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.
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.
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 :)
> 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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
This is wrong in so many different ways it's like an art piece. Every part of it that tries to defend the central thesis is actually disproving it. It's kind of funny actually. Here's a dude that's been writing for 30 years, and not only is his writing bad, his ideas are crap. It has the feel of somebody who's completely convinced of his own ideas, despite the fact that they're based solely on his personal experience.
I have a simple proof that the thesis is wrong. Take a moron, and have him work on a farm for 30 years. Then have him write a book about running a farm. Now, he's going to sound like a moron, and will write very poorly. But most everything he writes will be right. Despite his bad writing, he can still communicate his observations of how and why simple things work. So it's not hard to be right while sounding wrong. You just have to be a moron.
I don't think your proof works. Here is a line from the article where he elaborates on what he means:
> By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas right means developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail. So getting the ideas right is not just a matter of saying true things, but saying the right true things.
I'm guessing that a moron with 30 year's experience on a farm would not successfully do that, even when writing a book on farming.
I think the the essay is largely about exploring ideas deeply. And in much the same way a chef might stress that you must add the eggs one-by-one or whatever other culinary unfounded superstition they employ, your farm moron will stress always plowing east-to-west or something---both processes may yield a perfectly fine product, but neither has actually understood what's actually going on. They may be expert practitioners, but they are no experts.
The point about end-notes being a mechanism to ease the strain of fitting tree-like ideas into a linear essay is lovely. It brings to mind David Foster Wallace's writing, which is obsessively end-noted and if you listen to his speeches, you can see that he basically tortures himself in sanding down his ideas, much like PG says.
PG's ideas in here, to the extent that I agree with them (which is not fully), does break down for ideas. Example being: brilliant engineers who are incredibly capable at having ideas and executing against them but incredibly incapable of communicating said ideas. Their ideas are very true, evidenced by their ability to produce real results, but also oftentimes ugly when communicated.
A final counterpoint is JFK's eulogy, which sounds amazing, but, after the initial emotional appeal wore off, I realized doesn't really have a strong unified thread running through it, and is thus forgettable in terms of the truths it ostensibly delivers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiDUbaBL9E. Compare to "This Is Water" by DFW, which doesn't have the same epic prose, but is maybe the most true-seeming speech I've ever heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw. It could be that PG's ideas were never intended for spoken speeches, but whatever this is still an adjacent truth != beauty example.
A tree structure of ideas naturally fits into a linear essay of text, so I don't understand this. The opening paragraphs of a section of text are a broad theme on which subsequent paragraphs expand. Paragraphs also carry a similar structure in their sentences, and every great essay builds large trees of logical ideas within a linear rhetorical structure. A footnote as an expansion is a crutch: either the text of the footnote is important enough to appear on the page, in which case you should generally find a way to put it in the prose, or it is not, in which case you should omit it entirely.
The only truly good use of expository footnotes is to expand on things that the reader might be interested in (and point to further reading), but are orthogonal to the main argument of the essay. They are not for expansion of the tree of logical arguments present in the body of the essay.
...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.
>M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error.
I don't know if Paul has much of a reputation as a technologist among tech lay people, but this quote reminds me of Paul's fame as a thinker among tech people.
Paul Graham, as a writer who writes sentences that sound bad and who promulgates ideas that are stupid, is an expert in neither good sounding sentences nor sound ideas, hence is unqualified to hold forth on the topic.
I was wondering if I’m the only one who thinks that way. He might be a better writer than some (including myself), but that’s a pretty low bar. The ideas are neither novel nor deep, and the writing is subpar.
I pasted the essay into ChatGPT, and this is what it said (just for fun; I’m not taking ChatGPT’s evaluation seriously.)
The essay is superficial, mildly derivative, and wrapped in a tone that suggests insight without delivering much. If it reads like someone thinking out loud and convincing themselves they’ve discovered something profound — that’s because it kind of is.
It’s not wrong. It’s just lightweight.
So why do people praise essays like this?
Because they’re:
- Readable: The ideas feel accessible and comforting.
- Anecdotal: They use lived experience rather than abstract reasoning.
- Flatter the reader: They make you feel smart for agreeing with something that feels intuitive.
But that’s not the same as being deep or challenging.
Dear Paul,
I'm sure it has been said elsewhere in the comments, but ironically I struggle to agree with this essay...which happens to be nicely and succinctly written.
I'm arguing that it's your own bias generated from the synthesis of your own idea that selects for sentences that effectively express the idea, and nothing to do with the writing itself.
The anecdote about the puddle who suddenly gains consciousness and remarks that the world is so perfectly formed around it, that it's proof of divine creation, seems to apply here.
The author generates an idea and is trying to articulate it. A well written sentence or paragraph that flows, pleases the author. This is because the idea they are trying to express is done in a satisfying way.
Thus the more pleasing the writing to the author, the more efficiently it articulates the original idea.
It's the author's bias, based on their own idea, that defines the level of 'pleasingness'.
Lastly, Paul, do you think the LLMs are any less satisfied with their confident and irrational hallucinations, than they are with their more well supported claims? Further, if you weren't aware that the output was ridiculous, would you be able to tell a accurate statement from a false one?
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.
