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Good Writing
- ahmadtbk 1y agoGood 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.
- firefoxd 1y ago[flagged]
- pmdr 1y agopg
- bigyabai 1y agoThis 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.
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- cainxinth 1y agoThere was a line in the (not great) Ferrari biopic where Enzo is explaining his philosophy and says: > In all life, when a thing works better, usually it is more beautiful to the eye.
- RandomLensman 1y agoWhat how does that concept work in poetry or lyrics, for example? Something could be completely fictional (and artificial) and still be exceptionally well written.
- keiferski 1y agoIt 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!”
- RandomLensman 1y agoMaybe the first paragraph could have been written less sweeping?
- bigyabai 1y agoI don't think Paul knows that he's writing rhetoric and not prose.
- robertpateii 1y agoImo, that quote is clearly a train metaphor. But to your point, I do vaguely recall being unclear plenty when I read Moby Dick decades ago.
- keiferski 1y agoTrue, this quote is just one of my favorite from the book and I wanted to share it. There are definitely other more difficult lines in it.
- wat10000 1y agoI find that Moby Dick passage to be quite clear and straightforward. It uses metaphor, but a simple and direct one.
- jdoliner 1y agoBeauty is truth, truth is beauty.
- kazinator 1y agoWow, 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.
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- fidotron 1y agoThere 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". [1] https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3774-legal-prose-and-verborrhea https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3774-legal-prose-and...
- antirez 1y agoI 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.
- qsort 1y agoI 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 :)
- antirez 1y agoYep I guess that's true, I often times see that the best papers are written better and make broader cultural references. However, recently, with all the non mother tongue English speakers around, especially from China, I often see great ideas exposed in a bad way. So this link starts to be weaker and weaker.
- SpicyLemonZest 1y 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. 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.
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- Wowfunhappy 1y ago...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.
- pvg 1y agoMost 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.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago> We don't listen to median human music either. 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.
- pvg 1y agoGet a median human to write some elevator or hold music and see how that goes. There's an entire business of making and licensing such music which would not be the case if any rando could just crank it out. Emails, etc, are just 'communication but over text' - it's 'writing' in the very basic sense but it's not the sort of writing people concerned with style and quality care about, either as consumers or producers. Me talking to the cashier at the store is not 'public speaking', neither I nor the cashier care it's not the Gettysburgh Address.
- kaushalvivek 1y agoI feel the essence here is -- iterative writing improves both the prose and the core point. 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 1y ago...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.
- luispauloml 1y agoThere 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? Also, did anybody else got confused too?
- gizmo 1y ago- He means written dialogue. Think Plato. - It’s an example of a statement that rests on a false premise
- erichocean 1y ago"Jobs" is too large a category; many specific job categories have limited slots (e.g. medical residencies). 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.
- wat10000 1y agoSlots at Harvard may be limited but slots at excellent institutions of higher education are not. Seats at ball games are not. Medical residencies are only limited by fiat. That could be fixed if we wanted to. The problem is the artificial limit, not the people getting the limited placements. What people fail to understand is that immigrants add to both the supply and demand side. An immigrant sitting in a stadium seat is taking a place that could have gone to someone else. But their presence also drives the capacity to build more seats. More demand for higher education results in more capacity for higher education.
- bgwalter 1y agoEven construction work in Europe is limited. People from Eastern Europe are undercutting German tradespeople and frankly deliver inferior work. You could hire a German craftsman with the quality of work that was present 30 years ago and the work would last for 30 years. But who is embarking on learning a trade only to be replaced by Poles, Romanians or (in the future) Ukrainians, who will then replace Poles and Romanians once Ukraine is in the EU?
- adamgordonbell 1y agoCounter point: systems that force complexity into legible forms often destroy valuable nuance, and richness. - seeing like a state
- pvg 1y agoScott'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.
- adamgordonbell 1y agoIf you understand some area and would like to explain it and use writing as a tool, you need to make it legible to the reader. Good writing is distilling and simplifying and forcing things through an explanatory process that rubs off some of the rough edges while at the same time clarifying. That loses specific things. Understandability and nuance can be in conflict. Legibility is not specific to governments.
- pvg 1y agoThat’s your thesis but it’s not clear to me how it’s related to those in Seeing like a State
- throwawaymaroon 1y ago[dead]
- wat10000 1y agoI’m pretty sure that “Seeing Like a State” legibility and writing legibility are totally different concepts that happen to share a word. State legibility is all about categorizing and simplifying to allow information processing to happen in a distributed fashion among a large number of bureaucrats. Writing legibility is about conveying information to the individual reader. A hundred pages of prose about a single person is incompatible with the former but can be a great example of the latter if written well.
