Musk or PG and you kept them in some off the beaten path place ie not Silicon Valley, not NYC pick your hot location (and stipulate they couldn't move because of family or other obligations) and they weren't surrounded by others who were top notch (as a result of also being in the right place at the right time) there wouldn't be anything particularly notable about them.
Having gone myself to one of those 'good' universities I will say that Paul being at Harvard would certainly amplify this type of behavior by being surrounded early on at a formidable age by accomplished members of that community.
When people become insanely rich, they tend to attract a dozen or so sycophants into their orbit who never tell them “no”, never say they’re wrong, and basically spend all their time praising and enabling them. Otherwise, they’d be out. It’s not surprising that some of them start to believe they are always right and that they are good at everything.
You're saying that about Paul Graham, of all people? His Wikipedia page lists him as a "computer scientist, writer and essayist, entrepreneur and investor", in that order. He wrote various Lisp books before founding Viaweb, and arguably it was the essays that made YC a thing in the first place. He is arguably one of the best writers in the startup scene.
I wonder if you're just unaware of all of this, or if you just have an axe to grind here?
Successful people outgrowing their jodhpurs and losing their reason is a thing, sure, but that does not apply in this specific case. Tech writing is still writing, my friend.
Have you read ANSI Common Lisp? Or even the introduction to it?
I have criticisms of Mr. Graham, but the man can write, and consistently. Some of the essays can be a tad too terse for me at times, but when he gets it right, his stuff can be exquisite.
Another example that comes immediately crashing to mind is Donald Knuth - have you read any of his tech writing? It's glorious.
Anyone who wants to claim there's a hard line between writing worthy of "literary merit" and tech writing is going to have their work cut out for them with those two already.
It doesn't seem like you're talking about the same thing the article is. Graham doesn't say "you must be a good writer to be a good thinker".
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in some other way and then write about them afterward — for example, if you build something, or conduct an experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such cases the ideas often live more in the work than the writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas are good.
Writers who have trouble expressing thoughts in a non-native language are not actually developing the idea in that language. That doesn't mean they are producing bad ideas, but it _might_ mean they won't produce good writing (in that non-native language).
I took the essay to be highlighting that if you use writing as a tool for thinking, clunky writing is likely to highlight places where your ideas themselves aren't clear or correct yet. The iterative process of refining the writing to "sound good" will help shape the ideas.
This seems to be a commonly expressed idea in other forms. For example, when thinking through ideas in code, the process of making the code more "beautiful" can also result in a clearer expression of more correct ideas.
Ive read most of the comments here, and this is one of the only actually insightful ones.
Communication is very hard - we have to first translate some scattered notions into a coherent idea, then find the right words to express that idea, then the people receiving them have to understand those words, translate them into their scattered ideas. And then do the same in the other direction.
The act of writing - and especially editing - helps us refine the ideas and find the words to best express them, and especially in a way that they are to have the intended effect on others.
I'm sure this essay has some good ideas at its core, but I don't think it had nearly enough editing...
343 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadThat being said, this is pretty intellectually absent by the standards of a PG essay. "Writing good is hard" says man who has made his living off issuing advice that other people unconditionally obey. It feels less like a piece of solid writing advice and more like a selfish way to cover his ass now that the auspices of tech startups are shifting towards fascism. Like if the man behind the curtain started apologizing for the Emerald City and green-tinted glasses.
> In all life, when a thing works better, usually it is more beautiful to the eye.
Moby Dick is my go-to example of a novel that is incredibly well-written, but I wouldn’t say it’s particularly clear or straightforward in its presentation of ideas.
An example, if you haven’t read it:
”The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”
You could try to write a non-fiction essay about how being a parent sets you up for potentially the worst pain and most intense grief you can imagine but yet also the experience is so meaningful and rewarding that it's worth it. But that essay would be abstract and wouldn't really hit you in the gut.
Or you could read Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" or watch Arrival which is nominally completely made up about aliens that don't experience time like us and it will convey the same concepts more effectively than an essay could.
There's actually deeper arguments to be made that storytelling was the first form of human abstraction (we only get the essential details pertinent to the story, all else is abstracted away) and much of what's core to all our practices of representation stems from an originary impetus for storytelling as a means of sharing and replicating knowledge. The prosaic, scientific, nonfictional, non hyperbolic writing we have all gotten used to is kind of a late development.
When characters do things that beggars belief built upon their previous actions, it can ruin the whole story.
Even poetry has some truth and concept inside the poet to which it’s bound.
PG going for the "they're connected" angle, not too convincingly as shown mainly in the paragraph starting "This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas".
[1] https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3774-legal-prose-and...
