Agreed this was well expressed, and I value this sort of reflection and cultural introspection, even if I lightly disagree with elements of the author's piece (that perhaps I'm wrongly overreading).
Per the well-expressed article, I agree there's a problem that lies can be bundled as truth through elegance (and I have strong views that there are broader forms of this, as the author alludes to, effectively style over/instead of substance, for instance in our ability to discern capability through hiring processes or overweight our assessment of the merit of ideas based on who expresses them and how), but I challenge (1) the premise that many situations are effectively represented by a singular "truth", in which case the representation of truth may be relevant even if possible to game, (2) that style / aesthetic is pointless (it might be "useless" for a definition of utility, but I contest a philosophical perspective that sees humanity and culture best exemplified by reductionism and efficiency), and (3) that style and beauty cannot be truth itself (stare at a painting that moves you, listen to a favourite song or one of the great works, look upon a beautiful scene in nature, or experience any of the myriad forms of love, and consider how that resonates with truth as much as any proof; indeed this last point is one of the themes across pg's work that still resonates strongly for me despite feeling increasingly detached from many of his other positions over time, and is well reflected by his book title of Hackers and Painters).
A friend of mine uses Apple Reminders to rank his most favorite sentences of all time. It struck me that authority emerges through which ones continue to stick around (as forwarded ideas).
Writing that is aimed at the truth should be written to best convey it. But truth is not the only aim of writing, and it's most often not the primary aim.
Truth is also not the aim of these:
> Suits for interviews. Combed hair for dates. Makeup to feel prettier.
The latter is for the pursuit of beauty. The first is because the almighty British empire started wearing suits and we all followed.
Wearing a grubby t-shirt to a job is not because you value truth so much. It's failing to value the other things.
The lads on the Manhattan project almost surely dressed better than a truth-loving rationalist.
This effect is why pseudoprofound bullshit works so well, like pretty much all of the “new age.”
It strikes me as a broken heuristic. We use elegance as a proxy for intelligence and education and thus likelihood of something being true, but being a proxy means it can be cheated and gamed. You can invest effort in just getting good at language and then use that skill to fool people into thinking you know something.
Language is one way we use to estimate the status of other people.
Someone who is eloquent or aesthetically pleasing is more likely to be high status, and thus it’s personally beneficial for me to associate myself with them so some of their status might trickle down to me.
I feel that language is the refuge of educated idiots. You can take very simple ideas and wrap them with enough verbose and dense prose such that they take a while before a reader can unpack them and realise there's nothing new inside. It's almost a reflection of peoples' egos rather than their ideas.
As a counterpoint we have the quote: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
Yes, what is beautiful does please. But why should it do so? Because beauty is good and true. Indeed, in classical philosophy, while truth is being as known (the epistemic stance; as it relates to the intellect), and the good is being as desired (the ethical stance; as it relates to the will), beauty is being understood as pleasing (the aesthetic stance; as it relates to perception and to contemplation).
In short: True -> known by the intellect; Good -> desired by the will; Beautiful -> contemplated with delight.
The trouble is not beauty, but the author’s lack of discernment. Is a sentence really beautiful if it is untrue? What about if it is written using beautiful calligraphy? Well, under the artistic aspect of handwriting, yes, it is truly beautiful and true in that respect; but the meaning of the sentence is different from its expressed form (which also has content). The two can vary in truth and beauty independently.
Perhaps this is why we take a certain kind of greater offense at lies told to use sweetly. A course vulgarian is already low and hideous in his speech, and his lies will more closely correspond to the coarseness of his manners in proportionality. But a lie spoken with refinement almost suggests duplicity, between the promise of truth in the beauty of the medium - an honor that is proper to truth - and the ugliness and untruth of the message. The truth should be honored with beautiful expression, but here, it is almost as if we’ve been lied to twice: in the content per se and in the form of the content as a promise of the truth of the content by implication. It is a perversion, which already reveals that there is a normative relation between truth, goodness, and beauty that has been violated. We presume it for this reason.
