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.
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
He could have written something like: “The blocky ships hovered seemingly in defiance of gravity.”
Instead he picked a phrasing that’s intentionally a little hard to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to get the joke, and remembers it.
Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick.
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though.
Descriptive writing, especially for fiction, seems out of scope.
His writing is known for a very smooth cadence. You reach these “lumps” in the narrative, and can almost miss them, which, for me, multiplies their impact.
I’ve always considered him one of the best writers that I’ve read. He probably gets less credit than he deserves (although I think he’s won a Pulitzer), because of his subject matter; sort of like Leslie Nielsen, or Victor Borge, who were both masters of their art.
Check out Keynes or 1950s American writing such as https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v01/d8....
That is probably my favourite phrase from the whole book. For some reason I find it hilarious. It has stuck in my brain in much the same way that names don't.
That's fine. The ideas transmit, the words are forgotten. He doesn't need to use memorable sentences if he's saying what he's trying to say.
Paul Graham is a very skilled communicator. He's not a writer's writer like YKW, but he doesn't need to be.
"But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
Hopefully that's not too much italianposting for the international audience :)
Regarding the nobel prize quote above, while it provides some food for thought, I’m not sure what point exactly it is intended to make.
Yes, if you use some disfavored group's vernacular, there's a decent chance you also use their cultural values.
Nonsense. I've known many writers who are wonderfully eloquent at transmitting their essential message well with text, but fumble their way through live discourse as if they were high-schoolers in their first classroom presentation.
Some people just communicate better by certain means, and with writing, there's a breathing space that some can't manage with speech, in which you can better organize your otherwise interesting ideas.
> I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs
Simplicity in the naive sense of minimal word count increases cognitive load because we have neural circuits that got used to a particular middle ground.
I 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
> 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.
On the other hand, I may know too much about what he writes about to benefit from it. Which means I’m not the target audience.
And I don’t say this to sound smart. I’m a generalist. I know a little about a lot. Plenty of people are far more intelligent than I am.
I personally feel this is a great filter. The exceptions to the rule are obvious and don’t need to be stated. It increases the signal to noise ratio to leave them out. And the people that complain are signaling their inability to get into the author’s pov.
For me the issue with PG's writing, is that it has tiny hints of Narcissism, and that, by itself, hurts his ability to convey ideas. In classic writing, and in my opinion, also in great modern writing, there is a lot of humbleness and even some self deprecation. Sometimes the more the author doubts themselves, the more convincing they are, as it shows self critique, and lack of "Dunning-Kruger effect".
p.s. I wonder how many here are not aware you are the creator of Redis. (I assume most do, but chances are many have no idea).
I 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.
> 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.
Historical recipes are terrible because they lack details. They don't tell you to add salt, they don't include accurate measurements (of temperature, time, ingredients, etc), they don't explain methods. Yet people of the time they were written can still follow those recipes and cook the intended dish. Writers always leave out details that are assumed by the reader. At the time those recipes were written, those people reading them would have already known all the left-out details.
If I write you a book on programming, I'm not going to explain to you what a computer is, how it works, how to copy software onto it, how to power it. You're going to already understand all that, or you probably wouldn't be reading a book on programming. Depending on what you understand, and depending on what ideas I try to convey, and how I do that, may change the end result of the information you come to understand. But they don't make the ideas less or more valid because I wrote it this way or that way.
Writing is only the communication of an idea from an author to a reader. Style, form, method, construction, etc are all inherent to writing. But the validity of the expressed idea is not. The content of the idea is completely separate from the "art" of writing. A painting of a blue sun does not affect the sun, nor does a painter's ability to depict the sun affect the sun. But a bad painter can still paint a bad painting that a viewer will understand to be the sun.
"Good writing" is like "Good art". It's subjective. As long as the recipient got what the producer intended, it's good enough.
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
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.
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.
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.
When you write well, you iterate. When you iterate, you improve both the prose and the core point -- because you crystalize ideas further.
This makes improvements in these seemingly perpendicular directions counterintuitively correlated.
Ironically I found this specific PG essay uncharacteristically obtuse. This could have been much shorter.
Your comment also makes clear that this requires that the writer is attempting to make a true core point, rather than (for example) convince people of something it would be convenient for them to believe. If you are dealing with writers who are using their powers for ill purposes, then the skill of the prose may well be inversely correlated with their truth.