- idlewords 1y agoReading Graham's essays on writing always puts me in mind of the videos where Mexican moms react to Rachael Ray trying to cook (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFN2g1FBgVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFN2g1FBgVA), or a Malaysian guy has to watch a BBC cook make rice (https://youtu.be/53me-ICi_f8?si=0AaZ82dk_AYFqJAx&t=226 https://youtu.be/53me-ICi_f8?si=0AaZ82dk_AYFqJAx&t=226).
- hnhg 1y agoHe carries the self-confidence that billions of dollars in wealth can give you.
- flipgimble 1y ago[flagged]
- ignoramous 1y ago> ... he writes mostly to justify his luck in amassing capital as something of intellectual consequence. Strange take, given PG made his billions from actually building something of immense consequence (YC) & provably codifying a blueprint on building fast-growing companies in SV. If PG was a prof at HBS, it is likely he'd be considered in the same bracket as Clayton Christensen.
- mgfist 1y agoHis comment got deleted but it was funny hearing him say PG hasn't created anything while commenting on a website PG created
- SoftTalker 1y agoIt's really the self-confidence of a successful person. He doesn't need to prove anything to anyone at this point, so he's unafraid of criticism. There was another submission here recently ("Find Your People") that touched on that: be immune to rejection.
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- tptacek 1y agoLook, anything that gets HN people to write second drafts of comments, I'm fine with it. I mean... no, ok, just going to leave it there.
- gist 1y agoWriting 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.
- tptacek 1y agoI think, as is often the case, there is something to the idea in the post we're commenting on, but it's been taken way too far.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoThis is the essence of philosophy. Observe X, now argue that everything in the universe is actually X.
- chromatic 1y agoIf there's more than "good editing often improves writing" I didn't see it in the essay.
- basket_horse 1y agogood editing often improves writing, and good writing often improves ideas
- rossdavidh 1y agoSo, 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.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> 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.
- machinelearning 1y agoSo 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.
- baxtr 1y agoMaybe it’s true that writing that sounds good is also more likely to be right. But I’m pretty sure this doesn’t hold for speech.
- pdonis 1y ago> Maybe it’s true that writing that sounds good is also more likely to be right. That's not what PG is saying in the article. He explicitly says that you can't conclude this.
- baxtr 1y agoWhat can you conclude then?
- pdonis 1y agoThat writing that sounds bad is likely to be wrong.
- machinelearning 1y agoThe issue with this article is that it is very imprecise. Are the standards for whether something “sounds bad” based on the average person’s reading or the intended audience. In its most general form (how the median article sounds to the median person), the argument is pretty vacuous. Most writing discusses simple ideas and they should sound good (familiar, easy, pleasurable) to the median person. But the most valuable kind of writing could sound tedious and filled with incomprehensible terminology to the median person but concise and interesting to the intended audience. The current way the idea is stated doesn’t sound correct because you can convincingly defend all 4 quadrants of the truth table.
- baxtr 1y agoThanks. The way you describe the topic, a dimension is missing in the article: who am I writing for? Related: I think pg would benefit from graphics here and there. Creating visuals like the 2x2 matrix you describe help tremendously to make ideas more comprehensible.
- vzaliva 1y agoThe 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.
- ISL 1y agoOne can readily argue that Graham has earned recognition and acclaim specifically for his essays. They're part of what drew early founders to YC.
- tzury 1y ago100%
- ofcourseyoudo 1y agoImpossible to decouple the quality (or not) of his writing from the fact that he had already sold Viaweb to Yahoo at that point. Surely that drew early founders to YC as well.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoI'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.
- fogleman 1y agoPossible counterpoint: LLMs are notoriously good at writing plausible sounding ideas that are wrong.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoLol your response is even better than mine, thank you.
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago“Plausible sounding” != good sounding in the way that (I think) PG is using it. LLMs produce plausible, wrong, and very bad prose. Arguably evidence for his point, if anything.
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- pvg 1y agoFire up an LLM and write a Malcolm Gladwell article.
- legends2k 1y agoPaul clearly excludes non-native writers. I know excellent thinkers who struggle to express an idea in a given language that they're not fluent in. Another related point: I've seen geeks who're solid in thinking but terrible at explaining what they think.
- ajoberstar 1y agoIt 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.
- DanAtC 1y agoI know this is his site, but who here honestly gives a shit what Paul Graham thinks? If you do, touch grass.
- jmorf 1y ago“It’s hard to be right without sounding right.” No. It’s hard to sound right even when you are. And if you don’t, you might as well be wrong.
- nchmy 1y agoIve 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...
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- lutusp 1y ago"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.” A classic writing book, now nearly forgotten -- "Strunk & White"/"The Elements of Style" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 1y agoElements of Style is one of the most assigned textbooks around. It's far from "forgotten."
