I believe that it is not that style helps the content to be more right, not in the way PG believes (like in the example about writing shorter sentences), it is that a richer style (so, not shorter, but neither baroque: a style with more possibilities) can reflect a less obvious way of thinking, that carries more signal.
I'll make an example that makes this concept crystal crisp, and that you will likely remember for the rest of your life (no kidding). In Italy there was a great writer called Giuseppe Pontiggia. He had to write an article for one of the main newspapers in Italy about the Nobel Prize in Literature, that with the surprise of many, was never assigned, year after year, to Borges. He wrote (sorry, translating from memory, I'm not an English speaker and I'm not going to use an LLM for this comment):
"Two are the prizes that each year the Swedish academy assigns: one is assigned to the winner of the prize, the other is not assigned to Borges".
This uncovers much more than just: even this year the prize was not assigned to Borges. And, honestly, I never saw this kind of style heights in PG writings (I appreciate the content most of the times, but having translated a few of his writings in Italian, I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs). You don't reach that kind of Pontiggia style with the process in the article here, but via a very different process that only the best writers are able to perform and access.
Reminds me of a line by Douglas Adams describing some particularly crude alien invaders:
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
He could have written something like: “The blocky ships hovered seemingly in defiance of gravity.”
Instead he picked a phrasing that’s intentionally a little hard to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to get the joke, and remembers it.
Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick.
My take is that it's "writing that calls attention to itself" (or, if you want, writing that is clearly off the wall)
Not sure if it can't be applied to exposition, Pontiggia managed it as above?
Some pecunious would like it reduced to Jobs ("editing is all you need") but I'd argue Jony has the sparkle, the je ne sais quoi, the more than just functional
I think that the last time I ran across "haecceitas" in a literary context was in an essay by Randall Jarrell. My guess is that he was referring to William Carlos Williams. In that case, Jarrell meant writing that tried to engage each thing as it is, not as part of a larger class.
Yepp the "academic" flavour of it is ... slightly different (& less relevant imho to parent thread) ... than the pop-cultural one, should have stressed that it exists ntheless. Thank you for providing more context for "context elision" :)!
Dave Barry writes like that, all the time (a lot less so, these days). He uses it for comedic twists, and usually integrated with other tricks.
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.
He was a columnist for the Miami Herald, for many years, and has written a number of books. The site will let you read a number of his columns. His books read about the same, but longer.
> “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
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.
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.
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.
Idk, I'm conflicted here because PG is the embodiment of a poor amateur writer with good ideas.
He is literally the proof that writing can be bad (albeit we should define what good and bad writing are and agree on it) but still interesting because of the ideas.
I write for living (albeit in Czech) and I don't think that PGs writing is bad. It is not artistically brilliant (unlike Douglas Adams'), but he gets his points clearly across, and uses a language that even foreigners with limited command of English can parse.
That's good in my opinion - in the same sense that hammer which drives down nails flawlessly is good. PG is not trying to write colorful fiction, he wants to communicate something, and he succeeds in doing so. It is still a hammer, not a statue of David, but there are good and bad hammers, and this is a good hammer. You wouldn't want to drive nails into boards with a statue of David anyway.
I don't share that fully, and I've read every single one of his essays, his arid style gets tough after few paragraphs, it's too dense and harsh, sentences are consistently very short so it feels like reading a machine gun.
I think the intended implication goes the other way:
"But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
Hopefully that's not too much italianposting for the international audience :)
I can’t understand why it would be at all safe to conclude this. In any other field, you certainly wouldn’t conclude that good visual design, attention to detail, craftsmanship, etc. indicates anything about the factual or moral correctness of the beliefs of the creators. Do the most beautiful and expensive churches indicate the most moral or theologically correct religious groups? Do the best designed uniforms tell you something about the wartime behavior of soldiers or the military policy of the country? Do the pharmaceutical companies with the best produced television advertisements have the best intentions and products backed by the best medical research?
You have it backwards. PG agrees that you can't conclude from the fact that something is beautiful that it's also right--he says "we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true".
What PG is saying is that if something is ugly, you can conclude that it's most likely wrong as well.
You can’t safely conclude that either. It could be a hastily-written rough draft. It could be the result of effort, but written by someone who isn’t fluent in English.
Attention to detail is a signal of quality, but these things are just heuristics, not reliable truths.
> I understand what he is saying and it’s precisely what I am disputing.
I don't see how. Your post was disputing the claim that good design, craftsmanship, beauty, etc. are signs of correctness. And that's not the claim PG makes in the article. Your post never disputed the claim PG did make, which is that bad design and craftsmanship, ugliness, etc., are signs of lack of correctness.
In the first paragraph, he writes, ”I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.” So he does indeed make the claim you say he doesn’t make.
The essay itself lacks anything novel, despite the rather breathless framing: “So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true.” These ideas are a couple of hundred years old at least. Kant: “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good”. This is classic Age of Enlightenment stuff, repackaged in classic Silicon Valley VC style.
yep totes. good style is sometimes proximate to good ideas because both indicate the author has spent lots of 'thinking tokens' on the thing, which is a costly and therefore sometimes-more-reliable signal. but i believe it falls apart under intensive selection -- the things we read are popular, and so on average are selection-survivors, which means they'll approach the optimal ratio of thinking token spend on style/vs substance for survival, which may not be the same as the best ratio for precise or insightful communication.
but the best communication survives too because it touches universal truths by connecting them with specific real phenomena. the worst (most harmful) communication survives because it frantically goodharts our quality evaluation process, even when it contradicts truth or reality. e.g. Orwell on the good side, L Ron Hubbard on the bad side. Unfortunately these categories are often not well sorted until after the principals are all dead (probably because everyone has to die before you can tell whether the values are universal or just generationally interesting), and there's a style-bar that has to be cleared before you even get to join the canon for consideration; interestingly this this would tend to increase the illusion that style is associated with substance, especially in older writing.
> In the first paragraph, he writes, ”I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.”
But towards the end he backs away from that claim, and makes the claim I described:
"[W]hile 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 the light of that, and of much of the rest of the essay, I think the sentence from the start that you quote was misstated. It should have been stated as "Writing that's right is likely to sound good."
> But towards the end he backs away from that claim, and makes the claim I described:
> "[W]hile 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."
What do you mean, backs away? Those aren't different claims. If writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, it is necessarily the case that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
Yes, they are. The first claim (the one he backs away from) is A implies B, where A = "this writing is beautiful" and B is "this writing is true". The second claim is Not A implies Not B. Those are not logically equivalent. The second claim is logically equivalent to B implies A, i.e., "this writing is true" implies "this writing is beautiful". But B implies A is not equivalent to A implies B.
> If writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, it is necessarily the case that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
No, it isn't. It could also be the case that both types of writing, sounding bad and not sounding bad, are less likely to be right (because, say, sophistry is very prevalent).
What is necessarily the case is that, if writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, writing that is right is less likely to sound bad. Which, as above, is not logically equivalent to "writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right".
> What is necessarily the case is that, if writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, writing that is right is less likely to sound bad.
That's true. You're 100% right about this.
But if you're able to prove it, you should be well aware that exactly the same proof will quickly show that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
> Which, as above, is not logically equivalent to "writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right".
And that, obviously, is false. They are the same statement; either is sufficient to prove the other. I don't know what happened in your comment.
It's a logical tautology, at least if we make the implications definite (i.e., "sounds bad" necessarily implies "not right", and therefore "right" necessarily implies "does not sound bad"). In other words, "A implies B" is logically equivalent to "Not B implies Not A". There's no need to give any further proof.
> you should be well aware that exactly the same proof will quickly show that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
No, it won't. You really need to learn some basic logic.
> They are the same statement
No, they're not. Again, please learn some basic logic. "A implies B" is not logically equivalent to "B implies A". You are claiming that it is. Any basic textbook on logic will tell you that you are wrong.
If you want to go around calling things basic math, maybe you should actually do the math. You're not going to impress anyone by just parroting the idea that you're an idiot.
I can do it for you:
+----------+--------+
| eloquent | clumsy |
+-------+----------+--------+
| true | A | B |
+-------+----------+--------+
| false | C | D |
+-------+----------+--------+
Imagine there are A papers that are eloquent and true, B papers that are badly worded and true, C papers that are eloquent and false, and D papers that are badly worded and false. We'll also assume none of these values are 0.
For convenience, I'll use the lowercase letters to refer to probabilities rather than counts: a = A / (A + B + C + D), b = B / (A + B + C + D), etc.
We are given the postulate "papers that sound bad [in our terminology, "clumsy"] are less likely to be true". There are two possible interpretations of this:
1. Clumsy papers are less likely to be true than the average of all papers.
2. Clumsy papers are less likely to be true than eloquent papers.
Fortunately for us, each of these implies the other, so I'll use interpretation (1), again for convenience.