Lacan developed the idea of "deferred understanding" in his clinical practice and (infamously) deployed it in his teaching as well. It sounds a little suspicious at first, but it's not difficult to grasp what it is or why it might be beneficial in certain contexts where repression is faced. For example, it's a cliche on the left that far more people like the idea of socialism when it's described to them piecemeal without being labeled as such than would be willing to endorse "socialism" by name. Drawing out that tacit endorsement is a matter of "deferring understanding"--bypassing someone's resistance to an idea they don't understand well, but nevertheless have strong feelings about, by introducing them to it in a somewhat confusing way, so that they come to understand it better before they realize what exactly it is that they're coming to understand. In Lacan's approach understanding is a specific process with its own benefits and drawbacks, rather than the universal purpose of all communication, nor beneficial for every purpose communication might be engaged in to pursue. Confusing writing is like the proverbial knife that can be used to injure or, in the hands of a surgeon, to heal. This is why art students sometimes practice drawing images that have been turned upside down, so that they can focus on the details that are there in front of their eyes without being distracted by their own comprehension standing in for the colors and shapes actually present: "this is an image of a cow and I know what a cow is supposed to look like, so once I have recognized that it is a cow, there is no longer any need to keep looking." One of the big leaps that art students make is in learning to rigorously look at what they're drawing beyond merely seeing and recognizing what it is, which is the usual everyday way of looking. In the same way Lacan taught his students to rigorously listen to their patients and all the little oddities in the way they describe their problems that might otherwise be dismissed out of hand by a less attentive doctor who too quickly decides they know what is going on. This way they might avoid being fooled by their own understanding before they've had a chance to engage with the irreducible complexity and uniqueness of this or that specific neurosis. Understanding is not always the right tool for the job, or at least not the right tool for every step of every communicative job.
Isn't that the same thing as the oft-repeated "if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough", which is a saying I really, really, really dislike a lot, because understanding is one thing, and transferring that understanding is a skill unto its own.
This doesn't seem true in the age of LLMs, which are notorious for being confidently incorrect.
In fact, this whole article seems out of touch with the realities of where AI is going. In my opinion, good writing is dead. Or rather, good writing is commoditized. Good ideas are still very much alive, but if you have an idea and bad prose, iterating with an LLM will have a better end state than rereading your paragraph 50 times.
That said, if you're only writing to internalize your own ideas (journaling) then this makes more sense.
>You can't simultaneously optimize two unrelated things;
What kind of illogical nonsense is this? I found the speed my car produces the best MPG and simultaneously found the best volume for the stereo.
I suppose his overall conclusion works in one way, the article is both poorly written, and devoid of anything useful. Nobody would read it if it wasn't from pg.
An even better example is just a few sentences back in the essay: The speed of a car has nothing to do with its color, and yet you can improve the speed without changing the color.
> 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.
So, we have 1) Can't conclude that beautiful writing is true, and 2) Writing that is not beautiful usually has bad ideas too.
But he immediately follows this up with:
> Indeed, the two senses of good writing are more like two ends of the same thing.
How does this idea logically follow from the previous statement? Indeed?
I don't agree with other commenters that PG's writing here is good. The writing is bad, and so are the ideas.
What are people smoking to think PG is such a great thinker and/or writer?
You can't optimize for two things at the same time in the /same system/.
In your example, the best volume for the stereo will change based on how fast you're going. Noise from air going around your car will require a slightly louder volume. It technically goes the other way too, I'm sure louder music will affect your mileage slightly, reducing your MPG due to increased power draw. Realistically it won't matter, but they do exist in the same system.
You can absolutely optimize for two things at the same time in different systems. The ideal speed optimizing for MPG in different cars aren't really linked and can be found independently.
> I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.
Paul's point would make sense if his case was about greater verisimilitude, which might sound like splitting hairs, but is an important phenomenon in philosophy. Many dictators have sounded good but their core messages were abhorrent.
In the same vein, there are thousands of fiction books, some more brilliantly written than others, but nothing in that spectrum makes any of their stories any more real or true.
> I know it's true from writing.
Well, some things just appear to be true. I admire Paul's writings and I believe his honesty in trying to get to the truth, but in this specific essay, it seems like what he's alluding to is the appearance of truth. Good writing makes core ideas look more true, but it can't objectively have a relation to truth itself, only with our description of said idea.
I think a strong sense of confidence (perhaps overconfidence) and inflated self-worth are likely closely related to increased likelihood of success. “Those who dare, win” and all that.
But I think most of the opinions and advice rich, successful people like to share is just a side-effect, not a productive output, of these traits.
I'm solidly in the camp that believes that if Graham wasn't rich no one would read this stuff or claim to admire it. He also should have run this through a spell checker.
I think it’s true that the impactfullness of his essays has gone down in the recent years. However, note that a lot of people that gathered at HN in the early days came because of his early essays, such as Hackers and Painters. Me included.
> The clue to the answer is something I noticed 30 years ago when I was doing the layout for my first book. Sometimes when you're laying out text you have bad luck. For example, you get a section that runs one line longer than the page. I don't know what ordinary typesetters do in this situation, but what I did was rewrite the section to make it a line shorter. You'd expect such an arbitrary constraint to make the writing worse. But I found, to my surprise, that it never did. I always ended up with something I liked better.
This is a well-known phenomenon, and yes, "ordinary" writers and typesetters do this too. These visual loose ends are called Widows, Orphans and Runts [1]. Writing that is less visually ugly on the page will seem to read better.
> Because the writer is the first reader
This seems like a derivative of a zen-like koan from jazz musician Winton Marsalis' "Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is the player" [2]. Interesting that he immediately starts talking about music there too.
> 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 think I would have enjoyed this read more if it was clear at the top that by the time he'd finished writing it, he disagreed with his initial assertion ("I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.") Without that, the article kind of feels like bait, and reading it plus writing this comment feels like me taking it.