- breckinloggins 1y agoDidn’t the ancients define “sophistry” as (in part) exactly the kind of writing one does when influence is more important than truth? 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 1y agoPG 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.
- Barrin92 1y agoIn 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"
- MinimalAction 1y agoI 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.
- MinimalAction 1y agoAlso, this article is ironically long and quite vague for PG's standards. The writing doesn't feel sound enough to be right.
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- mykowebhn 1y agoAnd 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?"
- bee_rider 1y agoHe’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.
- Waterluvian 1y agoI 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.
- kayodelycaon 1y agoSometimes luck and starting position is far more important than skill in being successful. That’s why a lot of advice from successful people is so varied and is not as helpful as advertised.
- throwanem 1y agoEnd of the first paragraph and we're already in the weeds with a totally nonsensical and implausible thesis. Never change, Paul.
- kristianc 1y agoInterested 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.
- Veen 1y agoI 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.
- mkoubaa 1y agoKant was an awful writer and _nobody_ thinks otherwise.
- throw4847285 1y agoI took Intro to Modern Philosophy with one of the top Kant scholars in the world, and when we got to Kant the professor warned us that he was a brilliant thinker but a terrible writer. He shared the old philosophical cliche, "Hume wrote about complex ideas simply, Kant wrote about simple ideas complexly." And yet to this day I suspect that Kant got a lot right, or at least set the terms of debate for hundreds of years. The reason why his writing is so obtuse is because he is grappling with a rigorous approach to concepts that are intuitively simple but entirely unexamined by most people. For example, I was trying to make my way through just the intro of a Critique of Judgment and I already encountered an idea so blindingly obvious and yet never really examined. Kant set up a dialectic between two ideas that people all believe but never really examine together: 1) Matters of taste are subjective and there is no reason to argue about them. People like what they like and you can't question that. 2) People argue about matters of taste as if their lives depended on. I wish I had the time and focus to really try to read through this book, but I know I don't. Still, even getting a glimpse at what was going on in that guy's mind is gratifying.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago[flagged]
- mykowebhn 1y agoWhether it's well written is debatable.
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- ashoeafoot 1y agoGood writing comes from horny, hungry desperate artists. Everything else is content.
- r33b33 1y agoThis is actually true. Also, the mentally ill. A model citizen (NPC) will never produce great art.
- codr7 1y ago[flagged]
- spyckie2 1y agoWhile 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??
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- logic_node 1y agoThis 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.
- andrewrn 1y agoThe 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 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 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 1y agoA 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.
- twodave 1y agoI 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.
- 6stringmerc 1y agoOh 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.
- milesrout 1y ago[dead]
- stevetron 1y agoThe 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.
- bsaul 1y agoIn french we have this very old expression : "ce qui se conçoit bien s'énonce clairement". "what is well understood will be clearly phrased". It's been consistently used by parents and teachers since the 17th century, so i guess there must be some truth to it.
- antithesizer 1y agoLacan 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.
- roxolotl 1y ago> I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right. This is a wild belief to hold in the post truth age of bs generation machines.
- antithesizer 1y agoMarx wrote the following about Proudhon: >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.
- mkoubaa 1y agoMarx and his hot takes are highly overrated
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- antithesizer 1y ago[flagged]
- sebastianconcpt 1y agoAnd yet, countless people bought his deadly equivocated ideas and still want to make it "sound more right". Paul Graham in that essay is equating "good writing" to "good propaganda" and in it he confesses that truth is treated as a convenient accident. To truth, that's intellectually amoral. His utilitarian opportunism intensifies.
- hoherd 1y agoThis reminds of this cognitive bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme-as-reason_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme-as-reason_effect
- r33b33 1y agoTL:DR: Writing is rewriting.
- voidhorse 1y agopg 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.
- blast 1y ago> If the writer is honest, internal consistency and truth converge. Can't one be honestly mistaken?
- doodaddy 1y agoFor all the writing there is about writing, Orwell’s six rules have yet to do me wrong: 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 1y agoGrunt. Sniffle.
- _wire_ 1y agoThis article's claim is a good demonstration of Brandolini's law. End of discussion.
- throwaway2037 1y agoHat 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.
- kierangill 1y agoI’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.
- saghm 1y ago> 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.
- kierangill 1y ago> but why does this have to be the case? 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.
- enriquto 1y agoWhat 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.
- throwaway984393 1y ago[dead]
- DavidPiper 1y ago> 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans [2] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=162573063275994 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=162573063275994
- __mharrison__ 1y agoTBH, I've written 12 books and rarely deal with orphans or widows. Good typesetting helps take care of this. (LaTeX previously and now Typst.)
- mkoubaa 1y agoThis feels like a cousin of the idea that the funnier the joke the more truth it uncovers.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kurko 1y ago> 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.