This is a wild belief to hold in the post truth age of bs generation machines.
>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.
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.Yes, this is an example of good writing—in terms of clarity, structure, insight, and style. But it’s worth breaking that claim down, because "good writing" is context-dependent.
Strengths Clarity and Flow: The essay is easy to follow, despite discussing an abstract idea (the relationship between style and substance). The structure is coherent: the author presents a claim, acknowledges its apparent implausibility, investigates it, and builds a layered argument.
Concrete Analogies: The use of vivid metaphors (e.g., shaking a bin, sanding wood, plane design) is not decorative fluff—they function as intellectual tools, helping the reader visualize abstract processes.
Insight: The core thesis—that good writing style and good thinking are not merely correlated but intertwined—is a valuable observation. It’s counterintuitive but persuasive, which makes for intellectually engaging material.
Voice: There’s a distinctive voice here—measured, reflective, mildly contrarian. That builds trust with the reader.
Rhythm and Cadence: The sentences vary in length and structure, but always seem to land where they should. The rhythm supports the ideas, which is part of the essay’s point and also its proof.
Weaknesses or Limitations Circular Reasoning Risk: The argument sometimes verges on tautological: “Writing that sounds good is likely to be right because sounding good helps make it right.” The essay attempts to address this, but doesn’t fully disentangle the cause-effect relationship. It risks being a self-fulfilling thesis.
Not Universally Applicable: The essay assumes a specific kind of writing—essayistic, idea-driven, exploratory. The claims would not hold up in all writing contexts (technical manuals, legal contracts, scientific abstracts), and the essay nods to this but doesn’t dwell on the implications.
Selective Evidence: The support is anecdotal, introspective, and analogical—not empirical. That’s fine for an essay like this, but it weakens the argument’s generalizability.
Potential Elitism: Implicit is the idea that if your writing sounds clumsy, your ideas are probably wrong or poorly developed. While often true, this can overlook valid content poorly expressed due to lack of experience, language barriers, or educational disadvantage.
Conclusion Yes, this is good writing—especially for a reflective, philosophical essay intended to explore a subtle intellectual thesis. It’s clear, memorable, and thought-provoking. But it’s good within a specific genre and purpose. The strength of its argument lies more in its coherence and persuasiveness than in empirical rigor, and that’s appropriate for its form.
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.
This is one of PG's worse essays.
Something I've mentioned before is I can't get over the fact that Paul has mulitiple people review his essays prior to publishing (which others have defended when I've made the same comment before).
I (as most people do) write clients every day with proposals or results or reports. Nobody reviews my writing first and the end recipients they either like what I say and pay me money and refer others to me or they don't. I certainly don't have the time to perseverate over the perfect phrase or paragraph '50 or 100 times' but yet I get results more often than I don't.
For fly.io I can see the appeal of unedited content as it can be rougher (as in breaks style guides and whatnot) and I like that roughness in blogs. E.g. you might get a British idiom come through or a more conversational style.
What is more concerning is that I don't think many people who have read widely would consider Paul Graham to be a good writer, and yet people who care about him let him publish this article... He's definitely not a bad writer, and he generally communicates good ideas clearly, which is surely sufficient - and perhaps even appropriate - for his purposes. But he's not a Good Writer.
I've read many (perhaps even most) of his essays and there isn't a single one of them that I can actually remember, let alone any particular line or phrase that stands out. Though surely some of the ideas remain an influence in my general thought.
Conversely, there's plenty of writers who have seared many lines - and entire concepts - into my mind forever. I come back to them endlessly, even without pulling up the actual writing.
It's been consistently used by parents and teachers since the 17th century, so i guess there must be some truth to it.
> Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement, > Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
Abhorrent does not mean untrue. In fact some of the worst people use truth to evil ends.
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.
That’s why a lot of advice from successful people is so varied and is not as helpful as advertised.
What's an example of a spelling mistake in it? I read it carefully and didn't notice any.
also other rich people also write stuff. nobody reads that shit.
> In all life, when a thing works better, usually it is more beautiful to the eye.
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.
(LaTeX previously and now Typst.)
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.
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.
1. "An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation"
I thought dialogue and conversation were the same thing. What is the difference between them besides one being a cleaned up version of the other?
2. "If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs."
What does this even mean? Is it an exemple or an analogy? It sounds like at this point in the text there should be an analogy, but this sentence sounds like an example. So, which one is it?
Also, did anybody else got confused too?