I think I agree with the central point here. I think the key phrase is “internal consistency”. This is also very true of programming. It’s difficult to build good software without having a handle on the subject matter (and/or a domain expert to get feedback from).
But often writing is also a process of discovery. Maybe you are trying to write something that hasn’t been written about before. This is like building software without a spec. You can still write well and be irrelevant, just as one can build great software upon bad assumptions and fail to sell it. This doesn’t make it bad writing in its own right, but it also may not be very useful to anyone. In my opinion both software and prose should be produced for a purpose.
Thus, if there’s no meaning to it, writing, like software, falls pretty flat.
Interested to know how much Immanuel Kant pg has read. Kant's whole project was about grappling with how the mind structures experience—and how language mediates, rather than transparently transmits, thought. You can never fully get to the thing in itself.
I can see how re-editing can make the ideas more coherent within pg's frame of representation, but I'm struggling with the idea that it makes them any more true.
I would like to imagine that pg's obsession with pared-down, simple sentences is a post-traumatic stress response to an early encounter with Kant's prose.
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?
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.
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.
I’m a sucker for when the form serves as an example for the author’s idea.
> If it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and you just state them. But other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications.
From William Zinsser’s On Writing Well:
> The growing acceptance of the split in-finitive, or of the preposition at the end of a sentence, proves that formal syntax can't hold the fort forever against a speaker's more comfortable way of getting the same thing said—and it shouldn't. I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
Another from the same book:
> CREEPING NOUNISM. This is a new American disease that strings two or three nouns together where one noun—or, better yet, one verb-will do. Nobody goes broke now; we have money problem areas. It no longer rains; we have precipitation activity or a thunderstorm probability situation. Please, let it rain.
> Today as many as four or five concept nouns will attach themselves to each other, like a molecule chain. Here's a brilliant specimen I recently found: "Communication facilitation skills development intervention." Not a person in sight, or a working verb. I think it's a program to help students write better.
> the rhythm of writing has to match the ideas in it
It's hard for me to tell what the point of the author was from just the part you quoted, but why does this have to be the case? I don't have trouble believing that many complex ideas require complex language to describe them, but the idea that it's literally a requirement in order for the writing to be "good" rather than just a usual circumstance isn't obvious to me. If anything, the complexity of this quote just seems to hide the dubious premise.
> 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.
Most people don't want to spend much time reading 'median human' writing so the claim that LLMs are 'better', even if true, doesn't really say that much. We don't listen to median human music either.
> 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."
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.
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 do not agree with the premise of the article --- writing that sounds good is more likely to be right. I've seen enough beautiful lies, fictionalized versions of the truth, and cunning orchestrations of a string of well-woven sentences, none of which had any intention of revealing the truth, but of convincing the reader to believe it's true.
I propose the following -- writing the sounds good manipulates the reader into thinking that it is right. Feels better to believe it.
> Bruce Lee:
Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch.
After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch (jab, uppercut, etc) .
Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch.
I think a lot of that "shaking of the bin" to compress objects brings you closer to the final and concise level of talking about punching. That middle section is verbose, petty.
A great example of this is Nietzsche's "god is dead, and we have killed him." He just skips over the details, and nerd-bait debate about atheism that had been ongoing since Spinoza. There's no contribution he could have made to that debate. All had already been said. Nietzsche assumes the readers' familiarity, expresses his own take and opens up a possibility for a "what's next."
If Nietzsche had one more sentence, the entire impact would have been destroyed.
A more typical form of writing at this time would have been "By rationally examining the philosophical basis for belief in god..." This predictably yields a relitigation of the debate... the Richard Dawkins route, a very different book.
"Good writing" nearly always collides with something else, for example a writer paid by the word. Or a writer granted too little time to compose prose, as opposed to merely creating it.
A shorter exposition is nearly always (a) better, and (b) more work. I'm reminded of Mark Twain's remark, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
An underlying cause is that people don't read enough, before presuming to write. This results in malaprops like "reign him in", an example I see almost daily now. (A monarch reigns over a kingdom, a cowboy reins in a horse.) Examples abound, this is a common one.
Even worse, I now see automatic grammar checkers making ungrammatical "corrections" (incorrections?) like replacing "its" with "it's," or the reverse, but in the wrong circumstances.
But my all-time greatest annoyance are constructions like "Similar effect to ...", which in nearly all cases ought to be "Effect similar to ..." with copious variations, all wrong. Online searches discover that, in many such cases, the wrong form prevails over the right one.
Someone may object that language is an art form without fixed rules, that seems right. But granted that truth, many popular word sequences sound like fingernails on a chalkboard.
PG agrees that you can't conclude that beautiful writing, writing that seems plausible and convincing, actually is. Sophistry is writing (or speaking) that seems plausible and convincing, but is false. PG is not saying that's not possible.
What he's saying is that writing that is ugly is highly likely to be wrong. Which has nothing to do with sophistry.
>When I'm working on an essay, I spend far more time reading than writing. I'll reread some parts 50 or 100 times, replaying the thoughts in them and asking myself, like someone sanding a piece of wood, does anything catch? Does anything feel wrong? And the easier the essay is to read, the easier it is to notice if something catches.
This seems to me analogous to the process I've discovered with photography... the more you throw away, the better the remaining photographs.
Clearly, I'll need to adjust my habits. I usually re-read what I wrote a few times, then later a few times should said comments actually attract attention.
This seems to me analogous to the process I've discovered with photography... the more you throw away, the better the remaining photographs.
Hat tip! I had to look it up on Wiki to remind myself. To quote:
> Brandolini's law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) is an Internet adage coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The adage states:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
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.