Now, if someone is undiscerning, he will fail to discern the various elements in play and fail to judge them accordingly as distinct elements. If a man lacks taste, he might even consider beautiful what is actually mediocre or gaudy or ugly. If he lacks what we might call perseverance or a kind of stamina - in short: if he is weak - then he might be unwilling to let go or refuse something pleasing or seemingly pleasurable that is attached to something that may not be so good (for instance, the glutton who cannot refuse the pleasure of good food, even though the excess is killing him).
It’s good that the author at least recognizes his own weakness, but the conclusion at the end simply does not follow. Ugliness is not “authentic” or virtuous or honest. Indeed, by casting it as a virtue, one falls into the same or even worse trap: the presumption of goodness or truth on the part of what is ugly. One will presume that a slovenly interview candidate must be good, because he is slovenly, which is ridiculously stupid. So now you face a new possibility: the slovenly mediocrity. A double blow. And if beauty can work in the favor of a candidate, then why can’t ugliness work against him? It goes both ways.
If we had more beauty - in dress, in manners, in speech, in our surroundings - I think perhaps the “seductive” power the author cannot seem to resist would be less, well, seductive. He would not be so starved for beauty. It would not be such a rarity that he would feel compelled to latch onto the occasional occurrence. What we need is more beauty not less. In the 1950s, no one thought a man in a suit was remarkable. Today, wearing a suit is much less common. In some industries like tech in the last couple of decades, suits may even be viewed with disdain and hostility. The “dress code” forbids them.
W.r.t. poetry and prose, in either case, a fully beautiful piece of poetry or prose does shine forth with truth. In the former case, the beauty of the form takes on a greater significance, but the meaning is still its lifeblood. The form is there to relay the meaning through skillful appeal to pathos and use of imagery, metaphor, simile, analogy, rhythm, and wordplay. The ...
Haha this is true. It reminds me of when Bootstrap first showed up on the scene. Now that version of it looks laughably outdated, but it suddenly meant you could no longer judge if something was legit by whether it looked kinda good. It took someone with an eye for detail to make things look good and everyone had components that rendered as grey box if they weren't careful.
So you make the beautiful splash page to show you can. But then suddenly it became trivial. No longer a useful signal.
Perhaps language is like that. Once you could not do it without also being smart. Now (in the era of modern education and literacy) it is within reach of many (perhaps all), so even the most stupid of sentences can be rendered poetic.
> Why do we ponder over sentences that rearrange words into appealing order,
> An ice cube melts with quiet discipline, surrendering its edges before its core, shaping the drink long before flavor has a chance to speak. Even in something so small, form decides outcome.
This doesn't sound good to me at all, it sounds like whoever wrote it is either an LLM, a lazy student padding the wordcount their essay, or thinks too highly of themselves.
If there's any reason that people think more of it, it's that the non-straightforward manner in which it's written forced us to process the words rather than filter them out as the bullshit they are.
> and disregard sentences as meaningless when they sound disorderly and bland?
> Climate change is killing people. I am upset when people die. I want polar bears to live longer.
They're just too short and do not contain any explanation/justification/making a case for the core claim.
I get conflicted feelings about dismissing detailed prose as doing nothing more than wrapping weak ideas in flowery disguise. Certainly, it’s very possible to write pretentiously. And more than that I’d argue it is __easy__. But simple, straightforward sentences are also __easy__.
I think in both cases, easily written simple sentences and easily written pretentious ones, the author fools themselves with a false understanding. Instead, when they’ve really considered the words and the meaning — they’ve extensively thought and worked on what they are thinking — then writing either way can be impactful.
I sometimes have an idea or concept which I cannot put into words, at one point I sat down for an hour trying and couldn't sketch out what was in my mind from any angle.
I wonder if it's a limitation of my linguistic capabilities, insanity or if language simply cannot describe certain things.