We can now define our postulate precisely:
b / (b + d) < (a + b) / (a + b + c + d)
Observe here that the four values a, b, c, and d are all positive and their sum is 1.
We can use basic algebra to rearrange the postulate:
b / (b + d) < (a + b) [because a + b + c + d = 1]
b < (a + b)(b + d) [because (b + d) is positive]
b < (ab + ad + b^2 + bd) [algebra]
b < b(a + b + d) + ad [algebra]
b < b(1 - c) + ad [because a + b + c + d = 1]
b < b - bc + ad [algebra]
0 < 0 - bc + ad [algebra]
bc < ad [algebra]
Let's examine whether eloquent papers are more likely to be true. As an algebraic statement, this is:
a / (a + c) > (a + b) / (a + b + c + d)
Same process:
a / (a + c) > (a + b)
a > (a + b)(a + c)
a > a^2 + ac + ab + bc
a > a(a + c + b) + bc
a > a(1 - d) + bc
a > a - ad + bc
0 > 0 - ad + bc
ad > bc
We have now proven that eloquent papers are more likely to be true if and only if ad > bc. We've also proven that, if clumsy papers are less likely to be true, bc < ad. I'm really, really hoping you can fill in the rest of the proof.
Why did you insist - repeatedly - that a very basic and obvious fact was false? What were you thinking?
> It could also be the case that both types of writing, sounding bad and not sounding bad, are less likely to be right (because, say, sophistry is very prevalent).
No, it cannot be the case that every type of writing is less likely to be right. Less likely than what?
Think of it this way: some percentage of writing that sounds bad is wrong, and some percentage of writing that does not sound bad is wrong. I am simply pointing out that it is perfectly possible for both percentages to be the same, so that whether or not the writing sounds bad gives no useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
I think you are taking "less likely" too literally. PG makes it clear that he is not talking about exact mathematical functions. His intent is much better captured by treating the statements as logical implications, as I and others have been doing.
> I think you are taking "less likely" too literally.
> I am simply pointing out that it is perfectly possible for both percentages to be the same
Come on. If you believe those percentages are the same, what's left of PG's claim?
> , so that whether or not the writing sounds bad gives no useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
He notes, and you stipulate, that if the writing sounds bad, that gives useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
> His intent is much better captured by treating the statements as logical implications, as I and others have been doing.
I have been treating them as logical implications. The difference is that I actually know what the implications are.
How do you think the argument "assuming badly worded papers are no more likely to be wrong than any other papers, it isn't necessarily the case that if badly worded papers are more likely to be wrong than other papers, conclusion X would follow" works? You want to use logic instead of algebra? Every conclusion follows from a contradiction.
No, it is not.
If A -> B is Not logically equivalent as If Not A -> Not B. Many make this mistake.
It is equivalent to If Not B -> Not A.
In this case, if a writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right - leads to - if the writing is right the writing is likely to sound good, (and only that).
> If A -> B is Not logically equivalent as If Not A -> Not B. Many make this mistake.
But many people making a mistake won't show that everything anyone says is an example of that mistake. Your observation isn't relevant here, because a claim of that form hasn't been made. We don't have "not", we have "less", which behaves differently.
For the claim "f(a) > f(b) -> g(a) > g(b)", it is trivial to show that "f(a) < f(b) -> g(a) < g(b)". These two claims are identical to each other. The proof is one step long.
In the present context, we have f(x) representing "quality of the writing in x" and g(x) representing "likelihood that the ideas in x are correct".
I’m not sure about that. Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them eloquently? While clarity of thought facilitates clarity of writing, that’s in principle orthogonal to the right/wrong axis, especially in the ethical sense implied by the Moretti quote. And as the sibling comment correctly observes, the existence of language barriers rather disprove that hypothesis.
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.
> Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them eloquently?
It's about the process, not the talent. When you've carefully thought through and refined an idea to understand whether it makes sense yourself, that usually provides a lot of guidance on how you can express the idea eloquently to others. You know the questions they'll have and the answers they'll find satisfying, because you already went through the same process. When you're just tossing out your first half-baked impression, it's a lot harder to communicate it well, although some people do have the orthogonal talent of making it up on the fly.
Sure, it's not a 1:1 map, but often who does an excellent job, does it along all the line: form, content, and the best papers are even shorter normally... They don't have to justify with many pages the lack of real content.
About the nobel price quote: it shows that the most powerful language is unexpected, breaks the obviousness of things, something that ancient greeks knew very well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
I was responding to “the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.”
About the nobel prize quote, it isn’t that powerful to me because I don’t really know what it wants to say, and it didn’t lead me to any notable insight either. But maybe that’s just me.
Pontiggia sometimes explained parts of other writers just using rethoric figures, and showing how their application provided new insights into things and concepts.
Writing, at a level sufficient to get your point across and be well read, is within reach of most people. The writing is not really an intelligence test.
The gap is typically that if something is written poorly we can infer the underlying thinking that went into it wasn't well enough conceived to put out high quality text. You can understand this implicitly when you think about how you would write about a topic that you barely know about vs a topic that you are so comfortable with that the writing doesn't even seem like an effort. Ironically people often don't write about the stuff they know best because they presume it's obvious - and it is, to them. And then they write about the stuff they're trying to figure out - which is poorly understood and poorly expressed.
My answer would be: "eloquence" may be a too-strong requirement, but if you can't express your ideas at least clearly, how can you be sure that they are the right ideas? Because without a detailed description that another human being can understand, this is really hard to judge. Maybe there is a lot of overlooked flaws in your flow.
I have a suspicion that there is a subset of geniuses who just intuitively "grok" some important ideas without being able to describe them to other people. Some of the autistic savants come to mind. But I am not sure if they can be induced to actually cooperate efficiently with the rest of humanity. Whatever happens in their minds, seems to be locked there.
Yep 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.
>In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
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
I describe it as inverse purple prose. The over-engineered simplicity stands out and distracts from the content.
Simplicity in the naive sense of minimal word count increases cognitive load because we have neural circuits that got used to a particular middle ground.
I'm not a native English speaker and learned the majority of it from technical and fantasy books. It may be me, but the majority of his writing feels like powerpoint slides. You can feel the idea, but the medium is to bland to pay attention to it. I would take a more complicated and nuanced prose that would elicit some virtual landmarks in my memory.
The quote reminds me of Tucholsky, a German journalist known for this style. An example that comes to mind was his review of James Joyce's Ulysses: "It's like meat extract: you can't eat it, but many soups will be made with it".
I think putting a bit of fun writing into reports of everyday events or reviews can go a long way. Tucholsky again, I'm paraphrasing and translating from memory where he wrote a trial against dada artist Grosz who depicted army officials as grotesque and ugly: "To demonstrate that there are no faces like this in the Reichswehr (the army), they brought in lieutenant so-and-so. They shouldn't have done that."
Presumably, for this concept to stick with you your whole life, you'd have to have heard of "Borges"? From Googling that name, it appears the author you're referring to died in 86. Why would anyone expect him to win the current year's Nobel Prize in Literature?
Yes I think I know what you are getting at. Although PG essays are great if the idea is new to you. But for this one I am thinking "yes I know" skim skim skim! I have experienced the same thing. Anyone who has has their writing edited probably has.
Who reads the latest "Nobel winner" anyway? Or, think about the person complaining "why didn't this movie get an Oscar?" in the Youtube comments. There's only 5 people in the Nobel literature committee and the person they elect says more about them than about what good writing is.
I find Paul Graham's writing style to be a bit off. I think he is too overly reductive and simplistic in his use of language and imprecise in his choice of words, and I genuinely don't understand the praise for his writing. You should read his work because these are the thoughts of a highly influential VC, not because they are gems of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Sometimes a longer, more nuanced word has all the right connotations, and sometimes a more complex sentence carries the perfect rhetorical structure. Paul Graham's writing seems to ignore (or perhaps purposely eschew) such details.
> I think he is too overly reductive and simplistic
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.
Wait, I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make here. Is it that I commented about Paul Graham's writing style in response to a PG essay on writing style? Is that "making up concerns before even engaging with the author's ideas"? The whole point of the essay we're discussing is writing style, and in particular a set of suggestions he has based on his own work.
It's valid to criticize someone for not giving a piece of writing a charitable read before criticising the author's style, but that does not seem to apply when the topic of the essay is the author's style. Writing style is largely about figuring out how to direct the reader to your ideas, so it seems axiomatic that any piece of writing that needs a high-effort charitable read is poorly written (this, by the way, is in TFA).