> I know it's true from writing. You can't simultaneously optimize two unrelated things; when you push one far enough, you always end up sacrificing the other.
We know from experience that it’s possible. Many of the greats did both.
There’s a tweet where PG argues that Musk can’t be evil because smart people work for him. His reasoning is basically: “No intelligent person would work for someone evil, and I know many smart people who work for Musk. Therefore, he can’t be evil.”
But that logic doesn’t hold up. Our modern understanding of evil often involves some form of dehumanization, usually in the service of a so-called higher goal, which is used to justify the cruelty. The obvious historical example is Hitler. And to say that no smart people ever worked for him is absurd. Just look at Heisenberg or Heidegger. They were definitely “smart” for any definition of “smart”.
It seems like PG struggles to recognize what’s right in front of him. He tries to make abstract, high-level arguments that often contradict observable reality - and he rarely offers concrete and rational explanations to support them.
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.
Paul Graham's notion that good writing and stylistic quality are mutually required represents a false dichotomy. He understands this, which is why the essay is so good.
Style is a distraction while clarity and sophistication are inherently aligned.
In reality, there is opposition between style and substance. Sophistication does not increase clarity, clarity is not always the byproduct of aesthetic refinement. True writing excellence lies in the deliberate orchestration of form and meaning.
If I am drunk, or have brain damage, my ideas will be bad and so is my writing.
It’s not about what makes writing good. It’s about what makes it bad. People don’t agree on good writing.
I think Paul is talking more about not bad writing. Otherwise, he’d be talking about poetry, which also asserts truth and style as inseparable. People disagree about poetry. Most people agree Paul is a good (not bad) writer, not a poet.
Graham says good writing sounds good and is more likely to be true. But his own writing is hard to read and confusing. His sentences are long and messy. If he’s right, then his own ideas must be wrong because his writing sounds bad.
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/ )
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.
To me this looks like a false dichotomy. Writing beautifully and having a good argument are not mutually exclusive. So I think the article sets out a false proposition and discusses it at length.
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.
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.
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!”
While writing, you edit your writing towards both sounding good and having solid ideas.
That's the entire essay's point and I largely agree with it.
Its why I think current LLMs are bad writers, not because their prose or ideas are off, but AI generated writing does not have the same quality of robustness from ideas that are thoroughly vetted through the author's editing of it.
At the end of the day, good writing takes a lot of time thinking through what you are really saying and standing behind it. LLMs cannot do that for you (yet).
LLMs can certainly be a helpful tool, mostly by unblocking authors via creating prose, honing in on accurate expressions, researching edge cases and suggesting arguments or counter arguments.
But the craft of sharpening an idea to a very fine, meaningful, well written point is something that is still far off.
Of course, until the next research paper completely proves me wrong.
Step 1. RLHF on real time edited documents
Step 2. Profit??
I'm sorry, but this is such a risky conclusion (that essays that "sound good" are also "right"). The assumption is that the author is not only with good intentions but also not ill informed. What if an intelligent yet either evil or simply confidently incorrect author falls in love with their ideas, and manages to edit it to perfection by "shaking the bin". Does that make the writing more true? We have seen in the past how very well-written and convincing texts have changed the course of history, some for the better, but sadly, some for the worse.
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.
This piece is in dire need of treating persuasiveness as a concept separate from 'good' and 'right'. Persuasive writing considers its audience and identifies avenues to create a train of thought that feels natural and true to them. What PG is describing is essentially the process of writing something that you yourself find persuasive. That can be a useful technique if your audience is people like you, but it can also amplify your biases and isolate your work from other perspectives that could provide value (increase 'right'ness per PG's definition).
Writing to convince yourself can help to refine your ideas, but writing to convince your detractors can point out blind spots and encourage finding strong evidentiary support for your argument. Equating "good" with "I would find it convincing" decimates the value that PG rightly identifies in using writing to enhance your ideas rather than just convey them.
And then you have people like Kant and Hegel who have both been criticized for their writing styles, but I would bet in 200 years time people would still be reading and studying them. And with Paul Graham they'd ask, "Who?"
He’s like some startup guy or something, right? His blog posts are well written, and the arguments seem… I mean, fine. I think there’s a third dimension here; in 200 years people will probably be more likely to talk about Kant or Hegel because Graham’s subject matter is just inherently more ephemeral.
But, most of humanity’s endeavors have been ephemeral.
> If you have to rewrite an awkward passage, you'll never do it in a way that makes it less true. You couldn't bear it, any more than gravity could bear things floating upward. So any change in the ideas has to be a change for the better.
I don't get that point. I'd say that there are many ways a thought could get diluted, misinterpreted, turned into wrong conclusions, or made less clear on subsequent iterations.
Just like the metaphor of shaking a bin with different objects doesn't work if the objects are tomatoes, glass or cats.
PG's essays could be a case of this; other examples are often seen in politics, when complex topics are trivialized by demagogues. A lighter example could be "Uncleftish Beholding"[1], an attempt to write about the atomic theory in a way that (very arguably) reads better.
The web site, on my browser, is typical of so many I encounter these days: patently unreadable. Chrome in dark mode renders it white-on-white text. I press contral-a, and it can be read, but it is still not easy.
This essay nails it, clear thinking really does lead to clear writing. It’s a good reminder that writing is less about sounding smart and more about being understood.
Oh Mr. Graham again. I’m not a fan. I tried to read along, I really did, and then I came upon this sentence:
“But not without method acting.”