I'll make an example that makes this concept crystal crisp, and that you will likely remember for the rest of your life (no kidding). In Italy there was a great writer called Giuseppe Pontiggia. He had to write an article for one of the main newspapers in Italy about the Nobel Prize in Literature, that with the surprise of many, was never assigned, year after year, to Borges. He wrote (sorry, translating from memory, I'm not an English speaker and I'm not going to use an LLM for this comment):
"Two are the prizes that each year the Swedish academy assigns: one is assigned to the winner of the prize, the other is not assigned to Borges".
This uncovers much more than just: even this year the prize was not assigned to Borges. And, honestly, I never saw this kind of style heights in PG writings (I appreciate the content most of the times, but having translated a few of his writings in Italian, I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs). You don't reach that kind of Pontiggia style with the process in the article here, but via a very different process that only the best writers are able to perform and access.
"But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
Hopefully that's not too much italianposting for the international audience :)
Regarding the nobel prize quote above, while it provides some food for thought, I’m not sure what point exactly it is intended to make.
About the nobel price quote: it shows that the most powerful language is unexpected, breaks the obviousness of things, something that ancient greeks knew very well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
About the nobel prize quote, it isn’t that powerful to me because I don’t really know what it wants to say, and it didn’t lead me to any notable insight either. But maybe that’s just me.
It's about the process, not the talent. When you've carefully thought through and refined an idea to understand whether it makes sense yourself, that usually provides a lot of guidance on how you can express the idea eloquently to others. You know the questions they'll have and the answers they'll find satisfying, because you already went through the same process. When you're just tossing out your first half-baked impression, it's a lot harder to communicate it well, although some people do have the orthogonal talent of making it up on the fly.
The gap is typically that if something is written poorly we can infer the underlying thinking that went into it wasn't well enough conceived to put out high quality text. You can understand this implicitly when you think about how you would write about a topic that you barely know about vs a topic that you are so comfortable with that the writing doesn't even seem like an effort. Ironically people often don't write about the stuff they know best because they presume it's obvious - and it is, to them. And then they write about the stuff they're trying to figure out - which is poorly understood and poorly expressed.
My answer would be: "eloquence" may be a too-strong requirement, but if you can't express your ideas at least clearly, how can you be sure that they are the right ideas? Because without a detailed description that another human being can understand, this is really hard to judge. Maybe there is a lot of overlooked flaws in your flow.
I have a suspicion that there is a subset of geniuses who just intuitively "grok" some important ideas without being able to describe them to other people. Some of the autistic savants come to mind. But I am not sure if they can be induced to actually cooperate efficiently with the rest of humanity. Whatever happens in their minds, seems to be locked there.
What PG is saying is that if something is ugly, you can conclude that it's most likely wrong as well.
Attention to detail is a signal of quality, but these things are just heuristics, not reliable truths.
The article says it is ruling out both of these possibilities, as other posts elsewhere in this discussion have already pointed out.
I don't see how. Your post was disputing the claim that good design, craftsmanship, beauty, etc. are signs of correctness. And that's not the claim PG makes in the article. Your post never disputed the claim PG did make, which is that bad design and craftsmanship, ugliness, etc., are signs of lack of correctness.
The essay itself lacks anything novel, despite the rather breathless framing: “So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true.” These ideas are a couple of hundred years old at least. Kant: “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good”. This is classic Age of Enlightenment stuff, repackaged in classic Silicon Valley VC style.
but the best communication survives too because it touches universal truths by connecting them with specific real phenomena. the worst (most harmful) communication survives because it frantically goodharts our quality evaluation process, even when it contradicts truth or reality. e.g. Orwell on the good side, L Ron Hubbard on the bad side. Unfortunately these categories are often not well sorted until after the principals are all dead (probably because everyone has to die before you can tell whether the values are universal or just generationally interesting), and there's a style-bar that has to be cleared before you even get to join the canon for consideration; interestingly this this would tend to increase the illusion that style is associated with substance, especially in older writing.
But towards the end he backs away from that claim, and makes the claim I described:
"[W]hile we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
In the light of that, and of much of the rest of the essay, I think the sentence from the start that you quote was misstated. It should have been stated as "Writing that's right is likely to sound good."
> "[W]hile we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
What do you mean, backs away? Those aren't different claims. If writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, it is necessarily the case that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
But many people making a mistake won't show that everything anyone says is an example of that mistake. Your observation isn't relevant here, because a claim of that form hasn't been made. We don't have "not", we have "less", which behaves differently.
For the claim "f(a) > f(b) -> g(a) > g(b)", it is trivial to show that "f(a) < f(b) -> g(a) < g(b)". These two claims are identical to each other. The proof is one step long.