As to your original point, being too vague also doesn't increase signal to noise ratio. It just lets you write as though a lot of noise is signal.
> Is that "making up concerns before even engaging with the author's ideas"?
I am responding to the point that pg’s writing is too reductionist. Comments on these articles often include “what about [obvious exception that distract from the main idea]”.
These comments indicate they are trying to dismiss rather than understand (the author didn’t even consider my idea!)
As an example, “San Francisco is wealthier than Bakersfield”. Almost certainly a bad reader will complain that this does not apply to every resident. But we all know what is meant.
So my general takeaway is that making broad statements without qualification can be a strength, because you filter out bad readers who aren’t interested in big ideas. And catering to them (who cannot be satisfied) only worsens the experience for your interested audience.
This itself is of course a broad statement with exception.
PG's writing is often so reductionist it muddies his points and HN commenters are often pedants about meaningless issues. Both can be true.
I don't blame PG for the pedantry over the minutiae. That's on the readers, and people on HN specifically are prone to this kind of pedantry. I do blame him for weakening his points by using bad language to express them.
TFA isn't about how to read, though. It's about writing.
For me the issue with PG's writing, is that it has tiny hints of Narcissism, and that, by itself, hurts his ability to convey ideas. In classic writing, and in my opinion, also in great modern writing, there is a lot of humbleness and even some self deprecation. Sometimes the more the author doubts themselves, the more convincing they are, as it shows self critique, and lack of "Dunning-Kruger effect".
p.s. I wonder how many here are not aware you are the creator of Redis. (I assume most do, but chances are many have no idea).
Paul Graham is a very good writer, but one of the things I admire most about him is that, when he happens upon a truly excellent writer, he doesn't show the jealousy for which writers are infamously known. There has never been a case of a truly excellent writer being penalized, harassed, and eventually banned here.
This is wrong in so many different ways it's like an art piece. Every part of it that tries to defend the central thesis is actually disproving it. It's kind of funny actually. Here's a dude that's been writing for 30 years, and not only is his writing bad, his ideas are crap. It has the feel of somebody who's completely convinced of his own ideas, despite the fact that they're based solely on his personal experience.
I have a simple proof that the thesis is wrong. Take a moron, and have him work on a farm for 30 years. Then have him write a book about running a farm. Now, he's going to sound like a moron, and will write very poorly. But most everything he writes will be right. Despite his bad writing, he can still communicate his observations of how and why simple things work. So it's not hard to be right while sounding wrong. You just have to be a moron.
I don't think your proof works. Here is a line from the article where he elaborates on what he means:
> By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas right means developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail. So getting the ideas right is not just a matter of saying true things, but saying the right true things.
I'm guessing that a moron with 30 year's experience on a farm would not successfully do that, even when writing a book on farming.
Even 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.
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.
...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.
The point about end-notes being a mechanism to ease the strain of fitting tree-like ideas into a linear essay is lovely. It brings to mind David Foster Wallace's writing, which is obsessively end-noted and if you listen to his speeches, you can see that he basically tortures himself in sanding down his ideas, much like PG says.
PG's ideas in here, to the extent that I agree with them (which is not fully), does break down for ideas. Example being: brilliant engineers who are incredibly capable at having ideas and executing against them but incredibly incapable of communicating said ideas. Their ideas are very true, evidenced by their ability to produce real results, but also oftentimes ugly when communicated.
A final counterpoint is JFK's eulogy, which sounds amazing, but, after the initial emotional appeal wore off, I realized doesn't really have a strong unified thread running through it, and is thus forgettable in terms of the truths it ostensibly delivers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiDUbaBL9E. Compare to "This Is Water" by DFW, which doesn't have the same epic prose, but is maybe the most true-seeming speech I've ever heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw. It could be that PG's ideas were never intended for spoken speeches, but whatever this is still an adjacent truth != beauty example.
A tree structure of ideas naturally fits into a linear essay of text, so I don't understand this. The opening paragraphs of a section of text are a broad theme on which subsequent paragraphs expand. Paragraphs also carry a similar structure in their sentences, and every great essay builds large trees of logical ideas within a linear rhetorical structure. A footnote as an expansion is a crutch: either the text of the footnote is important enough to appear on the page, in which case you should generally find a way to put it in the prose, or it is not, in which case you should omit it entirely.
The only truly good use of expository footnotes is to expand on things that the reader might be interested in (and point to further reading), but are orthogonal to the main argument of the essay. They are not for expansion of the tree of logical arguments present in the body of the essay.
>M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error.
I don't know if Paul has much of a reputation as a technologist among tech lay people, but this quote reminds me of Paul's fame as a thinker among tech people.
Paul Graham, as a writer who writes sentences that sound bad and who promulgates ideas that are stupid, is an expert in neither good sounding sentences nor sound ideas, hence is unqualified to hold forth on the topic.
I was wondering if I’m the only one who thinks that way. He might be a better writer than some (including myself), but that’s a pretty low bar. The ideas are neither novel nor deep, and the writing is subpar.
I pasted the essay into ChatGPT, and this is what it said (just for fun; I’m not taking ChatGPT’s evaluation seriously.)
The essay is superficial, mildly derivative, and wrapped in a tone that suggests insight without delivering much. If it reads like someone thinking out loud and convincing themselves they’ve discovered something profound — that’s because it kind of is.
It’s not wrong. It’s just lightweight.
So why do people praise essays like this?
Because they’re:
- Readable: The ideas feel accessible and comforting.
- Anecdotal: They use lived experience rather than abstract reasoning.
- Flatter the reader: They make you feel smart for agreeing with something that feels intuitive.
But that’s not the same as being deep or challenging.
I'm VERY curious as to what your prompt was. Because I just did the same thing, simply asking "do you think this is an example of good writing?" and it responded with this
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.
Exactly. That's why I said I'm not taking it seriously. LLMs tend to always agree with you (i.e. your prompt). I don't have the exact prompt handy but it was something like
I read the following article and found that the ideas are not novel, and the content is not insightful. What is your opinion?
If I used a more positive prompt, I'm sure it would have told me that it's a great article.
I 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?
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?
Because 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.
Dear Paul,
I'm sure it has been said elsewhere in the comments, but ironically I struggle to agree with this essay...which happens to be nicely and succinctly written.
I'm arguing that it's your own bias generated from the synthesis of your own idea that selects for sentences that effectively express the idea, and nothing to do with the writing itself.
The anecdote about the puddle who suddenly gains consciousness and remarks that the world is so perfectly formed around it, that it's proof of divine creation, seems to apply here.
The author generates an idea and is trying to articulate it. A well written sentence or paragraph that flows, pleases the author. This is because the idea they are trying to express is done in a satisfying way.
Thus the more pleasing the writing to the author, the more efficiently it articulates the original idea.
It's the author's bias, based on their own idea, that defines the level of 'pleasingness'.
Lastly, Paul, do you think the LLMs are any less satisfied with their confident and irrational hallucinations, than they are with their more well supported claims? Further, if you weren't aware that the output was ridiculous, would you be able to tell a accurate statement from a false one?
Writing wise I have a great deal of respect for you (and other top commenters) because you don't have people edit and review what you say you just write it (and take lumps or accolaydes).
Something I've mentioned before is I can't get over the fact that Paul has mulitiple people review his essays prior to publishing (which others have defended when I've made the same comment before).
I (as most people do) write clients every day with proposals or results or reports. Nobody reviews my writing first and the end recipients they either like what I say and pay me money and refer others to me or they don't. I certainly don't have the time to perseverate over the perfect phrase or paragraph '50 or 100 times' but yet I get results more often than I don't.
I see nothing wrong at all with asking people for feedback on an essay that will be broadly published and read. That just seems prudent.
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.
> I see nothing wrong at all with asking people for feedback on an essay that will be broadly published and read.
Is he really 'broadly published and read'? Most people outside of tech have no clue (and no interest) in what PG says.
Yes there is 'nothing wrong' except if you put yourself out there as having good unique thoughts why does it not show that you are lacking confidence to have others (again in this situation maybe in another I'd agree) always review what you are posting on your personal site or blog?
And very importantly he doesn't allow comments (on his blog) the only comments are on HN which he doesn't link to. It's unknown if he even reads the HN comments anymore. Or (last interaction over a year ago) comment on HN anymore (to defend his thoughts or position).
Many reasons for this of course but if you can't handle criticism and think so little of what people on HN says why are you publishing at all? That's your biggest audience isn't it?
(Side note YES HN is can be a brutal crowd for sure. Would be interesting if he ever publishes the changes he makes in the essays or what the people reviewing the essay have to say).