The so-called Arab spring has shown us how manipulation works by using favored slogan words that bypass our logic. Islamists often repeat a hilarious slogan: ‘Islam is the solution’. Don’t worry about questioning ‘solution to what’, or ‘how’. Illiterate or lesser educated people will support that identity factor that may also attract educated folks.
This way language could also be seen as a tool for reduction. Complex realities are messy, but language allows us to "package" them into neat little boxes as with politicians and preachers as great examples. They come up with slogans as solutions: A weak idea can be turned into a catchy three-word slogan. It feels powerful because it’s easy to remember, even if it doesn't actually solve the problem. Language also uses metaphors and "loaded" words to bypass our logic and go straight to our feelings. Once you're emotionally invested, you stop checking if the idea actually makes sense, it sounds like common sense.
Now which one for of language is the most effective: Spoken, Printed, digital?
Elegance is NOT bullshit. Elegance is efficiency. Although you do need to be very literate to see why. To elaborate, lets use LLM's as an example.
In LLM's we have tokens and tokens represent concepts or partial concepts. Some LLM's use relatively few tokens, while others use more. GPT 4 used about 100k tokens, while GPT-4o got much better performance by using 200k tokens. LLM's that use the most tokens are typically the most efficient.
They're more efficient because they can represent more concepts with single tokens when compared to smaller models. The same is true of human language.
People with larger vocabularies (of words, or maths, or images, or whatever) can more efficiently express, and therefore process the relationships between, concepts. In fact more words, means there are literally more thoughts they are capable of having. Language constrains thought, but it also enables it. You can't think of a thing, if you can't conceptualize it and whether your vocabulary is words, maths, or images we all have a vocabulary of concepts.
Most relevantly here: The WAYS in which those tokens/words/thoughts are arranged matters. The difference between a model that's been "fine tuned" to a task, and one that hasn't is the efficiency with which it represents the relationships between the most relevant tokens. Again, human language (and human thought) is the same. Elegant language is language that is arranged to express complicated concepts using the fewest tokens possible. Every poet and every teacher know this instinctively. Good authors often learn it the hard way.
Modern readers often miss subtext and other more subtle forms of communication because they're bad readers. That's a different problem, and not the fault of the authors.
Any recommendations for writers or bloggers who write plainly/unpretentiously, but have really interesting ideas? First thought was maybe John Salvatier [1] or Adam Mastroianni [2].
It's clever that the the author provides both his essay and an example at the same time! Sorry, that joke felt obligatory.
Miscellaneous reactions, in an elegant bulleted list:
- "Simple" sentences are certainly expressive, but "elegant" wording expands the set of meanings that can be conveyed. And vice-versa
- I think a lot of the meat of a sentence is conveyed in the connotations of words and not their literal meaning. "Simple" wording is necessarily more common, and therefore will necessarily have a less specific or reliable connotation. This is a blessing and a curse.
- More subjectively, I think ideal writing is also a window into the author's experience of the world (or moreso whatever topic they're writing about), and as a reader, I want that to come through in an authentic way that matches the author's experience. So, using a thesaurus and agonizing over sentence structure might end up 'elegant' but still vaguely bad, but on the other hand if you agonize over a sentence and come up with something more "sophisticated" that ultimately rings truer to you, then go for it.
- ^ The above points aren't direct rebuttals to TFA, but I think they relate to why elegance can be appealing.
You don't change people's minds by telling them the truth. You change people's minds by letting them discover the truth on their own. People want to believe what they already believe, so a direct argument that goes against their belief is more likely to harden them against the argument than change their mind. "Elegance", or an indirect approach, softens the argument. The parts ancillary to the argument itself creep into the person's mind, make connections there among other things they already know (including of course the concept that "elegance is truth"), and prime the other person's belief system to accept the argument when it's finally presented. By making connections with flowery language and things-that-aren't-the-argument, the argument settles in as a highly-connected vertex in the belief system instead of a brick thrown in through the window.