In the present context, we have f(x) representing "quality of the writing in x" and g(x) representing "likelihood that the ideas in x are correct".
Yes, they are. The first claim (the one he backs away from) is A implies B, where A = "this writing is beautiful" and B is "this writing is true". The second claim is Not A implies Not B. Those are not logically equivalent. The second claim is logically equivalent to B implies A, i.e., "this writing is true" implies "this writing is beautiful". But B implies A is not equivalent to A implies B.
> If writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, it is necessarily the case that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
No, it isn't. It could also be the case that both types of writing, sounding bad and not sounding bad, are less likely to be right (because, say, sophistry is very prevalent).
What is necessarily the case is that, if writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, writing that is right is less likely to sound bad. Which, as above, is not logically equivalent to "writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right".
No, it cannot be the case that every type of writing is less likely to be right. Less likely than what?
Think of it this way: some percentage of writing that sounds bad is wrong, and some percentage of writing that does not sound bad is wrong. I am simply pointing out that it is perfectly possible for both percentages to be the same, so that whether or not the writing sounds bad gives no useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
I think you are taking "less likely" too literally. PG makes it clear that he is not talking about exact mathematical functions. His intent is much better captured by treating the statements as logical implications, as I and others have been doing.
> I am simply pointing out that it is perfectly possible for both percentages to be the same
Come on. If you believe those percentages are the same, what's left of PG's claim?
> , so that whether or not the writing sounds bad gives no useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
He notes, and you stipulate, that if the writing sounds bad, that gives useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
> His intent is much better captured by treating the statements as logical implications, as I and others have been doing.
I have been treating them as logical implications. The difference is that I actually know what the implications are.
How do you think the argument "assuming badly worded papers are no more likely to be wrong than any other papers, it isn't necessarily the case that if badly worded papers are more likely to be wrong than other papers, conclusion X would follow" works? You want to use logic instead of algebra? Every conclusion follows from a contradiction.
> What is necessarily the case is that, if writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, writing that is right is less likely to sound bad.
That's true. You're 100% right about this.
But if you're able to prove it, you should be well aware that exactly the same proof will quickly show that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
> Which, as above, is not logically equivalent to "writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right".
And that, obviously, is false. They are the same statement; either is sufficient to prove the other. I don't know what happened in your comment.
It's a logical tautology, at least if we make the implications definite (i.e., "sounds bad" necessarily implies "not right", and therefore "right" necessarily implies "does not sound bad"). In other words, "A implies B" is logically equivalent to "Not B implies Not A". There's no need to give any further proof.
> you should be well aware that exactly the same proof will quickly show that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
No, it won't. You really need to learn some basic logic.
> They are the same statement
No, they're not. Again, please learn some basic logic. "A implies B" is not logically equivalent to "B implies A". You are claiming that it is. Any basic textbook on logic will tell you that you are wrong.
I can do it for you:
Imagine there are A papers that are eloquent and true, B papers that are badly worded and true, C papers that are eloquent and false, and D papers that are badly worded and false. We'll also assume none of these values are 0.For convenience, I'll use the lowercase letters to refer to probabilities rather than counts: a = A / (A + B + C + D), b = B / (A + B + C + D), etc.
We are given the postulate "papers that sound bad [in our terminology, "clumsy"] are less likely to be true". There are two possible interpretations of this:
1. Clumsy papers are less likely to be true than the average of all papers.
2. Clumsy papers are less likely to be true than eloquent papers.
Fortunately for us, each of these implies the other, so I'll use interpretation (1), again for convenience.
We can now define our postulate precisely:
Observe here that the four values a, b, c, and d are all positive and their sum is 1.We can use basic algebra to rearrange the postulate:
Let's examine whether eloquent papers are more likely to be true. As an algebraic statement, this is: Same process: We have now proven that eloquent papers are more likely to be true if and only if ad > bc. We've also proven that, if clumsy papers are less likely to be true, bc < ad. I'm really, really hoping you can fill in the rest of the proof.Why did you insist - repeatedly - that a very basic and obvious fact was false? What were you thinking?
Yes, if you use some disfavored group's vernacular, there's a decent chance you also use their cultural values.
Nonsense. I've known many writers who are wonderfully eloquent at transmitting their essential message well with text, but fumble their way through live discourse as if they were high-schoolers in their first classroom presentation.
Some people just communicate better by certain means, and with writing, there's a breathing space that some can't manage with speech, in which you can better organize your otherwise interesting ideas.
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
He could have written something like: “The blocky ships hovered seemingly in defiance of gravity.”
Instead he picked a phrasing that’s intentionally a little hard to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to get the joke, and remembers it.
Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick.
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though.
Descriptive writing, especially for fiction, seems out of scope.