This is one of the most terribly written sentences in the English language I’ve seen since getting out of jail in January. It violates every reasonable convention regarding communication. It is terrible and please take note that a person who put this sentence out into the wild, without intentional comedy, is a fucking terrible writer.
pg is an expert at cranking out vapid, insubstantial pieces of writing that the gullible eat up as the pronouncements of genius. If I actually wanted to be known as a writer the last person I'd consult for advice is Paul Graham.
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...
Paul Graham clearly loves writing and spending many iterations on producing something perfect. That was also his approach with the Arc language.
I may be projecting my own preferences here, but such a person is likely to have an ambivalent relationship with LLMs, which just output bland mediocrity or falsehoods.
In his previous essay, he warned that one should not create things that make the world worse. He softened it up by saying, without proof, that creating awesome things is probably fine (are LLMs awesome, I don't think so?).
Now he talks about good writing. I get the impression that he is one of the last remaining humanists in Silicon Valley, who at least has doubts about the direction we are going in and would be happy if YC startups created something else.
What happened to this man? A few years ago he wrote a glorious Rosetta stone of second-order functions in several programmng languages. Now he's spewing tired tropes about journalistic-style writing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
In which Paul Graham (re)-discovers Aristotelian and medieval metaphysics and the unity of truth, beauty and goodness. Or maybe more pragmatic in the word of Andrei Tupolev, head of the Soviet design bureau of the same name, "An ugly plane doesn't fly"
antirez|9 months ago
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.
yojo|9 months ago
“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.
qsort|9 months ago
"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 :)
energy123|9 months ago
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.
lexandstuff|9 months ago
leononame|9 months ago
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
nssnsjsjsjs|9 months ago
polygot|9 months ago
> 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.
officehero|9 months ago
pclmulqdq|9 months ago
y1n0|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
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eranation|9 months ago
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).
not_maz|9 months ago
0xbadcafebee|9 months ago
I have a simple proof that the thesis is wrong. Take a moron, and have him work on a farm for 30 years. Then have him write a book about running a farm. Now, he's going to sound like a moron, and will write very poorly. But most everything he writes will be right. Despite his bad writing, he can still communicate his observations of how and why simple things work. So it's not hard to be right while sounding wrong. You just have to be a moron.
ChadNauseam|9 months ago
> By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas right means developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail. So getting the ideas right is not just a matter of saying true things, but saying the right true things.
I'm guessing that a moron with 30 year's experience on a farm would not successfully do that, even when writing a book on farming.
readred|9 months ago
his definition of 'good' at the beginning of his piece, is not what he says. it is not 'right ideas' or 'flow well'
what he is really means is 'convincing'. i.e. effective rhetoric
not only that, it's rhetoric spoken with a speakerphone aimed at the masses. In that the simple content > complex content.
if one were to take the perspective of 'good writing' in that it gave the readers something, rather than take - it demands something of the reader
zfnmxt|9 months ago
I think the the essay is largely about exploring ideas deeply. And in much the same way a chef might stress that you must add the eggs one-by-one or whatever other culinary unfounded superstition they employ, your farm moron will stress always plowing east-to-west or something---both processes may yield a perfectly fine product, but neither has actually understood what's actually going on. They may be expert practitioners, but they are no experts.
andrewrn|9 months ago
PG's ideas in here, to the extent that I agree with them (which is not fully), does break down for ideas. Example being: brilliant engineers who are incredibly capable at having ideas and executing against them but incredibly incapable of communicating said ideas. Their ideas are very true, evidenced by their ability to produce real results, but also oftentimes ugly when communicated.
A final counterpoint is JFK's eulogy, which sounds amazing, but, after the initial emotional appeal wore off, I realized doesn't really have a strong unified thread running through it, and is thus forgettable in terms of the truths it ostensibly delivers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiDUbaBL9E. Compare to "This Is Water" by DFW, which doesn't have the same epic prose, but is maybe the most true-seeming speech I've ever heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw. It could be that PG's ideas were never intended for spoken speeches, but whatever this is still an adjacent truth != beauty example.
pclmulqdq|9 months ago
The only truly good use of expository footnotes is to expand on things that the reader might be interested in (and point to further reading), but are orthogonal to the main argument of the essay. They are not for expansion of the tree of logical arguments present in the body of the essay.
kaushalvivek|9 months ago
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.
rossdavidh|9 months ago
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.
roxolotl|9 months ago
This is a wild belief to hold in the post truth age of bs generation machines.
hoherd|9 months ago
antithesizer|9 months ago
>M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error.
I don't know if Paul has much of a reputation as a technologist among tech lay people, but this quote reminds me of Paul's fame as a thinker among tech people.
sfpotter|9 months ago
selcuka|9 months ago
I pasted the essay into ChatGPT, and this is what it said (just for fun; I’m not taking ChatGPT’s evaluation seriously.)
thomasanders0n|9 months ago
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thymine_dimer|9 months ago
I'm arguing that it's your own bias generated from the synthesis of your own idea that selects for sentences that effectively express the idea, and nothing to do with the writing itself.
The anecdote about the puddle who suddenly gains consciousness and remarks that the world is so perfectly formed around it, that it's proof of divine creation, seems to apply here.
The author generates an idea and is trying to articulate it. A well written sentence or paragraph that flows, pleases the author. This is because the idea they are trying to express is done in a satisfying way.
Thus the more pleasing the writing to the author, the more efficiently it articulates the original idea. It's the author's bias, based on their own idea, that defines the level of 'pleasingness'.
Lastly, Paul, do you think the LLMs are any less satisfied with their confident and irrational hallucinations, than they are with their more well supported claims? Further, if you weren't aware that the output was ridiculous, would you be able to tell a accurate statement from a false one?