- It’s an example of a statement that rests on a false premise
But more importantly, slots at e.g. Harvard are limited. Seats at ball games are limited. Etc. Most things in life are, in fact, limited.
Graham is purposefully misleading here, and he knows it.
What people fail to understand is that immigrants add to both the supply and demand side. An immigrant sitting in a stadium seat is taking a place that could have gone to someone else. But their presence also drives the capacity to build more seats. More demand for higher education results in more capacity for higher education.
You could hire a German craftsman with the quality of work that was present 30 years ago and the work would last for 30 years. But who is embarking on learning a trade only to be replaced by Poles, Romanians or (in the future) Ukrainians, who will then replace Poles and Romanians once Ukraine is in the EU?
The second is a counterfactual, and it is correctly deployed to help show the difference between a valid argument and a sound argument. Graham is saying that a good liar presents pleasing and valid but unsound arguments, or rather sophistry.
I think your confusion here is from reading comprehension problems.
1) court testimony which we know (from outside evidence) is either true or not true 2) scientific papers which we know to have been reproducible, or not 3) stock pundits predictions about the future of some company or other, which we know with hindsight to have been accurate or not
Much more convincing to me than any amount of good writing about writing, would be to have some empirical evidence.
There are objective features of writing, but quality is subjective.
Of course, as to the thesis of the essay, it is both trivial and uninteresting that people, including PG, tend to have views of the correctness of an idea and the quality of the presentation that are correlated.
It is interesting that PG thinks that this is anything more than a cognitive bias to be cautious about, though.
The way I interpret this is that it refers to claims that build on each other to come to a conclusion. So the way to test for truth is to somehow test each claim and the conclusion, which could vary in difficulty based on the kind of claims being made.
As this essay exemplifies, it is difficult to test for truth if you make broad claims that are so imprecise that they can't be verified or don't tell you anything interesting when verified using reasonable assumptions.
> 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.
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.
From the essay’s context, I take it to mean “is benefitted by” rather than “must absolutely”. Maybe my world view is distorted by Zinsser but I see this as an authorism.
A writer can choose to trade off vigor for nuance by hedging. They can preempt arguments with “it is my opinion that” and “one ought to”. But, it is my opinion that, exhaustive disclaimers are not fun to read. I know it’s his opinion — this is posted to his Internet Blog, not a textbook.
> Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
@idlewords already broke that game like 15 years ago: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm.
I wouldn't phrase it exactly this way, but this is an important point that I really struggle to get across. I regularly see proposals and such that are very challenging to reason about because of their writing. But when I ask for terms to be more rigorously defined, or for the document to be reordered into a more principled structure, some people seem to have a strong instinct that I'm just being difficult for the sake of it. I still remember one guy who insisted that I need to make a specific technical criticism or sign off, and absolutely refused to accept the answer that my structural feedback was intended to help us reason about the technical details.
Because I think LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis. They are quite good at the craft of writing--not perfect, but probably much better than the median human--and they are just as good when the content is true as when it's false. This quality ruins a lot of my heuristics for evaluating whether writing is trustworthy, because LLMs are so good at bullshitting.
So while I agree that for humans, writing that sounds good tends to also be logically correct, that clearly isn't inherent in all writing.
Don't we? What about the music that plays in the elevator, or while you're on hold on the phone?
Similarly for writing, I would imagine you read plenty of emails that are of more-or-less median writing quality. And yet, these emails may discuss pivotal decisions, where it is very important whether their arguments are logically correct.
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."
This analysis in the article feels woefully uncharitable and is incompatible with HN guidelines, ironically, but if internalized leads directly to the nitpicking style frequently seen on HN as a substitute for elucidation of ideas not well expressed on the way to deeper analysis. Dismissing mediocre writing out of hand seems classist more than anything.
I can guess what this says about the readership of HN, but what does it says about the clarity of PG's essay?
They are trained on it.
PG going for the "they're connected" angle, not too convincingly as shown mainly in the paragraph starting "This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas".
[1] https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3774-legal-prose-and...
I propose the following -- writing the sounds good manipulates the reader into thinking that it is right. Feels better to believe it.
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.
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.
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.
What he's saying is that writing that is ugly is highly likely to be wrong. Which has nothing to do with sophistry.
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.”
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.
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.
> 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.Another related point: I've seen geeks who're solid in thinking but terrible at explaining what they think.