There's probably not many people who write essays generally focused in tech who have a larger audience (or even following). Though it's beside the point how generally popular he is. It can only be helpful to get feedback on anything that we ever do - it doesn't mean we have to incorporate it.
And seeking feedback from specific people who you respect is a vastly different thing than opening up your digital home to the slovenly masses to come and shit in with their comments.
Though, I think he probably should have sought feedback from some actual good writers for a topic like this...
What is wrong with having someone edit and review? It is just feedback. If the writing itself is an assignment editing is normal. If the writing is part of another process maybe not.
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.
Having an editor isn't wrong, but it's an luxury for something as small as a Hacker News comment or an email.
Paul having an editor isn't a luxury. His essays are edited because it's important for his business. He can easily justify a paying someone.
More to the point, we're contrasting Paul's essays to people who don't have the luxury. Paul's essays could be seen as less genuine, even if they seem wiser.
> His essays are edited because it's important for his business. He can easily justify a paying someone.
First he is not paying someone to edit these (any person I've seen appears to be unpaid and affiliated with HN in some way). Second he's not (as far as I can tell) angling these posts for business purposes (for example if the head of some corporation were doing that that would make sense).
That the 'studiedly mussed' style of fly.io blog posts comes across as 'unedited' for some is a terrific compliment, even more so for being unintended.
>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.
> 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?
An even better example is just a few sentences back in the essay: The speed of a car has nothing to do with its color, and yet you can improve the speed without changing the color.
You can't optimize for two things at the same time in the /same system/.
In your example, the best volume for the stereo will change based on how fast you're going. Noise from air going around your car will require a slightly louder volume. It technically goes the other way too, I'm sure louder music will affect your mileage slightly, reducing your MPG due to increased power draw. Realistically it won't matter, but they do exist in the same system.
You can absolutely optimize for two things at the same time in different systems. The ideal speed optimizing for MPG in different cars aren't really linked and can be found independently.
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.
Isn't that the same thing as the oft-repeated "if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough", which is a saying I really, really, really dislike a lot, because understanding is one thing, and transferring that understanding is a skill unto its own.
Lacan developed the idea of "deferred understanding" in his clinical practice and (infamously) deployed it in his teaching as well. It sounds a little suspicious at first, but it's not difficult to grasp what it is or why it might be beneficial in certain contexts where repression is faced. For example, it's a cliche on the left that far more people like the idea of socialism when it's described to them piecemeal without being labeled as such than would be willing to endorse "socialism" by name. Drawing out that tacit endorsement is a matter of "deferring understanding"--bypassing someone's resistance to an idea they don't understand well, but nevertheless have strong feelings about, by introducing them to it in a somewhat confusing way, so that they come to understand it better before they realize what exactly it is that they're coming to understand. In Lacan's approach understanding is a specific process with its own benefits and drawbacks, rather than the universal purpose of all communication, nor beneficial for every purpose communication might be engaged in to pursue. Confusing writing is like the proverbial knife that can be used to injure or, in the hands of a surgeon, to heal. This is why art students sometimes practice drawing images that have been turned upside down, so that they can focus on the details that are there in front of their eyes without being distracted by their own comprehension standing in for the colors and shapes actually present: "this is an image of a cow and I know what a cow is supposed to look like, so once I have recognized that it is a cow, there is no longer any need to keep looking." One of the big leaps that art students make is in learning to rigorously look at what they're drawing beyond merely seeing and recognizing what it is, which is the usual everyday way of looking. In the same way Lacan taught his students to rigorously listen to their patients and all the little oddities in the way they describe their problems that might otherwise be dismissed out of hand by a less attentive doctor who too quickly decides they know what is going on. This way they might avoid being fooled by their own understanding before they've had a chance to engage with the irreducible complexity and uniqueness of this or that specific neurosis. Understanding is not always the right tool for the job, or at least not the right tool for every step of every communicative job.
interesting, thanks. But isn't this just playing with definitions ? It seems like what lacan described was a way to fight against pre-judgement, in order to reach a better understanding of the subject.
> I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.
Paul's point would make sense if his case was about greater verisimilitude, which might sound like splitting hairs, but is an important phenomenon in philosophy. Many dictators have sounded good but their core messages were abhorrent.
In the same vein, there are thousands of fiction books, some more brilliantly written than others, but nothing in that spectrum makes any of their stories any more real or true.
> I know it's true from writing.
Well, some things just appear to be true. I admire Paul's writings and I believe his honesty in trying to get to the truth, but in this specific essay, it seems like what he's alluding to is the appearance of truth. Good writing makes core ideas look more true, but it can't objectively have a relation to truth itself, only with our description of said idea.
I think a strong sense of confidence (perhaps overconfidence) and inflated self-worth are likely closely related to increased likelihood of success. “Those who dare, win” and all that.
But I think most of the opinions and advice rich, successful people like to share is just a side-effect, not a productive output, of these traits.
I'm solidly in the camp that believes that if Graham wasn't rich no one would read this stuff or claim to admire it. He also should have run this through a spell checker.
I think it’s true that the impactfullness of his essays has gone down in the recent years. However, note that a lot of people that gathered at HN in the early days came because of his early essays, such as Hackers and Painters. Me included.
A 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.
> The clue to the answer is something I noticed 30 years ago when I was doing the layout for my first book. Sometimes when you're laying out text you have bad luck. For example, you get a section that runs one line longer than the page. I don't know what ordinary typesetters do in this situation, but what I did was rewrite the section to make it a line shorter. You'd expect such an arbitrary constraint to make the writing worse. But I found, to my surprise, that it never did. I always ended up with something I liked better.
This is a well-known phenomenon, and yes, "ordinary" writers and typesetters do this too. These visual loose ends are called Widows, Orphans and Runts [1]. Writing that is less visually ugly on the page will seem to read better.
> Because the writer is the first reader
This seems like a derivative of a zen-like koan from jazz musician Winton Marsalis' "Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is the player" [2]. Interesting that he immediately starts talking about music there too.
> But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.
I think I would have enjoyed this read more if it was clear at the top that by the time he'd finished writing it, he disagreed with his initial assertion ("I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.") Without that, the article kind of feels like bait, and reading it plus writing this comment feels like me taking it.
I think I agree with the central point here. I think the key phrase is “internal consistency”. This is also very true of programming. It’s difficult to build good software without having a handle on the subject matter (and/or a domain expert to get feedback from).
But often writing is also a process of discovery. Maybe you are trying to write something that hasn’t been written about before. This is like building software without a spec. You can still write well and be irrelevant, just as one can build great software upon bad assumptions and fail to sell it. This doesn’t make it bad writing in its own right, but it also may not be very useful to anyone. In my opinion both software and prose should be produced for a purpose.
Thus, if there’s no meaning to it, writing, like software, falls pretty flat.
Interested to know how much Immanuel Kant pg has read. Kant's whole project was about grappling with how the mind structures experience—and how language mediates, rather than transparently transmits, thought. You can never fully get to the thing in itself.
I can see how re-editing can make the ideas more coherent within pg's frame of representation, but I'm struggling with the idea that it makes them any more true.
I would like to imagine that pg's obsession with pared-down, simple sentences is a post-traumatic stress response to an early encounter with Kant's prose.
I 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.
That tracks. Language is a kind of technology, that evolves to adapt to new uses. A simple elegant python program that fits on a slide might have taken tens of thousands of lines of obtuse fortran.
Yep, and Kant's writing in many ways is like early compiler design. Painful. Necessary. And built at a time when the cognitive architecture didn’t yet have shortcuts. He was writing in metaphysical FORTRAN.
There are two sentences in this essay that I couldn't understand. Can someone help me?
1. "An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation"
I thought dialogue and conversation were the same thing. What is the difference between them besides one being a cleaned up version of the other?
2. "If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs."
What does this even mean? Is it an exemple or an analogy? It sounds like at this point in the text there should be an analogy, but this sentence sounds like an example. So, which one is it?
Slots 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.
Even 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?
Dialogue and conversation are not the same thing, though they’re related, just in the same way that stress and anxiety are related but not the same. The task of reading comprehension involves being able to track important distinctions between synonyms.
The second is a counterfactual, and it is correctly deployed to help show the difference between a valid argument and a sound argument. Graham is saying that a good liar presents pleasing and valid but unsound arguments, or rather sophistry.
I think your confusion here is from reading comprehension problems.
I’m a sucker for when the form serves as an example for the author’s idea.
> If it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and you just state them. But other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications.
From William Zinsser’s On Writing Well:
> The growing acceptance of the split in-finitive, or of the preposition at the end of a sentence, proves that formal syntax can't hold the fort forever against a speaker's more comfortable way of getting the same thing said—and it shouldn't. I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
Another from the same book:
> CREEPING NOUNISM. This is a new American disease that strings two or three nouns together where one noun—or, better yet, one verb-will do. Nobody goes broke now; we have money problem areas. It no longer rains; we have precipitation activity or a thunderstorm probability situation. Please, let it rain.