To some extent this misses the distinction between style and substance. People who read a lot, and/or who evolved at a time when critical reading was an essential skill, can be relied on to distinguish between conveying an idea versus seducing a reader through one's style of expression.
Both Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain began their careers at print newspapers, where every word counted. They learned how to say much with few words. No amount of clever prose can substitute for this ability to set aside style in favor of substance.
The title gives more credit to the argument than the article :) someone also mentioned this, and I think we are kidding?
I’ve had debate coaches in both high school and college complain about my “academic utterances” and it has taken awhile to unlearn them. I think I have won— partially because I no longer make it a habit to sound cool on the internet (or in the meatspace). Partially also because I’m older now, so I don’t care. But looking back, I think that ego is the primary motivator for the prose, if I’m being honest.
The secondary motivator being our education: the complete bag-of-words LLM approach to writing and reading we all took to get A’s on our exams… you are forced to read one metric crap ton of 1700s prose, and if you catch the damn cadence and harness it to sound good, you are rewarded by your English teacher. This conditioning sticks around for awhile.
Some of you speak to the tertiary excuse: that we’re trying to convey something deeper to our audience than words alone can convey. Like you dive deep into meter, think about enunciation and the effects of sub vocalization (where hard consonants and cadence matters), or making coherent imagery out of wall of text wordslop.
I think it’s fine, but maybe you should think about whether you are alienating your listener the deeper you go.
I was hotly jealous of Kant again, was just now reading Critique of Reason on me old jailbroken Kindle. I had grandiose ideas for inflicting that prose on people everywhere I go, so that maybe we could fix stupidity “up top”. But maybe that imagery was for his time and we are mistaken to try to emulate it.
Ironically I was re reading kant because I was afraid I am getting mentally flabby with age. This article happily reminds me that the adipose was strong when I was younger though.
26 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 43.4 ms ] threadPer the well-expressed article, I agree there's a problem that lies can be bundled as truth through elegance (and I have strong views that there are broader forms of this, as the author alludes to, effectively style over/instead of substance, for instance in our ability to discern capability through hiring processes or overweight our assessment of the merit of ideas based on who expresses them and how), but I challenge (1) the premise that many situations are effectively represented by a singular "truth", in which case the representation of truth may be relevant even if possible to game, (2) that style / aesthetic is pointless (it might be "useless" for a definition of utility, but I contest a philosophical perspective that sees humanity and culture best exemplified by reductionism and efficiency), and (3) that style and beauty cannot be truth itself (stare at a painting that moves you, listen to a favourite song or one of the great works, look upon a beautiful scene in nature, or experience any of the myriad forms of love, and consider how that resonates with truth as much as any proof; indeed this last point is one of the themes across pg's work that still resonates strongly for me despite feeling increasingly detached from many of his other positions over time, and is well reflected by his book title of Hackers and Painters).
Truth is also not the aim of these:
> Suits for interviews. Combed hair for dates. Makeup to feel prettier.
The latter is for the pursuit of beauty. The first is because the almighty British empire started wearing suits and we all followed.
Wearing a grubby t-shirt to a job is not because you value truth so much. It's failing to value the other things.
The lads on the Manhattan project almost surely dressed better than a truth-loving rationalist.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
It strikes me as a broken heuristic. We use elegance as a proxy for intelligence and education and thus likelihood of something being true, but being a proxy means it can be cheated and gamed. You can invest effort in just getting good at language and then use that skill to fool people into thinking you know something.
As a counterpoint we have the quote: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
Yes, what is beautiful does please. But why should it do so? Because beauty is good and true. Indeed, in classical philosophy, while truth is being as known (the epistemic stance; as it relates to the intellect), and the good is being as desired (the ethical stance; as it relates to the will), beauty is being understood as pleasing (the aesthetic stance; as it relates to perception and to contemplation).
In short: True -> known by the intellect; Good -> desired by the will; Beautiful -> contemplated with delight.