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in some other way and then write about them afterward — for example, if you build something, or conduct an experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such cases the ideas often live more in the work than the writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas are good.
Writers who have trouble expressing thoughts in a non-native language are not actually developing the idea in that language. That doesn't mean they are producing bad ideas, but it _might_ mean they won't produce good writing (in that non-native language).
I took the essay to be highlighting that if you use writing as a tool for thinking, clunky writing is likely to highlight places where your ideas themselves aren't clear or correct yet. The iterative process of refining the writing to "sound good" will help shape the ideas.
This seems to be a commonly expressed idea in other forms. For example, when thinking through ideas in code, the process of making the code more "beautiful" can also result in a clearer expression of more correct ideas.
Can't one be honestly mistaken?
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.
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.
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.
I think PG's essays are (mostly) well-written, and are worth studying as examples of persuasive rhetoric.
But rhetoric has no morals and no relationship to truth.
Persuasion is what salespeople do. Grifters, lawyers, PR firms, politicians, and CEOs all make a living from being persuasive.
That doesn't mean you can trust them not to lie to you.
It also doesn't mean flawed rhetoric means flawed beliefs. Implying it does is itself a misleading rhetorical trick.
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!)
> 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.
LLMs produce plausible, wrong, and very bad prose. Arguably evidence for his point, if anything.
You could try to write a non-fiction essay about how being a parent sets you up for potentially the worst pain and most intense grief you can imagine but yet also the experience is so meaningful and rewarding that it's worth it. But that essay would be abstract and wouldn't really hit you in the gut.
Or you could read Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" or watch Arrival which is nominally completely made up about aliens that don't experience time like us and it will convey the same concepts more effectively than an essay could.
There's actually deeper arguments to be made that storytelling was the first form of human abstraction (we only get the essential details pertinent to the story, all else is abstracted away) and much of what's core to all our practices of representation stems from an originary impetus for storytelling as a means of sharing and replicating knowledge. The prosaic, scientific, nonfictional, non hyperbolic writing we have all gotten used to is kind of a late development.
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!”
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.
I believe there is another level beyond this. When you write, but not by numbers.
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??
But I’m pretty sure this doesn’t hold for speech.
That's not what PG is saying in the article. He explicitly says that you can't conclude this.
Please don’t get me wrong here, it’s nothing personal:
I think you might need to consider that the article isn’t as "good" and concise as you think it is.
If so many people misunderstood the concept then maybe it’s not the readers’ fault.
systems that force complexity into legible forms often destroy valuable nuance, and richness.
- seeing like a state
That loses specific things. Understandability and nuance can be in conflict. Legibility is not specific to governments.
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.
But, most of humanity’s endeavors have been ephemeral.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
No. It’s hard to sound right even when you are. And if you don’t, you might as well be wrong.
Communication is very hard - we have to first translate some scattered notions into a coherent idea, then find the right words to express that idea, then the people receiving them have to understand those words, translate them into their scattered ideas. And then do the same in the other direction.
The act of writing - and especially editing - helps us refine the ideas and find the words to best express them, and especially in a way that they are to have the intended effect on others.
I'm sure this essay has some good ideas at its core, but I don't think it had nearly enough editing...
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.
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.
[0]: a typical example: https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html
If you didn't tell me this is from PG I would think it's from some self help book.
He spends months chiseling each essay because he understands that clear thinking is expressed through clear prose. Dismissing that craft because he also knows Lisp is like trashing Stephen King’s storytelling because he can ride a bike.
If you only grant “literary merit” to people who never shipped a line of code, your definition’s too narrow for the real world—where ideas, not résumés, decide who we read.
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.
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.
I think at the core the problem (if you want to call it that) can be boiled down to the following:
"I am smart. That's why I was successful at what I did. So I need to prove to myself and others that it wasn't luck it was I am damn smart"
The problem with hubris is that if you took someone like Musk or PG and you kept them in some off the beaten path place ie not Silicon Valley, not NYC pick your hot location (and stipulate they couldn't move because of family or other obligations) and they weren't surrounded by others who were top notch (as a result of also being in the right place at the right time) there wouldn't be anything particularly notable about them.
Having gone myself to one of those 'good' universities I will say that Paul being at Harvard would certainly amplify this type of behavior by being surrounded early on at a formidable age by accomplished members of that community.
I wonder if you're just unaware of all of this, or if you just have an axe to grind here?