> Today as many as four or five concept nouns will attach themselves to each other, like a molecule chain. Here's a brilliant specimen I recently found: "Communication facilitation skills development intervention." Not a person in sight, or a working verb. I think it's a program to help students write better.
> the rhythm of writing has to match the ideas in it
It's hard for me to tell what the point of the author was from just the part you quoted, but why does this have to be the case? I don't have trouble believing that many complex ideas require complex language to describe them, but the idea that it's literally a requirement in order for the writing to be "good" rather than just a usual circumstance isn't obvious to me. If anything, the complexity of this quote just seems to hide the dubious premise.
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.
So, this would seem to be fairly easy to test empirically. Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing, and use it on something where you know if it's true:
1) court testimony which we know (from outside evidence) is either true or not true
2) scientific papers which we know to have been reproducible, or not
3) stock pundits predictions about the future of some company or other, which we know with hindsight to have been accurate or not
Much more convincing to me than any amount of good writing about writing, would be to have some empirical evidence.
> Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing
There are objective features of writing, but quality is subjective.
Of course, as to the thesis of the essay, it is both trivial and uninteresting that people, including PG, tend to have views of the correctness of an idea and the quality of the presentation that are correlated.
It is interesting that PG thinks that this is anything more than a cognitive bias to be cautious about, though.
So one thing to note is that the essay mentions that it refers specifically to "writing that is used to develop ideas" vs. "writing meant to describe others ideas".
The way I interpret this is that it refers to claims that build on each other to come to a conclusion. So the way to test for truth is to somehow test each claim and the conclusion, which could vary in difficulty based on the kind of claims being made.
As this essay exemplifies, it is difficult to test for truth if you make broad claims that are so imprecise that they can't be verified or don't tell you anything interesting when verified using reasonable assumptions.
> But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.
I wouldn't phrase it exactly this way, but this is an important point that I really struggle to get across. I regularly see proposals and such that are very challenging to reason about because of their writing. But when I ask for terms to be more rigorously defined, or for the document to be reordered into a more principled structure, some people seem to have a strong instinct that I'm just being difficult for the sake of it. I still remember one guy who insisted that I need to make a specific technical criticism or sign off, and absolutely refused to accept the answer that my structural feedback was intended to help us reason about the technical details.
...I find it a bit surprising that Paul Graham of all people, writing in May of 2025, managed to get through this entire essay without mentioning LLMs.
Because I think LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis. They are quite good at the craft of writing--not perfect, but probably much better than the median human--and they are just as good when the content is true as when it's false. This quality ruins a lot of my heuristics for evaluating whether writing is trustworthy, because LLMs are so good at bullshitting.
So while I agree that for humans, writing that sounds good tends to also be logically correct, that clearly isn't inherent in all writing.
Most people don't want to spend much time reading 'median human' writing so the claim that LLMs are 'better', even if true, doesn't really say that much. We don't listen to median human music either.
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.
Get 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.
I think emails summarizing meetings, or making a case for something, or describing something, match the kind of writing PG means in his essay.
And like the commenter you're replying to, I think that LLMs today can write far better than your average coworker (assuming they don't go on a hallucinated tangent; then again some coworkers also do!).
So it's fair to compare LLMs and work emails.
Not to speak of work wiki pages (Confluence etc) describing technical things, decisions, policies, etc.
Why do you think pg is writing about emails and meeting notes? I don't readily see anything in the piece to suggest that. 'making a case for something' or 'describing something' covers the bulk of writing, the piece is quite explicit about not being about all writing.
It seems to me there is no difference in kind between an email arguing for or examining an important decision or idea, and an "essay" on an important decision or idea.
I definitely don't think these documents are just "written speech". Some emails are—a quick message asking if you'll be in the office tomorrow, for example—but major ones require significantly more thought.
It seems to me there is no difference in kind between an email arguing for or examining an important decision or idea, and an "essay" on an important decision or idea.
Why are there people who make a living as, say, newspaper opinion columnists or magazine staff writers? Or hell, why aren't we all rich substackers given that writing a substack is literally email?
> LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis.
No, they don't. His thesis is not that writing that looks good--that seems plausible and convincing, like the output that LLMs often produce--actually is. He says explicitly in the article: "we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true".
His actual thesis is in the very next clause of that sentence: "it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
> 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.
> what does it says about the clarity of PG's essay?
This seems pretty clear to me:
"[W]hile 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."
And I'm not the only one who has quoted that passage in this discussion.
It's the second to last paragraph, when someone reading the essay may have already formed a hard to dislodge opinion on the kind of writing PG means. And indeed, many people here on HN did so.
The order of paragraphs, how early in the text ideas or clarifications are introduced, etc, all make for clear writing.
I'd say this is an example of an essay that lacks clarity, i.e. one that is not "good writing".
I had the same reaction. I spend an increasingly large part of my day reading and being required to edit AI slop. Part of what makes that hard as well as annoying is that it is all reasonably well written and plausible. Just not factual. That’s the real problem I think all of society is likely to face soon if not already. Not to mention the upcoming problem of new AI models trained on the internet of slop.
There is a famous line about legal writing: “There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.” [1]
PG going for the "they're connected" angle, not too convincingly as shown mainly in the paragraph starting "This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas".
> 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.
I do not agree with the premise of the article --- writing that sounds good is more likely to be right. I've seen enough beautiful lies, fictionalized versions of the truth, and cunning orchestrations of a string of well-woven sentences, none of which had any intention of revealing the truth, but of convincing the reader to believe it's true.
I propose the following -- writing the sounds good manipulates the reader into thinking that it is right. Feels better to believe it.
>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.
"Good writing" nearly always collides with something else, for example a writer paid by the word. Or a writer granted too little time to compose prose, as opposed to merely creating it.
A shorter exposition is nearly always (a) better, and (b) more work. I'm reminded of Mark Twain's remark, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
An underlying cause is that people don't read enough, before presuming to write. This results in malaprops like "reign him in", an example I see almost daily now. (A monarch reigns over a kingdom, a cowboy reins in a horse.) Examples abound, this is a common one.
Even worse, I now see automatic grammar checkers making ungrammatical "corrections" (incorrections?) like replacing "its" with "it's," or the reverse, but in the wrong circumstances.
But my all-time greatest annoyance are constructions like "Similar effect to ...", which in nearly all cases ought to be "Effect similar to ..." with copious variations, all wrong. Online searches discover that, in many such cases, the wrong form prevails over the right one.
Someone may object that language is an art form without fixed rules, that seems right. But granted that truth, many popular word sequences sound like fingernails on a chalkboard.
PG agrees that you can't conclude that beautiful writing, writing that seems plausible and convincing, actually is. Sophistry is writing (or speaking) that seems plausible and convincing, but is false. PG is not saying that's not possible.
What he's saying is that writing that is ugly is highly likely to be wrong. Which has nothing to do with sophistry.
Hat tip! I had to look it up on Wiki to remind myself. To quote:
> Brandolini's law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) is an Internet adage coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The adage states:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
> 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.
It doesn't seem like you're talking about the same thing the article is. Graham doesn't say "you must be a good writer to be a good thinker".
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in some other way and then write about them afterward — for example, if you build something, or conduct an experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such cases the ideas often live more in the work than the writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas are good.
Writers who have trouble expressing thoughts in a non-native language are not actually developing the idea in that language. That doesn't mean they are producing bad ideas, but it _might_ mean they won't produce good writing (in that non-native language).
I took the essay to be highlighting that if you use writing as a tool for thinking, clunky writing is likely to highlight places where your ideas themselves aren't clear or correct yet. The iterative process of refining the writing to "sound good" will help shape the ideas.
This seems to be a commonly expressed idea in other forms. For example, when thinking through ideas in code, the process of making the code more "beautiful" can also result in a clearer expression of more correct ideas.
Paul Graham's notion that good writing and stylistic quality are mutually required represents a false dichotomy. He understands this, which is why the essay is so good.
Style is a distraction while clarity and sophistication are inherently aligned.
In reality, there is opposition between style and substance. Sophistication does not increase clarity, clarity is not always the byproduct of aesthetic refinement. True writing excellence lies in the deliberate orchestration of form and meaning.
Good writing has the benefit of helping others for many decades and centuries. That's a realization I came to recently. My goal now is to write a variety of essays, articles, and books on topics that I excel in.
If I am drunk, or have brain damage, my ideas will be bad and so is my writing.
It’s not about what makes writing good. It’s about what makes it bad. People don’t agree on good writing.