The trouble is not beauty, but the author’s lack of discernment. Is a sentence really beautiful if it is untrue? What about if it is written using beautiful calligraphy? Well, under the artistic aspect of handwriting, yes, it is truly beautiful and true in that respect; but the meaning of the sentence is different from its expressed form (which also has content). The two can vary in truth and beauty independently.
Perhaps this is why we take a certain kind of greater offense at lies told to use sweetly. A course vulgarian is already low and hideous in his speech, and his lies will more closely correspond to the coarseness of his manners in proportionality. But a lie spoken with refinement almost suggests duplicity, between the promise of truth in the beauty of the medium - an honor that is proper to truth - and the ugliness and untruth of the message. The truth should be honored with beautiful expression, but here, it is almost as if we’ve been lied to twice: in the content per se and in the form of the content as a promise of the truth of the content by implication. It is a perversion, which already reveals that there is a normative relation between truth, goodness, and beauty that has been violated. We presume it for this reason.
Now, if someone is undiscerning, he will fail to discern the various elements in play and fail to judge them accordingly as distinct elements. If a man lacks taste, he might even consider beautiful what is actually mediocre or gaudy or ugly. If he lacks what we might call perseverance or a kind of stamina - in short: if he is weak - then he might be unwilling to let go or refuse something pleasing or seemingly pleasurable that is attached to something that may not be so good (for instance, the glutton who cannot refuse the pleasure of good food, even though the excess is killing him).
It’s good that the author at least recognizes his own weakness, but the conclusion at the end simply does not follow. Ugliness is not “authentic” or virtuous or honest. Indeed, by casting it as a virtue, one falls into the same or even worse trap: the presumption of goodness or truth on the part of what is ugly. One will presume that a slovenly interview candidate must be good, because he is slovenly, which is ridiculously stupid. So now you face a new possibility: the slovenly mediocrity. A double blow. And if beauty can work in the favor of a candidate, then why can’t ugliness work against him? It goes both ways.
If we had more beauty - in dress, in manners, in speech, in our surroundings - I think perhaps the “seductive” power the author cannot seem to resist would be less, well, seductive. He would not be so starved for beauty. It would not be such a rarity that he would feel compelled to latch onto the occasional occurrence. What we need is more beauty not less. In the 1950s, no one thought a man in a suit was remarkable. Today, wearing a suit is much less common. In some industries like tech in the last couple of decades, suits may even be viewed with disdain and hostility. The “dress code” forbids them.
W.r.t. poetry and prose, in either case, a fully beautiful piece of poetry or prose does shine forth with truth. In the former case, the beauty of the form takes on a greater significance, but the meaning is still its lifeblood. The form is there to relay the meaning through skillful appeal to pathos and use of imagery, metaphor, simile, analogy, rhythm, and wordplay. The ...
eloquent words aren’t true.
Tao Te Ching – Verse 81
So you make the beautiful splash page to show you can. But then suddenly it became trivial. No longer a useful signal.
Perhaps language is like that. Once you could not do it without also being smart. Now (in the era of modern education and literacy) it is within reach of many (perhaps all), so even the most stupid of sentences can be rendered poetic.
> An ice cube melts with quiet discipline, surrendering its edges before its core, shaping the drink long before flavor has a chance to speak. Even in something so small, form decides outcome.
This doesn't sound good to me at all, it sounds like whoever wrote it is either an LLM, a lazy student padding the wordcount their essay, or thinks too highly of themselves.
If there's any reason that people think more of it, it's that the non-straightforward manner in which it's written forced us to process the words rather than filter them out as the bullshit they are.
> and disregard sentences as meaningless when they sound disorderly and bland?
> Climate change is killing people. I am upset when people die. I want polar bears to live longer.
They're just too short and do not contain any explanation/justification/making a case for the core claim.