It becomes more than that once it gets understood or comprehended.
https://www.scribblejerk.com/blog/haecceity-rules
My take is that it's "writing that calls attention to itself" (or, if you want, writing that is clearly off the wall)
Not sure if it can't be applied to exposition, Pontiggia managed it as above?
Some pecunious would like it reduced to Jobs ("editing is all you need") but I'd argue Jony has the sparkle, the je ne sais quoi, the more than just functional
Check out Keynes or 1950s American writing such as https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v01/d8....
That's fine. The ideas transmit, the words are forgotten. He doesn't need to use memorable sentences if he's saying what he's trying to say.
Paul Graham is a very skilled communicator. He's not a writer's writer like YKW, but he doesn't need to be.
He is literally the proof that writing can be bad (albeit we should define what good and bad writing are and agree on it) but still interesting because of the ideas.
That's good in my opinion - in the same sense that hammer which drives down nails flawlessly is good. PG is not trying to write colorful fiction, he wants to communicate something, and he succeeds in doing so. It is still a hammer, not a statue of David, but there are good and bad hammers, and this is a good hammer. You wouldn't want to drive nails into boards with a statue of David anyway.
I don't share that fully, and I've read every single one of his essays, his arid style gets tough after few paragraphs, it's too dense and harsh, sentences are consistently very short so it feels like reading a machine gun.
His writing is known for a very smooth cadence. You reach these “lumps” in the narrative, and can almost miss them, which, for me, multiplies their impact.
I’ve always considered him one of the best writers that I’ve read. He probably gets less credit than he deserves (although I think he’s won a Pulitzer), because of his subject matter; sort of like Leslie Nielsen, or Victor Borge, who were both masters of their art.
Has a delightful 90's flavor.
He was a columnist for the Miami Herald, for many years, and has written a number of books. The site will let you read a number of his columns. His books read about the same, but longer.
Absolute riot.
That is probably my favourite phrase from the whole book. For some reason I find it hilarious. It has stuck in my brain in much the same way that names don't.
On the other hand, I may know too much about what he writes about to benefit from it. Which means I’m not the target audience.
And I don’t say this to sound smart. I’m a generalist. I know a little about a lot. Plenty of people are far more intelligent than I am.
I personally feel this is a great filter. The exceptions to the rule are obvious and don’t need to be stated. It increases the signal to noise ratio to leave them out. And the people that complain are signaling their inability to get into the author’s pov.
It's valid to criticize someone for not giving a piece of writing a charitable read before criticising the author's style, but that does not seem to apply when the topic of the essay is the author's style. Writing style is largely about figuring out how to direct the reader to your ideas, so it seems axiomatic that any piece of writing that needs a high-effort charitable read is poorly written (this, by the way, is in TFA).
As to your original point, being too vague also doesn't increase signal to noise ratio. It just lets you write as though a lot of noise is signal.
I am responding to the point that pg’s writing is too reductionist. Comments on these articles often include “what about [obvious exception that distract from the main idea]”.
These comments indicate they are trying to dismiss rather than understand (the author didn’t even consider my idea!)
As an example, “San Francisco is wealthier than Bakersfield”. Almost certainly a bad reader will complain that this does not apply to every resident. But we all know what is meant.
So my general takeaway is that making broad statements without qualification can be a strength, because you filter out bad readers who aren’t interested in big ideas. And catering to them (who cannot be satisfied) only worsens the experience for your interested audience.
This itself is of course a broad statement with exception.
I don't blame PG for the pedantry over the minutiae. That's on the readers, and people on HN specifically are prone to this kind of pedantry. I do blame him for weakening his points by using bad language to express them.
TFA isn't about how to read, though. It's about writing.
Simplicity in the naive sense of minimal word count increases cognitive load because we have neural circuits that got used to a particular middle ground.
> One part of that part was published as a preview in a "Domenica" of "Il sole 24 ore".
Perhaps it is in the June 21 2009 issue.
I think putting a bit of fun writing into reports of everyday events or reviews can go a long way. Tucholsky again, I'm paraphrasing and translating from memory where he wrote a trial against dada artist Grosz who depicted army officials as grotesque and ugly: "To demonstrate that there are no faces like this in the Reichswehr (the army), they brought in lieutenant so-and-so. They shouldn't have done that."
Good writing goes a long way
For me the issue with PG's writing, is that it has tiny hints of Narcissism, and that, by itself, hurts his ability to convey ideas. In classic writing, and in my opinion, also in great modern writing, there is a lot of humbleness and even some self deprecation. Sometimes the more the author doubts themselves, the more convincing they are, as it shows self critique, and lack of "Dunning-Kruger effect".
p.s. I wonder how many here are not aware you are the creator of Redis. (I assume most do, but chances are many have no idea).