I think Paul is talking more about not bad writing. Otherwise, he’d be talking about poetry, which also asserts truth and style as inseparable. People disagree about poetry. Most people agree Paul is a good (not bad) writer, not a poet.
Graham says good writing sounds good and is more likely to be true. But his own writing is hard to read and confusing. His sentences are long and messy. If he’s right, then his own ideas must be wrong because his writing sounds bad.
To me this looks like a false dichotomy. Writing beautifully and having a good argument are not mutually exclusive. So I think the article sets out a false proposition and discusses it at length.
For me the beauty of idlewords's own blog (https://idlewords.com/) is that it's so good it makes me want to write.
Similarly, I find Graham's writing so bad that it also makes me want to write.
(note: idlewords, if you see this, your blog is misbehaving at the moment. For example, PHP is complaining bitterly on this page right now: https://idlewords.com/2018/10/ )
Paul Graham is a good writer. He's not an elite-tier writer's writer like "the dead guy" who's not actually dead, but he's still better than 99% of business executives, and he's better in the skills that businessmen want.
It'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.
> ... 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.
Of course, this video is just stupid accent comedy, but we should be careful not to draw too much from it. (Let's also set aside the specifics of making fried rice.) The implication of the section of the clip you linked is that the presenter (Hersha Patel) does not know how to make rice properly, and this is evidenced by her cooking it in too much water and draining it.
But this is not correct.
There are, in fact, many different varieties of rice, different cuisines that incorporate rice as a major component, and different styles of cooking rice. Cooking (certain varieties of long-grained? rice) in an open vessel, cooking with an excess of water, and draining the water afterwards is an extremely common and popular way to prepare it for use in some cuisines: e.g.,
https://youtu.be/TARO_R4cE24?t=420
When this video first made the rounds some years ago, it was surprising to see how confidently people would weigh-in on this topic, despite demonstrating very little background or knowledge. (There's a big difference between saying “that's not the appropriate way to do this in this circumstance” and “that's completely wrong,” and the former creates space to derive knowledge. After all, the dish in the video is a popular one, even in cultures that predominantly eat jasmine or basmati rice, and there are interesting variations in technique and flavour that arise as a consequence!)
I similarly do not understand why these kind of reaction videos are popular. There are slightly better versions of this format (e.g., https://youtu.be/DsyfYJ5Ou3g?t=182) but they are drowned out by this kind of fluff. What does one really gain from interacting with such criticism?
Perhaps there is something to be learnt from these situations: ones where, equipped with just a little bit of knowledge, we derive unearned confidence, and use this confidence not to venture forth more boldly in search of knowledge, but to convince ourselves of our own superiority.
What how does that concept work in poetry or lyrics, for example? Something could be completely fictional (and artificial) and still be exceptionally well written.
My weird take on fiction is that much of the appeal is that the entire story is just an elaborate analogy to explain true facts about human nature that are otherwise hard to make clear.
You could try to write a non-fiction essay about how being a parent sets you up for potentially the worst pain and most intense grief you can imagine but yet also the experience is so meaningful and rewarding that it's worth it. But that essay would be abstract and wouldn't really hit you in the gut.
Or you could read Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" or watch Arrival which is nominally completely made up about aliens that don't experience time like us and it will convey the same concepts more effectively than an essay could.
Totally, it's not a weird take though. It's actually a pretty standard fare account of the purpose of fiction in literary theory that's been with us for a long time.
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.
It doesn’t, really, which is okay, because the subtext here is that Pg is writing about essayistic writing, or more specifically, communicating ideas in the form of written words. I don’t think he is commenting on “good writing” in the sense of a novel or line of poetry.
Moby Dick is my go-to example of a novel that is incredibly well-written, but I wouldn’t say it’s particularly clear or straightforward in its presentation of ideas.
An example, if you haven’t read it:
”The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”
I'm sorry, but this is such a risky conclusion (that essays that "sound good" are also "right"). The assumption is that the author is not only with good intentions but also not ill informed. What if an intelligent yet either evil or simply confidently incorrect author falls in love with their ideas, and manages to edit it to perfection by "shaking the bin". Does that make the writing more true? We have seen in the past how very well-written and convincing texts have changed the course of history, some for the better, but sadly, some for the worse.
While writing, you edit your writing towards both sounding good and having solid ideas.
That's the entire essay's point and I largely agree with it.
Its why I think current LLMs are bad writers, not because their prose or ideas are off, but AI generated writing does not have the same quality of robustness from ideas that are thoroughly vetted through the author's editing of it.
At the end of the day, good writing takes a lot of time thinking through what you are really saying and standing behind it. LLMs cannot do that for you (yet).
LLMs can certainly be a helpful tool, mostly by unblocking authors via creating prose, honing in on accurate expressions, researching edge cases and suggesting arguments or counter arguments.
But the craft of sharpening an idea to a very fine, meaningful, well written point is something that is still far off.
Of course, until the next research paper completely proves me wrong.
Step 1. RLHF on real time edited documents
Step 2. Profit??
The 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.
> Are the standards for whether something “sounds bad” based on the average person’s reading or the intended audience.
As pg describes it in the article, it's neither; it's based on the writer's judgment. The writer of course is writing for some intended audience, and their judgment of what sounds good or sounds bad should be influenced by that. But pg is describing the writer's process of judging what they write.
> The reason is that it makes the essay easier to read. It's less work to read writing that flows well. How does that help the writer? Because the writer is the first reader
Note that the writer's judgement only serves as an initial proxy for how well the essay reads. This implies that the reader, whoever that is, is the true judge of how well it reads. My point is that that group is ill defined.
If it were sufficient for the writer to be the only judge of how well something reads, surely PG wouldn't feel the need to have other proofread his essays. And surely it is not sufficient for someone who lacks taste to judge their own writing as good.
The way I read that statement is the same as the startup advice of "build what you would yourself want". However you still have to validate that the market exists and is big.
There is really nothing profound in that paragraph anyway, all it is saying is that a writer should edit and proofread their work. That whole paragraph could be deleted honestly. It is obvious table stakes for one to edit their work. What differentiates good from bad is a matter of taste + who is judging it.
Thanks. 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.
Scott's 'legibility' comes with a very explicit consumer - a large power structure like a state. Written style is not like that at all - pg can't force to anyone to write in his preferred way nor is anyone obliged to like it.
If 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.
I’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.
Perhaps ironically, I'm not communicating my point well.
There's a book called 80/20 running and the concept is you should do 80% of your running running slow. To me, that's a very legible concept. It's very clear and small and easy to explain.
I think his book is well packaged by having a title that condenses all of his thoughts into one little sound bite concept.
But actually you know his advice about training for running is much more complex. And you know he puts together running plans and they have a thousand types of running and it's not always 80% slow running. Sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that. It's rarely exactly 80% slow running. There's a million pieces of nuance to how he would train people to run faster but to get the concept across to write it down, he makes it more legible. He simplifies it to 80% of your running should be slow.
To me, and perhaps I'm learning only to me, that concept is very related to the concept of legibility in seeing like a state. You're taking the complicated forest with many different types of trees and you're simplifying it down to one uniform thing. That's much easier to understand and easy to track and communicate. 97 trees in this area.
The same thing can happen to concepts. They have a lot of nuance and complexity but to write them it down so that they can best be communicated, you often need to remove a lot of that.
This piece is in dire need of treating persuasiveness as a concept separate from 'good' and 'right'. Persuasive writing considers its audience and identifies avenues to create a train of thought that feels natural and true to them. What PG is describing is essentially the process of writing something that you yourself find persuasive. That can be a useful technique if your audience is people like you, but it can also amplify your biases and isolate your work from other perspectives that could provide value (increase 'right'ness per PG's definition).
Writing to convince yourself can help to refine your ideas, but writing to convince your detractors can point out blind spots and encourage finding strong evidentiary support for your argument. Equating "good" with "I would find it convincing" decimates the value that PG rightly identifies in using writing to enhance your ideas rather than just convey them.
> 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.
And then you have people like Kant and Hegel who have both been criticized for their writing styles, but I would bet in 200 years time people would still be reading and studying them. And with Paul Graham they'd ask, "Who?"
He’s like some startup guy or something, right? His blog posts are well written, and the arguments seem… I mean, fine. I think there’s a third dimension here; in 200 years people will probably be more likely to talk about Kant or Hegel because Graham’s subject matter is just inherently more ephemeral.
But, most of humanity’s endeavors have been ephemeral.
The web site, on my browser, is typical of so many I encounter these days: patently unreadable. Chrome in dark mode renders it white-on-white text. I press contral-a, and it can be read, but it is still not easy.