Thanks for the essays. Love them.
Swannie|9 months ago
This is one of PG's worse essays.
tptacek|9 months ago
gist|9 months ago
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.
bsaul|9 months ago
It's been consistently used by parents and teachers since the 17th century, so i guess there must be some truth to it.
pluies|9 months ago
> Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement, > Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.
pclmulqdq|9 months ago
antithesizer|9 months ago
moogly|9 months ago
basket_horse|9 months ago
This doesn't seem true in the age of LLMs, which are notorious for being confidently incorrect.
In fact, this whole article seems out of touch with the realities of where AI is going. In my opinion, good writing is dead. Or rather, good writing is commoditized. Good ideas are still very much alive, but if you have an idea and bad prose, iterating with an LLM will have a better end state than rereading your paragraph 50 times.
That said, if you're only writing to internalize your own ideas (journaling) then this makes more sense.
lkbm|9 months ago
> This doesn't seem true in the age of LLMs, which are notorious for being confidently incorrect.
You're denying the antecedent.
PG: Right => Sounds right
Your comment: (Sounds right => Right) is false.
These are not in conflict.
unknown|9 months ago
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jimnotgym|9 months ago
What kind of illogical nonsense is this? I found the speed my car produces the best MPG and simultaneously found the best volume for the stereo.
I suppose his overall conclusion works in one way, the article is both poorly written, and devoid of anything useful. Nobody would read it if it wasn't from pg.
raldi|9 months ago
mykowebhn|9 months ago
> 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.
So, we have 1) Can't conclude that beautiful writing is true, and 2) Writing that is not beautiful usually has bad ideas too.
But he immediately follows this up with:
> Indeed, the two senses of good writing are more like two ends of the same thing.
How does this idea logically follow from the previous statement? Indeed?
I don't agree with other commenters that PG's writing here is good. The writing is bad, and so are the ideas.
What are people smoking to think PG is such a great thinker and/or writer?
gmzamz|9 months ago
In your example, the best volume for the stereo will change based on how fast you're going. Noise from air going around your car will require a slightly louder volume. It technically goes the other way too, I'm sure louder music will affect your mileage slightly, reducing your MPG due to increased power draw. Realistically it won't matter, but they do exist in the same system.
You can absolutely optimize for two things at the same time in different systems. The ideal speed optimizing for MPG in different cars aren't really linked and can be found independently.
kurko|9 months ago
Paul's point would make sense if his case was about greater verisimilitude, which might sound like splitting hairs, but is an important phenomenon in philosophy. Many dictators have sounded good but their core messages were abhorrent.
In the same vein, there are thousands of fiction books, some more brilliantly written than others, but nothing in that spectrum makes any of their stories any more real or true.
> I know it's true from writing.
Well, some things just appear to be true. I admire Paul's writings and I believe his honesty in trying to get to the truth, but in this specific essay, it seems like what he's alluding to is the appearance of truth. Good writing makes core ideas look more true, but it can't objectively have a relation to truth itself, only with our description of said idea.
_1tem|9 months ago
Abhorrent does not mean untrue. In fact some of the worst people use truth to evil ends.
andoando|9 months ago
Waterluvian|9 months ago
But I think most of the opinions and advice rich, successful people like to share is just a side-effect, not a productive output, of these traits.
kayodelycaon|9 months ago
That’s why a lot of advice from successful people is so varied and is not as helpful as advertised.
f30e3dfed1c9|9 months ago
Jun8|9 months ago
jamesrcole|9 months ago
What's an example of a spelling mistake in it? I read it carefully and didn't notice any.
asadm|9 months ago
also other rich people also write stuff. nobody reads that shit.
cainxinth|9 months ago
> In all life, when a thing works better, usually it is more beautiful to the eye.
DavidPiper|9 months ago
This is a well-known phenomenon, and yes, "ordinary" writers and typesetters do this too. These visual loose ends are called Widows, Orphans and Runts [1]. Writing that is less visually ugly on the page will seem to read better.
> Because the writer is the first reader
This seems like a derivative of a zen-like koan from jazz musician Winton Marsalis' "Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is the player" [2]. Interesting that he immediately starts talking about music there too.
> 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 think I would have enjoyed this read more if it was clear at the top that by the time he'd finished writing it, he disagreed with his initial assertion ("I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.") Without that, the article kind of feels like bait, and reading it plus writing this comment feels like me taking it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans
[2] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=162573063275994
__mharrison__|9 months ago
(LaTeX previously and now Typst.)
twodave|9 months ago
But often writing is also a process of discovery. Maybe you are trying to write something that hasn’t been written about before. This is like building software without a spec. You can still write well and be irrelevant, just as one can build great software upon bad assumptions and fail to sell it. This doesn’t make it bad writing in its own right, but it also may not be very useful to anyone. In my opinion both software and prose should be produced for a purpose.
Thus, if there’s no meaning to it, writing, like software, falls pretty flat.
kristianc|9 months ago
I can see how re-editing can make the ideas more coherent within pg's frame of representation, but I'm struggling with the idea that it makes them any more true.
Veen|9 months ago
luispauloml|9 months ago
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?
gizmo|9 months ago
- It’s an example of a statement that rests on a false premise
raincole|9 months ago
erichocean|9 months ago
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.
thundergolfer|9 months ago
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.
rossdavidh|9 months ago
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.
dragonwriter|9 months ago
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.
machinelearning|9 months ago
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.
kierangill|9 months ago
> If it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and you just state them. But other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications.