I wouldn't phrase it exactly this way, but this is an important point that I really struggle to get across. I regularly see proposals and such that are very challenging to reason about because of their writing. But when I ask for terms to be more rigorously defined, or for the document to be reordered into a more principled structure, some people seem to have a strong instinct that I'm just being difficult for the sake of it. I still remember one guy who insisted that I need to make a specific technical criticism or sign off, and absolutely refused to accept the answer that my structural feedback was intended to help us reason about the technical details.
Because I think LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis. They are quite good at the craft of writing--not perfect, but probably much better than the median human--and they are just as good when the content is true as when it's false. This quality ruins a lot of my heuristics for evaluating whether writing is trustworthy, because LLMs are so good at bullshitting.
So while I agree that for humans, writing that sounds good tends to also be logically correct, that clearly isn't inherent in all writing.
No, they don't. His thesis is not that writing that looks good--that seems plausible and convincing, like the output that LLMs often produce--actually is. He says explicitly in the article: "we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true".
His actual thesis is in the very next clause of that sentence: "it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
I can guess what this says about the readership of HN, but what does it says about the clarity of PG's essay?
This seems pretty clear to me:
"[W]hile we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
And I'm not the only one who has quoted that passage in this discussion.
The order of paragraphs, how early in the text ideas or clarifications are introduced, etc, all make for clear writing.
I'd say this is an example of an essay that lacks clarity, i.e. one that is not "good writing".
This analysis in the article feels woefully uncharitable and is incompatible with HN guidelines, ironically, but if internalized leads directly to the nitpicking style frequently seen on HN as a substitute for elucidation of ideas not well expressed on the way to deeper analysis. Dismissing mediocre writing out of hand seems classist more than anything.
They are trained on it.
When you write well, you iterate. When you iterate, you improve both the prose and the core point -- because you crystalize ideas further.
This makes improvements in these seemingly perpendicular directions counterintuitively correlated.
Ironically I found this specific PG essay uncharacteristically obtuse. This could have been much shorter.
Your comment also makes clear that this requires that the writer is attempting to make a true core point, rather than (for example) convince people of something it would be convenient for them to believe. If you are dealing with writers who are using their powers for ill purposes, then the skill of the prose may well be inversely correlated with their truth.
1. "An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation"
I thought dialogue and conversation were the same thing. What is the difference between them besides one being a cleaned up version of the other?
2. "If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs."
What does this even mean? Is it an exemple or an analogy? It sounds like at this point in the text there should be an analogy, but this sentence sounds like an example. So, which one is it?
Also, did anybody else got confused too?
- It’s an example of a statement that rests on a false premise
But more importantly, slots at e.g. Harvard are limited. Seats at ball games are limited. Etc. Most things in life are, in fact, limited.
Graham is purposefully misleading here, and he knows it.
What people fail to understand is that immigrants add to both the supply and demand side. An immigrant sitting in a stadium seat is taking a place that could have gone to someone else. But their presence also drives the capacity to build more seats. More demand for higher education results in more capacity for higher education.
You could hire a German craftsman with the quality of work that was present 30 years ago and the work would last for 30 years. But who is embarking on learning a trade only to be replaced by Poles, Romanians or (in the future) Ukrainians, who will then replace Poles and Romanians once Ukraine is in the EU?
The second is a counterfactual, and it is correctly deployed to help show the difference between a valid argument and a sound argument. Graham is saying that a good liar presents pleasing and valid but unsound arguments, or rather sophistry.
I think your confusion here is from reading comprehension problems.
systems that force complexity into legible forms often destroy valuable nuance, and richness.
- seeing like a state
That loses specific things. Understandability and nuance can be in conflict. Legibility is not specific to governments.
There's a book called 80/20 running and the concept is you should do 80% of your running running slow. To me, that's a very legible concept. It's very clear and small and easy to explain.
I think his book is well packaged by having a title that condenses all of his thoughts into one little sound bite concept.
But actually you know his advice about training for running is much more complex. And you know he puts together running plans and they have a thousand types of running and it's not always 80% slow running. Sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that. It's rarely exactly 80% slow running. There's a million pieces of nuance to how he would train people to run faster but to get the concept across to write it down, he makes it more legible. He simplifies it to 80% of your running should be slow.
To me, and perhaps I'm learning only to me, that concept is very related to the concept of legibility in seeing like a state. You're taking the complicated forest with many different types of trees and you're simplifying it down to one uniform thing. That's much easier to understand and easy to track and communicate. 97 trees in this area.
The same thing can happen to concepts. They have a lot of nuance and complexity but to write them it down so that they can best be communicated, you often need to remove a lot of that.