This essay nails it, clear thinking really does lead to clear writing. It’s a good reminder that writing is less about sounding smart and more about being understood.
Oh Mr. Graham again. I’m not a fan. I tried to read along, I really did, and then I came upon this sentence:
“But not without method acting.”
This is one of the most terribly written sentences in the English language I’ve seen since getting out of jail in January. It violates every reasonable convention regarding communication. It is terrible and please take note that a person who put this sentence out into the wild, without intentional comedy, is a fucking terrible writer.
pg is an expert at cranking out vapid, insubstantial pieces of writing that the gullible eat up as the pronouncements of genius. If I actually wanted to be known as a writer the last person I'd consult for advice is Paul Graham.
Ive read most of the comments here, and this is one of the only actually insightful ones.
Communication is very hard - we have to first translate some scattered notions into a coherent idea, then find the right words to express that idea, then the people receiving them have to understand those words, translate them into their scattered ideas. And then do the same in the other direction.
The act of writing - and especially editing - helps us refine the ideas and find the words to best express them, and especially in a way that they are to have the intended effect on others.
I'm sure this essay has some good ideas at its core, but I don't think it had nearly enough editing...
Paul Graham clearly loves writing and spending many iterations on producing something perfect. That was also his approach with the Arc language.
I may be projecting my own preferences here, but such a person is likely to have an ambivalent relationship with LLMs, which just output bland mediocrity or falsehoods.
In his previous essay, he warned that one should not create things that make the world worse. He softened it up by saying, without proof, that creating awesome things is probably fine (are LLMs awesome, I don't think so?).
Now he talks about good writing. I get the impression that he is one of the last remaining humanists in Silicon Valley, who at least has doubts about the direction we are going in and would be happy if YC startups created something else.
What happened to this man? A few years ago he wrote a glorious Rosetta stone of second-order functions in several programmng languages. Now he's spewing tired tropes about journalistic-style writing.
The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time, they often become convinced they can succeed at anything. Musk is a glaring recent example - and now Paul. I do appreciate his essays on tech and related subjects, but not for their literary merit. If I’m seeking advice on writing, I’d turn to actual writers - people who’ve earned recognition and acclaim specifically for their work in that field.
I've commented many times before how I've become a bit disillusioned with pg's writing over the past decade or so, because it always seemed to lack anything beyond a surface level of introspection. He always seemed to be pushing the idea that qualities that make a person great at startups are the most important thing in the world - not surprising given his industry, but to me many of his essays just felt more and more self-serving, while never commenting on (or, in my opinion, really even understanding) the real societal negatives that I think have been a consequence (admittedly unexpected) of the startup boom.
But, in pg's defense, when it comes to his writing style and the quality of his prose, I think he's generally top notch, and even though I may disagree with him more often now, I appreciate the structure and clarity of his writing. Given how influential his essays have been, I think he's qualified to write about how his communication style makes an impact.
"pg's writing... always seemed to lack anything beyond a surface level of introspection"
with
"when it comes to his writing style and the quality of his prose, I think he's generally top notch"?
And "Given how influential his essays have been, I think he's qualified" - do you not see a problem with equating influence/popularity with quality/truth (let alone morality)?
He is the quintessential tech bro. His selective caring about “free speech” only when it serves to feed into right wing outrage was when he showed his true colors years ago. The recent essay on “Wokeness” just confirmed it.
Paul Graham's essays read like typical self-help books. Considering how popular self-help books are, I guess you can call that "good writing" for general population?
Paul Graham doesn’t moon-light as a writer, rather, writing is one of the core skills that made YC what it is.
He spends months chiseling each essay because he understands that clear thinking is expressed through clear prose. Dismissing that craft because he also knows Lisp is like trashing Stephen King’s storytelling because he can ride a bike.
If you only grant “literary merit” to people who never shipped a line of code, your definition’s too narrow for the real world—where ideas, not résumés, decide who we read.
I like Graham's writing, and defend it elsewhere in this thread, but that has such an obsequious and somehow macho smack to it, wow. One imagines Hercules chiseling his abs. If that's what his writing does for you, fair enough, but it sure is intense.
The commenter did not say Paul Graham writes quickly, so I'm not sure why you keep fixating on that point.
> I pity you and the likes of you who are coming here to shit all over as if there aren't any better things to do during the day.
Good lord. They said they like his writing, but found the particular tweet you shared pretentious. Your response to that light criticism is so disproportionate it reads sycophantic. This is a thread about good writing, I think criticizing anything is fair game.
When people become insanely rich, they tend to attract a dozen or so sycophants into their orbit who never tell them “no”, never say they’re wrong, and basically spend all their time praising and enabling them. Otherwise, they’d be out. It’s not surprising that some of them start to believe they are always right and that they are good at everything.
Successful people outgrowing their jodhpurs and losing their reason is a thing, sure, but that does not apply in this specific case. Tech writing is still writing, my friend.
Have you read ANSI Common Lisp? Or even the introduction to it?
I have criticisms of Mr. Graham, but the man can write, and consistently. Some of the essays can be a tad too terse for me at times, but when he gets it right, his stuff can be exquisite.
Another example that comes immediately crashing to mind is Donald Knuth - have you read any of his tech writing? It's glorious.
Anyone who wants to claim there's a hard line between writing worthy of "literary merit" and tech writing is going to have their work cut out for them with those two already.
I have learned about YCombinator, hacker news, Paul Graham, and startups in general through one of his essays. I was first blown away by the brilliance and clarity of his writing, and only then did I learn that he's a prominent tech figure.
So many years later, I still haven't read a better writer (except maybe Scott Alexander). So, at least from my perspective, if anyone has the authority to write about good writing, it's this guy.
Impossible 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.
> The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time, they often become convinced they can succeed at anything.
I think at the core the problem (if you want to call it that) can be boiled down to the following:
"I am smart.
That's why I was successful at what I did.
So I need to prove to myself and others that it wasn't luck it was I am damn smart"
The problem with hubris is that if you took someone like Musk or PG and you kept them in some off the beaten path place ie not Silicon Valley, not NYC pick your hot location (and stipulate they couldn't move because of family or other obligations) and they weren't surrounded by others who were top notch (as a result of also being in the right place at the right time) there wouldn't be anything particularly notable about them.
Having gone myself to one of those 'good' universities I will say that Paul being at Harvard would certainly amplify this type of behavior by being surrounded early on at a formidable age by accomplished members of that community.
You're saying that about Paul Graham, of all people? His Wikipedia page lists him as a "computer scientist, writer and essayist, entrepreneur and investor", in that order. He wrote various Lisp books before founding Viaweb, and arguably it was the essays that made YC a thing in the first place. He is arguably one of the best writers in the startup scene.
I wonder if you're just unaware of all of this, or if you just have an axe to grind here?
Wow, is this ever out of touch. People are currently confronting smoothly delivered, glib sentences that are wrong at an unprecedented scale due to widespread adoption of language model AI.
This is HN, PG posts will be instinctively and reactively upvoted.
That being said, this is pretty intellectually absent by the standards of a PG essay. "Writing good is hard" says man who has made his living off issuing advice that other people unconditionally obey. It feels less like a piece of solid writing advice and more like a selfish way to cover his ass now that the auspices of tech startups are shifting towards fascism. Like if the man behind the curtain started apologizing for the Emerald City and green-tinted glasses.
In which Paul Graham (re)-discovers Aristotelian and medieval metaphysics and the unity of truth, beauty and goodness. Or maybe more pragmatic in the word of Andrei Tupolev, head of the Soviet design bureau of the same name, "An ugly plane doesn't fly"
I believe that it is not that style helps the content to be more right, not in the way PG believes (like in the example about writing shorter sentences), it is that a richer style (so, not shorter, but neither baroque: a style with more possibilities) can reflect a less obvious way of thinking, that carries more signal.
I'll make an example that makes this concept crystal crisp, and that you will likely remember for the rest of your life (no kidding). In Italy there was a great writer called Giuseppe Pontiggia. He had to write an article for one of the main newspapers in Italy about the Nobel Prize in Literature, that with the surprise of many, was never assigned, year after year, to Borges. He wrote (sorry, translating from memory, I'm not an English speaker and I'm not going to use an LLM for this comment):
"Two are the prizes that each year the Swedish academy assigns: one is assigned to the winner of the prize, the other is not assigned to Borges".
This uncovers much more than just: even this year the prize was not assigned to Borges. And, honestly, I never saw this kind of style heights in PG writings (I appreciate the content most of the times, but having translated a few of his writings in Italian, I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs). You don't reach that kind of Pontiggia style with the process in the article here, but via a very different process that only the best writers are able to perform and access.