I think in both cases, easily written simple sentences and easily written pretentious ones, the author fools themselves with a false understanding. Instead, when they’ve really considered the words and the meaning — they’ve extensively thought and worked on what they are thinking — then writing either way can be impactful.
No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.
I wonder if it's a limitation of my linguistic capabilities, insanity or if language simply cannot describe certain things.
In LLM's we have tokens and tokens represent concepts or partial concepts. Some LLM's use relatively few tokens, while others use more. GPT 4 used about 100k tokens, while GPT-4o got much better performance by using 200k tokens. LLM's that use the most tokens are typically the most efficient.
They're more efficient because they can represent more concepts with single tokens when compared to smaller models. The same is true of human language.
People with larger vocabularies (of words, or maths, or images, or whatever) can more efficiently express, and therefore process the relationships between, concepts. In fact more words, means there are literally more thoughts they are capable of having. Language constrains thought, but it also enables it. You can't think of a thing, if you can't conceptualize it and whether your vocabulary is words, maths, or images we all have a vocabulary of concepts.
Most relevantly here: The WAYS in which those tokens/words/thoughts are arranged matters. The difference between a model that's been "fine tuned" to a task, and one that hasn't is the efficiency with which it represents the relationships between the most relevant tokens. Again, human language (and human thought) is the same. Elegant language is language that is arranged to express complicated concepts using the fewest tokens possible. Every poet and every teacher know this instinctively. Good authors often learn it the hard way.
Modern readers often miss subtext and other more subtle forms of communication because they're bad readers. That's a different problem, and not the fault of the authors.
[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
[2] https://www.experimental-history.com/
Miscellaneous reactions, in an elegant bulleted list:
- "Simple" sentences are certainly expressive, but "elegant" wording expands the set of meanings that can be conveyed. And vice-versa
- I think a lot of the meat of a sentence is conveyed in the connotations of words and not their literal meaning. "Simple" wording is necessarily more common, and therefore will necessarily have a less specific or reliable connotation. This is a blessing and a curse.
- More subjectively, I think ideal writing is also a window into the author's experience of the world (or moreso whatever topic they're writing about), and as a reader, I want that to come through in an authentic way that matches the author's experience. So, using a thesaurus and agonizing over sentence structure might end up 'elegant' but still vaguely bad, but on the other hand if you agonize over a sentence and come up with something more "sophisticated" that ultimately rings truer to you, then go for it.
- ^ The above points aren't direct rebuttals to TFA, but I think they relate to why elegance can be appealing.
Both Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain began their careers at print newspapers, where every word counted. They learned how to say much with few words. No amount of clever prose can substitute for this ability to set aside style in favor of substance.
I’ve had debate coaches in both high school and college complain about my “academic utterances” and it has taken awhile to unlearn them. I think I have won— partially because I no longer make it a habit to sound cool on the internet (or in the meatspace). Partially also because I’m older now, so I don’t care. But looking back, I think that ego is the primary motivator for the prose, if I’m being honest.
The secondary motivator being our education: the complete bag-of-words LLM approach to writing and reading we all took to get A’s on our exams… you are forced to read one metric crap ton of 1700s prose, and if you catch the damn cadence and harness it to sound good, you are rewarded by your English teacher. This conditioning sticks around for awhile.
Some of you speak to the tertiary excuse: that we’re trying to convey something deeper to our audience than words alone can convey. Like you dive deep into meter, think about enunciation and the effects of sub vocalization (where hard consonants and cadence matters), or making coherent imagery out of wall of text wordslop.
I think it’s fine, but maybe you should think about whether you are alienating your listener the deeper you go.
I was hotly jealous of Kant again, was just now reading Critique of Reason on me old jailbroken Kindle. I had grandiose ideas for inflicting that prose on people everywhere I go, so that maybe we could fix stupidity “up top”. But maybe that imagery was for his time and we are mistaken to try to emulate it.
Ironically I was re reading kant because I was afraid I am getting mentally flabby with age. This article happily reminds me that the adipose was strong when I was younger though.