Strange take, given PG made his billions from actually building something of immense consequence (YC) & provably codifying a blueprint on building fast-growing companies in SV.
If PG was a prof at HBS, it is likely he'd be considered in the same bracket as Clayton Christensen.
I think PG's essays are (mostly) well-written, and are worth studying as examples of persuasive rhetoric.
But rhetoric has no morals and no relationship to truth.
Persuasion is what salespeople do. Grifters, lawyers, PR firms, politicians, and CEOs all make a living from being persuasive.
That doesn't mean you can trust them not to lie to you.
It also doesn't mean flawed rhetoric means flawed beliefs. Implying it does is itself a misleading rhetorical trick.
Of course, this video is just stupid accent comedy, but we should be careful not to draw too much from it. (Let's also set aside the specifics of making fried rice.) The implication of the section of the clip you linked is that the presenter (Hersha Patel) does not know how to make rice properly, and this is evidenced by her cooking it in too much water and draining it.
But this is not correct.
There are, in fact, many different varieties of rice, different cuisines that incorporate rice as a major component, and different styles of cooking rice. Cooking (certain varieties of long-grained? rice) in an open vessel, cooking with an excess of water, and draining the water afterwards is an extremely common and popular way to prepare it for use in some cuisines: e.g., https://youtu.be/TARO_R4cE24?t=420
When this video first made the rounds some years ago, it was surprising to see how confidently people would weigh-in on this topic, despite demonstrating very little background or knowledge. (There's a big difference between saying “that's not the appropriate way to do this in this circumstance” and “that's completely wrong,” and the former creates space to derive knowledge. After all, the dish in the video is a popular one, even in cultures that predominantly eat jasmine or basmati rice, and there are interesting variations in technique and flavour that arise as a consequence!)
> Mexican moms react to Rachael Ray trying to cook (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFN2g1FBgVA)
I similarly do not understand why these kind of reaction videos are popular. There are slightly better versions of this format (e.g., https://youtu.be/DsyfYJ5Ou3g?t=182) but they are drowned out by this kind of fluff. What does one really gain from interacting with such criticism?
Perhaps there is something to be learnt from these situations: ones where, equipped with just a little bit of knowledge, we derive unearned confidence, and use this confidence not to venture forth more boldly in search of knowledge, but to convince ourselves of our own superiority.
Similarly, I find Graham's writing so bad that it also makes me want to write.
(note: idlewords, if you see this, your blog is misbehaving at the moment. For example, PHP is complaining bitterly on this page right now: https://idlewords.com/2018/10/ )
Something I've mentioned before is I can't get over the fact that Paul has mulitiple people review his essays prior to publishing (which others have defended when I've made the same comment before).
I (as most people do) write clients every day with proposals or results or reports. Nobody reviews my writing first and the end recipients they either like what I say and pay me money and refer others to me or they don't. I certainly don't have the time to perseverate over the perfect phrase or paragraph '50 or 100 times' but yet I get results more often than I don't.
For fly.io I can see the appeal of unedited content as it can be rougher (as in breaks style guides and whatnot) and I like that roughness in blogs. E.g. you might get a British idiom come through or a more conversational style.
Paul having an editor isn't a luxury. His essays are edited because it's important for his business. He can easily justify a paying someone.
More to the point, we're contrasting Paul's essays to people who don't have the luxury. Paul's essays could be seen as less genuine, even if they seem wiser.
First he is not paying someone to edit these (any person I've seen appears to be unpaid and affiliated with HN in some way). Second he's not (as far as I can tell) angling these posts for business purposes (for example if the head of some corporation were doing that that would make sense).
What is more concerning is that I don't think many people who have read widely would consider Paul Graham to be a good writer, and yet people who care about him let him publish this article... He's definitely not a bad writer, and he generally communicates good ideas clearly, which is surely sufficient - and perhaps even appropriate - for his purposes. But he's not a Good Writer.
I've read many (perhaps even most) of his essays and there isn't a single one of them that I can actually remember, let alone any particular line or phrase that stands out. Though surely some of the ideas remain an influence in my general thought.
Conversely, there's plenty of writers who have seared many lines - and entire concepts - into my mind forever. I come back to them endlessly, even without pulling up the actual writing.
Is he really 'broadly published and read'? Most people outside of tech have no clue (and no interest) in what PG says.
Yes there is 'nothing wrong' except if you put yourself out there as having good unique thoughts why does it not show that you are lacking confidence to have others (again in this situation maybe in another I'd agree) always review what you are posting on your personal site or blog?
And very importantly he doesn't allow comments (on his blog) the only comments are on HN which he doesn't link to. It's unknown if he even reads the HN comments anymore. Or (last interaction over a year ago) comment on HN anymore (to defend his thoughts or position).