- _1tem 1y ago> Many dictators have sounded good but their core messages were abhorrent. Abhorrent does not mean untrue. In fact some of the worst people use truth to evil ends.
- deadbabe 1y agoLike who?
- andoando 1y agoAbhorrent doesnt mean the message was not conveyed well, which ultimately is the purpose of good writing
- debo_ 1y agoI'm so tired of this guy
- basket_horse 1y ago> It's hard to be right without sounding right. 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lkbm 1y ago> > It's hard to be right without sounding right. > 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.
- machinelearning 1y ago> “So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true.” 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.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoThis 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.
- readred 1y agokeep in mind what he's aiming for, he's not being honest 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
- ChadNauseam 1y agoI 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.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoEven a moron can write directions for how to milk a cow. It doesn't matter how poor the writing is, it matters whether a person understands it. People can (and do, regularly) understand poor writing. Even a child can write its parent a note expressing love in terrible writing that the parent will understand, and the idea remains right and true regardless of the quality or style of writing. 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.
- assimpleaspossi 1y agoIf people would just quit writing "Me and my friend..." I would be happier.
- blabla1224 1y agoWhy there is no reading mode available on Paul’s website? :( reading his blog from my phone is physically painful
- dartharva 1y agoYou'll have to excuse me from taking writing advice from the guy who claims discovering the word "delve" anywhere means it was written by ChatGPT.
- sfpotter 1y agoPaul 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.
- thomasanders0n 1y ago[flagged]
- crossroadsguy 1y agoI don’t think witch-hunting at any scale should be okay on online forums. Please don’t. Maybe respond without feeling the need to visit someone’s profile or history?
- martin82 1y agoWhy not? How else would you identify a troll? What if someone has a hidden agenda and in isolation their arguments seem sound, but when you zoom out you see the agenda and understand that the arguments are biased and manipulative and actually counterproductive?
- sfpotter 1y agoBecause in many cases no "troll" has been found at all; and discouraging people from witch-hunting leads to a more positive environment that's conducive to interesting conversations. Often the witch hunter is just salty about something someone said. For instance, thomasanders0n is evidently a big fan of Paul Graham's writings. I left my impression of their article, which was short and to the point; I personally think the article is so bad that doesn't merit a lengthy teardown. But because I feel differently, my response has been interpreted as bitter and jaded. Shrug.
- selcuka 1y agoI 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.
- taylorlapeyre 1y agoPaul, I’m begging you to read the Gorgias!
- f30e3dfed1c9 1y agoI'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.
- asadm 1y agoi don’t think he was rich when he first started? also other rich people also write stuff. nobody reads that shit.
- f30e3dfed1c9 1y agoA little unclear on what your point is. If it is that Graham is widely read in a way that other rich people aren't, then that's just wrong. Outside of the VC and startup scenes, he isn't read at all.
- jimnotgym 1y agoI also have the very strong suspicion that he was never poor
- jamesrcole 1y ago> He also should have run this through a spell checker. What's an example of a spelling mistake in it? I read it carefully and didn't notice any.
- f30e3dfed1c9 1y agoGonna leave that as an exercise to the reader. (You could run it through a spell checker, too.)
- jamesrcole 1y agoThere aren't any spelling errors. If you want to claim otherwise it would be easy for you to show examples.
- atmosx 1y ago> 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.
- jaehong747 1y agoGraham 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.
- netcan 1y ago> 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.
- whatever1 1y agoHoly airball. LLMs exist. Good writing is now as cheap as wifi.
- RobertBobert 1y ago[dead]
- bgwalter 1y agoPaul 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.
- benreesman 1y agoA bunch of people here are trashing @pg's writing and that's a bad use of time in dubious taste. @idlewords already broke that game like 15 years ago: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm.
- thih9 1y ago> 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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
- iamsanteri 1y agoTo 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.
- incomingpain 1y agoPaul 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.
- talkingtab 1y agoIf you paint - no, paint by numbers does not qualify - then this will seem obvious. I believe there is another level beyond this. When you write, but not by numbers.
- thymine_dimer 1y agoDear 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? Thanks for the essays. Love them.
- Swannie 1y agoIt's not succinct. It's repetitive. I was hoping it would give more insights, but instead it repeated the same ideas. This is one of PG's worse essays.
- larrled 1y agoIf 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.
- podgorniy 1y agoToo much meta, too much narrow. This writing is not for us. It's for you.
- turnsout 1y ago> I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right. 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.
- eranation 1y agoI'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.
- enragedcacti 1y agoThis 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.
- jimnotgym 1y ago>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.
- gmzamz 1y agoYou 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.
- mykowebhn 1y agoAlso, > 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?
- raldi 1y agoAn 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.
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- mikewarot 1y ago>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.
- martin82 1y agoAll the woke and progressive ideas "sound good" on paper. 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.