In which a man disappearing up his own asshole somehow fails to be interesting.
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Graham takes the nebulous concept of “best” and, at great length and with great effort, fails to bring clarity.
I graded a lot of humanities papers in a previous career. One of the weirder genres of bad paper would come from very smart computer science/math/physics majors who didn’t have time to do any of the assigned reading and just kind of tried to answer the prompt from first principles without citing any primary sources or other scholarship.
This feels like that paper, except the author isn’t a stressed-out college sophomore but a 59 year old “thought leader” with a large audience who gets Sam Altman to read his drafts. No attempt to engage with the history of the genre at all, or with the many other writers who have considered the form, and no examples cited except a famous scientific article by Darwin.
Uhhhh what now? How does writing an essay about how an essay should be an essay that is surprising, somehow fail to be utterly surprising or even all that interesting?
Despite its title this isn’t meant to be the best essay
Oh, thanks for clarifying, that was really hard to figure out. /s
This is (not) the greatest essay in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
holy fuck this is meandering and written like shit. like, marvel at this early paragraph:
There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the one I started with. Instead of asking what would the best essay be? I should have asked how do you write essays well? Though these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer to the first question, as we’ve seen, isn’t really about essay writing. The second question forces it to be.
this quote looks like nonsense because Paully’s paragraph flow is absolutely fucked and his sentence structure isn’t much better. did he copy Marc Andreessen‘s absolute garbage writing style, or did he figure he no longer needs to pay an editor now that he’s tricked my industry into thinking he’s a great writer?
also, I don’t remember paully’s blog looking this ugly:
it actually took my eyes a while to see the header at all, and the weird janky “Read More”…. thing? he does on every page will lose your scroll position every time the tab reloads, plus it appears even on pages that don’t have any More to Read
is that a fucking shopping cart in the corner?
how reassuring. I legitimately can’t figure out what this is for; I don’t think you can buy any of paully boy’s books direct (and why would you?) and unless I’m missing something in the mess that is the sidebar there’s no swag he’s selling (but again, why would you buy that?)
so questions:
- is my industry finally done pretending hacker news is ugly and broken as fuck on purpose?
- is Paul fucking Graham’s blog hosted on Shopify? I’m not near a computer to check what javascript’s being loaded but this shit is seriously making me flash back to the last time I had to do a godawful Shopify theme for a client
e: yep, I did a tiny amount of digging. if you send paully’s blog a mobile user-agent, it sends a version of his blog that’s (for some fucking reason) hosted on Yahoo Small Business/Yahoo Stores (now Turbify) which is a preconfigured e-commerce site. this lazy asshole fucked up building a mobile site so bad (and his desktop site isn’t much less ugly) that he decided he’d go off the fucking deep end and shove all his writing into a barely customized online storefront instead. this is seriously the type of shit that some of my less computer-savvy clients would demand I do back when I was working through college
This is basically the quintessential example of “I am a smart person, I think like an LLM, therefore the LLM is smart too”:
While comparing ordinary human activity to language modeling is perhaps the greatest intellectual cliche of 2024, what PG describes in the essay-writing process itself essentially boils down to beam search. Autocomplete, find wrongness, backtrack, predict more consistent series of next tokens. The fact that only one of those options is actually reflected on the screen doesn’t change the fact that the writer is probability-weighting continuations in their head.