Many reasons for this of course but if you can't handle criticism and think so little of what people on HN says why are you publishing at all? That's your biggest audience isn't it?
(Side note YES HN is can be a brutal crowd for sure. Would be interesting if he ever publishes the changes he makes in the essays or what the people reviewing the essay have to say).
And seeking feedback from specific people who you respect is a vastly different thing than opening up your digital home to the slovenly masses to come and shit in with their comments.
Though, I think he probably should have sought feedback from some actual good writers for a topic like this...
1) court testimony which we know (from outside evidence) is either true or not true 2) scientific papers which we know to have been reproducible, or not 3) stock pundits predictions about the future of some company or other, which we know with hindsight to have been accurate or not
Much more convincing to me than any amount of good writing about writing, would be to have some empirical evidence.
There are objective features of writing, but quality is subjective.
Of course, as to the thesis of the essay, it is both trivial and uninteresting that people, including PG, tend to have views of the correctness of an idea and the quality of the presentation that are correlated.
It is interesting that PG thinks that this is anything more than a cognitive bias to be cautious about, though.
The way I interpret this is that it refers to claims that build on each other to come to a conclusion. So the way to test for truth is to somehow test each claim and the conclusion, which could vary in difficulty based on the kind of claims being made.
As this essay exemplifies, it is difficult to test for truth if you make broad claims that are so imprecise that they can't be verified or don't tell you anything interesting when verified using reasonable assumptions.
But I’m pretty sure this doesn’t hold for speech.
That's not what PG is saying in the article. He explicitly says that you can't conclude this.
Are the standards for whether something “sounds bad” based on the average person’s reading or the intended audience.
In its most general form (how the median article sounds to the median person), the argument is pretty vacuous.
Most writing discusses simple ideas and they should sound good (familiar, easy, pleasurable) to the median person.
But the most valuable kind of writing could sound tedious and filled with incomprehensible terminology to the median person but concise and interesting to the intended audience.
The current way the idea is stated doesn’t sound correct because you can convincingly defend all 4 quadrants of the truth table.
Related: I think pg would benefit from graphics here and there. Creating visuals like the 2x2 matrix you describe help tremendously to make ideas more comprehensible.
As pg describes it in the article, it's neither; it's based on the writer's judgment. The writer of course is writing for some intended audience, and their judgment of what sounds good or sounds bad should be influenced by that. But pg is describing the writer's process of judging what they write.
Note that the writer's judgement only serves as an initial proxy for how well the essay reads. This implies that the reader, whoever that is, is the true judge of how well it reads. My point is that that group is ill defined.
If it were sufficient for the writer to be the only judge of how well something reads, surely PG wouldn't feel the need to have other proofread his essays. And surely it is not sufficient for someone who lacks taste to judge their own writing as good.
The way I read that statement is the same as the startup advice of "build what you would yourself want". However you still have to validate that the market exists and is big.
There is really nothing profound in that paragraph anyway, all it is saying is that a writer should edit and proofread their work. That whole paragraph could be deleted honestly. It is obvious table stakes for one to edit their work. What differentiates good from bad is a matter of taste + who is judging it.
Please don’t get me wrong here, it’s nothing personal:
I think you might need to consider that the article isn’t as "good" and concise as you think it is.
If so many people misunderstood the concept then maybe it’s not the readers’ fault.
Don't we? What about the music that plays in the elevator, or while you're on hold on the phone?
Similarly for writing, I would imagine you read plenty of emails that are of more-or-less median writing quality. And yet, these emails may discuss pivotal decisions, where it is very important whether their arguments are logically correct.
Emails, etc, are just 'communication but over text' - it's 'writing' in the very basic sense but it's not the sort of writing people concerned with style and quality care about, either as consumers or producers. Me talking to the cashier at the store is not 'public speaking', neither I nor the cashier care it's not the Gettysburgh Address.
And like the commenter you're replying to, I think that LLMs today can write far better than your average coworker (assuming they don't go on a hallucinated tangent; then again some coworkers also do!).
So it's fair to compare LLMs and work emails.
Not to speak of work wiki pages (Confluence etc) describing technical things, decisions, policies, etc.
It seems to me there is no difference in kind between an email arguing for or examining an important decision or idea, and an "essay" on an important decision or idea.
I definitely don't think these documents are just "written speech". Some emails are—a quick message asking if you'll be in the office tomorrow, for example—but major ones require significantly more thought.
Why are there people who make a living as, say, newspaper opinion columnists or magazine staff writers? Or hell, why aren't we all rich substackers given that writing a substack is literally email?
