"The Best Essay" by Paul Graham
"The Best Essay" by Paul Graham
In which a man disappearing up his own asshole somehow fails to be interesting.
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.
I knew that was idle words, lol. Classic essay.
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.
Haha I had that drafted and decided that, in the spirit of the post, I’d write something less good
I want to make the other tribute joke, but it's really not like we need more heroic valorising going for that dipshit
If I post this kind of inane drivel, I'll at least make sure the title does not suggest it to be my best work.
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.
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
you gotta admit, putting forth one thing while trying to convince you it's some other thing (and that there totally isn't a business side associated to it.... right....) is extremely on brand for him and basically everything he puts his money behind
so this is delightfully poignant
to be fair, his desktop site has wrapped around to being charmingly retro
The shopping cart is presumably because he did E Commerce when he did an actual job.
Paul Graham needs to take a lesson from Jenny Nicholson and organize his thoughts into a numbered list.
Currently #2 on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39662615
I have zero interest in reading the post or the comments, the link is provided as a public service.
(BTW not everything by paulg submitted to HN is received rapturously. At least some members of the community can recognize his fatuousness)
a few posters over there have even called it out as reading like it’s AI generated. it doesn’t entirely have the tone for it, but paully g plagiarizing an essay by having GPT generate it and editing it to sound slightly more like something he’d write almost makes sense — it’d explain why this thing is so fucking long but doesn’t seem to say a damn thing. the problem is, a lot of his pre-gpt writing is exactly like that too.
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?