From William Zinsser’s On Writing Well:
> The growing acceptance of the split in-finitive, or of the preposition at the end of a sentence, proves that formal syntax can't hold the fort forever against a speaker's more comfortable way of getting the same thing said—and it shouldn't. I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
Another from the same book:
> CREEPING NOUNISM. This is a new American disease that strings two or three nouns together where one noun—or, better yet, one verb-will do. Nobody goes broke now; we have money problem areas. It no longer rains; we have precipitation activity or a thunderstorm probability situation. Please, let it rain.
> Today as many as four or five concept nouns will attach themselves to each other, like a molecule chain. Here's a brilliant specimen I recently found: "Communication facilitation skills development intervention." Not a person in sight, or a working verb. I think it's a program to help students write better.
saghm|9 months ago
It's hard for me to tell what the point of the author was from just the part you quoted, but why does this have to be the case? I don't have trouble believing that many complex ideas require complex language to describe them, but the idea that it's literally a requirement in order for the writing to be "good" rather than just a usual circumstance isn't obvious to me. If anything, the complexity of this quote just seems to hide the dubious premise.
benreesman|9 months ago
@idlewords already broke that game like 15 years ago: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm.
SpicyLemonZest|9 months ago
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.
Wowfunhappy|9 months ago
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.
pvg|9 months ago
pdonis|9 months ago
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."
envirogis|9 months ago
SoftTalker|9 months ago
They are trained on it.
fidotron|9 months ago
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...
MinimalAction|9 months ago
I propose the following -- writing the sounds good manipulates the reader into thinking that it is right. Feels better to believe it.
MinimalAction|9 months ago
netcan|9 months ago
I think a lot of that "shaking of the bin" to compress objects brings you closer to the final and concise level of talking about punching. That middle section is verbose, petty.
A great example of this is Nietzsche's "god is dead, and we have killed him." He just skips over the details, and nerd-bait debate about atheism that had been ongoing since Spinoza. There's no contribution he could have made to that debate. All had already been said. Nietzsche assumes the readers' familiarity, expresses his own take and opens up a possibility for a "what's next."
If Nietzsche had one more sentence, the entire impact would have been destroyed.
A more typical form of writing at this time would have been "By rationally examining the philosophical basis for belief in god..." This predictably yields a relitigation of the debate... the Richard Dawkins route, a very different book.
lutusp|9 months ago
A shorter exposition is nearly always (a) better, and (b) more work. I'm reminded of Mark Twain's remark, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
A classic writing book, now nearly forgotten -- "Strunk & White"/"The Elements of Style" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style) -- famously exhorts authors to "Make every word count."
An underlying cause is that people don't read enough, before presuming to write. This results in malaprops like "reign him in", an example I see almost daily now. (A monarch reigns over a kingdom, a cowboy reins in a horse.) Examples abound, this is a common one.
Even worse, I now see automatic grammar checkers making ungrammatical "corrections" (incorrections?) like replacing "its" with "it's," or the reverse, but in the wrong circumstances.
But my all-time greatest annoyance are constructions like "Similar effect to ...", which in nearly all cases ought to be "Effect similar to ..." with copious variations, all wrong. Online searches discover that, in many such cases, the wrong form prevails over the right one.
Someone may object that language is an art form without fixed rules, that seems right. But granted that truth, many popular word sequences sound like fingernails on a chalkboard.
davidivadavid|9 months ago
breckinloggins|9 months ago
It might be that it’s hard to create sophistry accidentally in one’s writing, but it’s certainly a possible - and common - trick.
The danger is when you convince yourself that what you’re writing isn’t sophistry… because - after all - it looks good.
pdonis|9 months ago
What he's saying is that writing that is ugly is highly likely to be wrong. Which has nothing to do with sophistry.
doodaddy|9 months ago
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. (To add: short words are best, and old words when short are best of all)
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Though there is one more that is deserving of seventh place: 7. Edit ruthlessly. “Murder your darlings.”
B1FF_PSUVM|9 months ago
machinelearning|9 months ago
Am I missing something or is the “seems true” part taking too many liberties here?
If anything, as described in the previous few sentences, the premise seems false, not true.
Kind of ironic since the line sounds right but isn’t rigorously right, so it undercuts the main argument.
mikewarot|9 months ago
This seems to me analogous to the process I've discovered with photography... the more you throw away, the better the remaining photographs.
Clearly, I'll need to adjust my habits. I usually re-read what I wrote a few times, then later a few times should said comments actually attract attention.
This seems to me analogous to the process I've discovered with photography... the more you throw away, the better the remaining photographs.
_wire_|9 months ago
throwaway2037|9 months ago
legends2k|9 months ago
Another related point: I've seen geeks who're solid in thinking but terrible at explaining what they think.
ajoberstar|9 months ago
> 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.
blast|9 months ago
Can't one be honestly mistaken?
atmosx|9 months ago
We know from experience that it’s possible. Many of the greats did both.
There’s a tweet where PG argues that Musk can’t be evil because smart people work for him. His reasoning is basically: “No intelligent person would work for someone evil, and I know many smart people who work for Musk. Therefore, he can’t be evil.”
But that logic doesn’t hold up. Our modern understanding of evil often involves some form of dehumanization, usually in the service of a so-called higher goal, which is used to justify the cruelty. The obvious historical example is Hitler. And to say that no smart people ever worked for him is absurd. Just look at Heisenberg or Heidegger. They were definitely “smart” for any definition of “smart”.
It seems like PG struggles to recognize what’s right in front of him. He tries to make abstract, high-level arguments that often contradict observable reality - and he rarely offers concrete and rational explanations to support them.
ahmadtbk|9 months ago
incomingpain|9 months ago
Style is a distraction while clarity and sophistication are inherently aligned.