But, in pg's defense, when it comes to his writing style and the quality of his prose, I think he's generally top notch, and even though I may disagree with him more often now, I appreciate the structure and clarity of his writing. Given how influential his essays have been, I think he's qualified to write about how his communication style makes an impact.
"pg's writing... always seemed to lack anything beyond a surface level of introspection"
with
"when it comes to his writing style and the quality of his prose, I think he's generally top notch"?
And "Given how influential his essays have been, I think he's qualified" - do you not see a problem with equating influence/popularity with quality/truth (let alone morality)?
[0]: a typical example: https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html
If you didn't tell me this is from PG I would think it's from some self help book.
He spends months chiseling each essay because he understands that clear thinking is expressed through clear prose. Dismissing that craft because he also knows Lisp is like trashing Stephen King’s storytelling because he can ride a bike.
If you only grant “literary merit” to people who never shipped a line of code, your definition’s too narrow for the real world—where ideas, not résumés, decide who we read.
I like Graham's writing, and defend it elsewhere in this thread, but that has such an obsequious and somehow macho smack to it, wow. One imagines Hercules chiseling his abs. If that's what his writing does for you, fair enough, but it sure is intense.
this is April 6th -
Essay was published May 24th, that is the better part of two months.Fact is you are most likely one of those:
Therefore, my advice to you is simple, care less about "what his writing does for me", and focus only on what is your own writing does for you.I pity you and the likes of you who are coming here to shit all over as if there aren't any better things to do during the day.
> I pity you and the likes of you who are coming here to shit all over as if there aren't any better things to do during the day.
Good lord. They said they like his writing, but found the particular tweet you shared pretentious. Your response to that light criticism is so disproportionate it reads sycophantic. This is a thread about good writing, I think criticizing anything is fair game.
> Fact is you are most likely one of those: https://x.com/paulg/status/1903066759302725698
So you're just blindly accusing someone who said they liked his writing of not reading his writing?
So many years later, I still haven't read a better writer (except maybe Scott Alexander). So, at least from my perspective, if anyone has the authority to write about good writing, it's this guy.
"Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this..." https://x.com/afraidofwasps/status/1177301482464526337?lang=...
I think at the core the problem (if you want to call it that) can be boiled down to the following:
"I am smart. That's why I was successful at what I did. So I need to prove to myself and others that it wasn't luck it was I am damn smart"
The problem with hubris is that if you took someone like Musk or PG and you kept them in some off the beaten path place ie not Silicon Valley, not NYC pick your hot location (and stipulate they couldn't move because of family or other obligations) and they weren't surrounded by others who were top notch (as a result of also being in the right place at the right time) there wouldn't be anything particularly notable about them.
Having gone myself to one of those 'good' universities I will say that Paul being at Harvard would certainly amplify this type of behavior by being surrounded early on at a formidable age by accomplished members of that community.
I wonder if you're just unaware of all of this, or if you just have an axe to grind here?
Have you read ANSI Common Lisp? Or even the introduction to it?
I have criticisms of Mr. Graham, but the man can write, and consistently. Some of the essays can be a tad too terse for me at times, but when he gets it right, his stuff can be exquisite.
Another example that comes immediately crashing to mind is Donald Knuth - have you read any of his tech writing? It's glorious.
Anyone who wants to claim there's a hard line between writing worthy of "literary merit" and tech writing is going to have their work cut out for them with those two already.
LLMs produce plausible, wrong, and very bad prose. Arguably evidence for his point, if anything.
Another related point: I've seen geeks who're solid in thinking but terrible at explaining what they think.
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in some other way and then write about them afterward — for example, if you build something, or conduct an experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such cases the ideas often live more in the work than the writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas are good.
Writers who have trouble expressing thoughts in a non-native language are not actually developing the idea in that language. That doesn't mean they are producing bad ideas, but it _might_ mean they won't produce good writing (in that non-native language).
I took the essay to be highlighting that if you use writing as a tool for thinking, clunky writing is likely to highlight places where your ideas themselves aren't clear or correct yet. The iterative process of refining the writing to "sound good" will help shape the ideas.
This seems to be a commonly expressed idea in other forms. For example, when thinking through ideas in code, the process of making the code more "beautiful" can also result in a clearer expression of more correct ideas.
No. It’s hard to sound right even when you are. And if you don’t, you might as well be wrong.
Communication is very hard - we have to first translate some scattered notions into a coherent idea, then find the right words to express that idea, then the people receiving them have to understand those words, translate them into their scattered ideas. And then do the same in the other direction.
The act of writing - and especially editing - helps us refine the ideas and find the words to best express them, and especially in a way that they are to have the intended effect on others.
I'm sure this essay has some good ideas at its core, but I don't think it had nearly enough editing...