In reality, there is opposition between style and substance. Sophistication does not increase clarity, clarity is not always the byproduct of aesthetic refinement. True writing excellence lies in the deliberate orchestration of form and meaning.
larrled|9 months ago
It’s not about what makes writing good. It’s about what makes it bad. People don’t agree on good writing.
I think Paul is talking more about not bad writing. Otherwise, he’d be talking about poetry, which also asserts truth and style as inseparable. People disagree about poetry. Most people agree Paul is a good (not bad) writer, not a poet.
unknown|9 months ago
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blabla1224|9 months ago
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jaehong747|9 months ago
idlewords|9 months ago
TimSchumann|9 months ago
hnhg|9 months ago
not_maz|9 months ago
juliusdavies|9 months ago
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/ )
Waterluvian|9 months ago
jamesdutc|9 months ago
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.
iamsanteri|9 months ago
fogleman|9 months ago
pvg|9 months ago
sorcerer-mar|9 months ago
LLMs produce plausible, wrong, and very bad prose. Arguably evidence for his point, if anything.
jxjnskkzxxhx|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
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dartharva|9 months ago
RandomLensman|9 months ago
munificent|9 months ago
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.
keiferski|9 months ago
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!”
robertpateii|9 months ago
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.
talkingtab|9 months ago
I believe there is another level beyond this. When you write, but not by numbers.
spyckie2|9 months ago
That's the entire essay's point and I largely agree with it.
Its why I think current LLMs are bad writers, not because their prose or ideas are off, but AI generated writing does not have the same quality of robustness from ideas that are thoroughly vetted through the author's editing of it.
At the end of the day, good writing takes a lot of time thinking through what you are really saying and standing behind it. LLMs cannot do that for you (yet).
LLMs can certainly be a helpful tool, mostly by unblocking authors via creating prose, honing in on accurate expressions, researching edge cases and suggesting arguments or counter arguments.
But the craft of sharpening an idea to a very fine, meaningful, well written point is something that is still far off.
Of course, until the next research paper completely proves me wrong.
Step 1. RLHF on real time edited documents Step 2. Profit??
baxtr|9 months ago
But I’m pretty sure this doesn’t hold for speech.
pdonis|9 months ago
That's not what PG is saying in the article. He explicitly says that you can't conclude this.
eranation|9 months ago
adamgordonbell|9 months ago
systems that force complexity into legible forms often destroy valuable nuance, and richness.
- seeing like a state
pvg|9 months ago
mkoubaa|9 months ago
assimpleaspossi|9 months ago
jdoliner|9 months ago
whatever1|9 months ago
enragedcacti|9 months ago
Writing to convince yourself can help to refine your ideas, but writing to convince your detractors can point out blind spots and encourage finding strong evidentiary support for your argument. Equating "good" with "I would find it convincing" decimates the value that PG rightly identifies in using writing to enhance your ideas rather than just convey them.
mykowebhn|9 months ago
bee_rider|9 months ago
But, most of humanity’s endeavors have been ephemeral.
thih9|9 months ago
I don't get that point. I'd say that there are many ways a thought could get diluted, misinterpreted, turned into wrong conclusions, or made less clear on subsequent iterations.
Just like the metaphor of shaking a bin with different objects doesn't work if the objects are tomatoes, glass or cats.
PG's essays could be a case of this; other examples are often seen in politics, when complex topics are trivialized by demagogues. A lighter example could be "Uncleftish Beholding"[1], an attempt to write about the atomic theory in a way that (very arguably) reads better.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
stevetron|9 months ago
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logic_node|9 months ago
taylorlapeyre|9 months ago
6stringmerc|9 months ago
“But not without method acting.”
This is one of the most terribly written sentences in the English language I’ve seen since getting out of jail in January. It violates every reasonable convention regarding communication. It is terrible and please take note that a person who put this sentence out into the wild, without intentional comedy, is a fucking terrible writer.
milesrout|9 months ago
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voidhorse|9 months ago
martin82|9 months ago
But they are detached from reality, scientifically wrong, and lead to disastrous outcomes.
--
All of marketing "sounds good" and even "looks good" - that is the entire point - but it is actually all lies.
turnsout|9 months ago
Yikes. I stopped reading right there… There's a lot of corrosive, racist writing on social media right now that "sounds good" to a lot of people.
throwanem|9 months ago
jmorf|9 months ago
No. It’s hard to sound right even when you are. And if you don’t, you might as well be wrong.
nchmy|9 months ago
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...
podgorniy|9 months ago
debo_|9 months ago
bgwalter|9 months ago
I may be projecting my own preferences here, but such a person is likely to have an ambivalent relationship with LLMs, which just output bland mediocrity or falsehoods.
In his previous essay, he warned that one should not create things that make the world worse. He softened it up by saying, without proof, that creating awesome things is probably fine (are LLMs awesome, I don't think so?).
Now he talks about good writing. I get the impression that he is one of the last remaining humanists in Silicon Valley, who at least has doubts about the direction we are going in and would be happy if YC startups created something else.
enriquto|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
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hn_throwaway_99|9 months ago
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.
raincole|9 months ago
[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.
tzury|9 months ago
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.
ryandrake|9 months ago
-__---____-ZXyw|9 months ago
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.
lumenwrites|9 months ago
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.
ISL|9 months ago
gist|9 months ago
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.
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n2d4|9 months ago
I wonder if you're just unaware of all of this, or if you just have an axe to grind here?
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bigyabai|9 months ago
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.
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