Reminds me of a line by Douglas Adams describing some particularly crude alien invaders:
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
He could have written something like: “The blocky ships hovered seemingly in defiance of gravity.”
Instead he picked a phrasing that’s intentionally a little hard to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to get the joke, and remembers it.
Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick.
FTA:
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though.
Descriptive writing, especially for fiction, seems out of scope.
The idea of "haecceitas" has been floating amongst the ... Pop-literati
https://www.scribblejerk.com/blog/haecceity-rules
My take is that it's "writing that calls attention to itself" (or, if you want, writing that is clearly off the wall)
Not sure if it can't be applied to exposition, Pontiggia managed it as above?
Some pecunious would like it reduced to Jobs ("editing is all you need") but I'd argue Jony has the sparkle, the je ne sais quoi, the more than just functional
I think that the last time I ran across "haecceitas" in a literary context was in an essay by Randall Jarrell. My guess is that he was referring to William Carlos Williams. In that case, Jarrell meant writing that tried to engage each thing as it is, not as part of a larger class.
Yepp the "academic" flavour of it is ... slightly different (& less relevant imho to parent thread) ... than the pop-cultural one, should have stressed that it exists ntheless. Thank you for providing more context for "context elision" :)!
Everything starts as fiction for the reader, especially new ideas.
It becomes more than that once it gets understood or comprehended.
Dave Barry writes like that, all the time (a lot less so, these days). He uses it for comedic twists, and usually integrated with other tricks.
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.
Any suggestions to wade into his work?
Here's his Website: https://www.davebarry.com
Has a delightful 90's flavor.
He was a columnist for the Miami Herald, for many years, and has written a number of books. The site will let you read a number of his columns. His books read about the same, but longer.
Absolute riot.
Agreed.
Check out Keynes or 1950s American writing such as https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v01/d8....
To me the first sentence sounds much better than the second, so by pg's standard it's better.
> “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
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.
Great example, love this.
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.
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.
Idk, I'm conflicted here because PG is the embodiment of a poor amateur writer with good ideas.
He is literally the proof that writing can be bad (albeit we should define what good and bad writing are and agree on it) but still interesting because of the ideas.
I write for living (albeit in Czech) and I don't think that PGs writing is bad. It is not artistically brilliant (unlike Douglas Adams'), but he gets his points clearly across, and uses a language that even foreigners with limited command of English can parse.
That's good in my opinion - in the same sense that hammer which drives down nails flawlessly is good. PG is not trying to write colorful fiction, he wants to communicate something, and he succeeds in doing so. It is still a hammer, not a statue of David, but there are good and bad hammers, and this is a good hammer. You wouldn't want to drive nails into boards with a statue of David anyway.
> but he gets his points clearly across
I don't share that fully, and I've read every single one of his essays, his arid style gets tough after few paragraphs, it's too dense and harsh, sentences are consistently very short so it feels like reading a machine gun.
Hard disagree. I find PG’s writing to be some of the best writing out there, for essays.
I think the intended implication goes the other way:
"But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
Hopefully that's not too much italianposting for the international audience :)
I can’t understand why it would be at all safe to conclude this. In any other field, you certainly wouldn’t conclude that good visual design, attention to detail, craftsmanship, etc. indicates anything about the factual or moral correctness of the beliefs of the creators. Do the most beautiful and expensive churches indicate the most moral or theologically correct religious groups? Do the best designed uniforms tell you something about the wartime behavior of soldiers or the military policy of the country? Do the pharmaceutical companies with the best produced television advertisements have the best intentions and products backed by the best medical research?
You have it backwards. PG agrees that you can't conclude from the fact that something is beautiful that it's also right--he says "we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true".
What PG is saying is that if something is ugly, you can conclude that it's most likely wrong as well.
You can’t safely conclude that either. It could be a hastily-written rough draft. It could be the result of effort, but written by someone who isn’t fluent in English.
Attention to detail is a signal of quality, but these things are just heuristics, not reliable truths.
> It could be a hastily-written rough draft. It could be the result of effort, but written by someone who isn’t fluent in English.
The article says it is ruling out both of these possibilities, as other posts elsewhere in this discussion have already pointed out.
Yes, I understand what he is saying and it’s precisely what I am disputing.
> I understand what he is saying and it’s precisely what I am disputing.
I don't see how. Your post was disputing the claim that good design, craftsmanship, beauty, etc. are signs of correctness. And that's not the claim PG makes in the article. Your post never disputed the claim PG did make, which is that bad design and craftsmanship, ugliness, etc., are signs of lack of correctness.
In the first paragraph, he writes, ”I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.” So he does indeed make the claim you say he doesn’t make.
The essay itself lacks anything novel, despite the rather breathless framing: “So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true.” These ideas are a couple of hundred years old at least. Kant: “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good”. This is classic Age of Enlightenment stuff, repackaged in classic Silicon Valley VC style.
yep totes. good style is sometimes proximate to good ideas because both indicate the author has spent lots of 'thinking tokens' on the thing, which is a costly and therefore sometimes-more-reliable signal. but i believe it falls apart under intensive selection -- the things we read are popular, and so on average are selection-survivors, which means they'll approach the optimal ratio of thinking token spend on style/vs substance for survival, which may not be the same as the best ratio for precise or insightful communication.
but the best communication survives too because it touches universal truths by connecting them with specific real phenomena. the worst (most harmful) communication survives because it frantically goodharts our quality evaluation process, even when it contradicts truth or reality. e.g. Orwell on the good side, L Ron Hubbard on the bad side. Unfortunately these categories are often not well sorted until after the principals are all dead (probably because everyone has to die before you can tell whether the values are universal or just generationally interesting), and there's a style-bar that has to be cleared before you even get to join the canon for consideration; interestingly this this would tend to increase the illusion that style is associated with substance, especially in older writing.
> In the first paragraph, he writes, ”I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.”
But towards the end he backs away from that claim, and makes the claim I described:
"[W]hile 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 the light of that, and of much of the rest of the essay, I think the sentence from the start that you quote was misstated. It should have been stated as "Writing that's right is likely to sound good."
> But towards the end he backs away from that claim, and makes the claim I described:
> "[W]hile 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."
What do you mean, backs away? Those aren't different claims. If writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, it is necessarily the case that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
> Those aren't different claims.
Yes, they are. The first claim (the one he backs away from) is A implies B, where A = "this writing is beautiful" and B is "this writing is true". The second claim is Not A implies Not B. Those are not logically equivalent. The second claim is logically equivalent to B implies A, i.e., "this writing is true" implies "this writing is beautiful". But B implies A is not equivalent to A implies B.
> If writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, it is necessarily the case that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
No, it isn't. It could also be the case that both types of writing, sounding bad and not sounding bad, are less likely to be right (because, say, sophistry is very prevalent).
What is necessarily the case is that, if writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, writing that is right is less likely to sound bad. Which, as above, is not logically equivalent to "writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right".
Expanding a little further...
> What is necessarily the case is that, if writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, writing that is right is less likely to sound bad.
That's true. You're 100% right about this.
But if you're able to prove it, you should be well aware that exactly the same proof will quickly show that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
> Which, as above, is not logically equivalent to "writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right".
And that, obviously, is false. They are the same statement; either is sufficient to prove the other. I don't know what happened in your comment.
> if you're able to prove it
It's a logical tautology, at least if we make the implications definite (i.e., "sounds bad" necessarily implies "not right", and therefore "right" necessarily implies "does not sound bad"). In other words, "A implies B" is logically equivalent to "Not B implies Not A". There's no need to give any further proof.
> you should be well aware that exactly the same proof will quickly show that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
No, it won't. You really need to learn some basic logic.
> They are the same statement
No, they're not. Again, please learn some basic logic. "A implies B" is not logically equivalent to "B implies A". You are claiming that it is. Any basic textbook on logic will tell you that you are wrong.
If you want to go around calling things basic math, maybe you should actually do the math. You're not going to impress anyone by just parroting the idea that you're an idiot.
I can do it for you:
Imagine there are A papers that are eloquent and true, B papers that are badly worded and true, C papers that are eloquent and false, and D papers that are badly worded and false. We'll also assume none of these values are 0.For convenience, I'll use the lowercase letters to refer to probabilities rather than counts: a = A / (A + B + C + D), b = B / (A + B + C + D), etc.
We are given the postulate "papers that sound bad [in our terminology, "clumsy"] are less likely to be true". There are two possible interpretations of this:
1. Clumsy papers are less likely to be true than the average of all papers.
2. Clumsy papers are less likely to be true than eloquent papers.
Fortunately for us, each of these implies the other, so I'll use interpretation (1), again for convenience.
We can now define our postulate precisely:
Observe here that the four values a, b, c, and d are all positive and their sum is 1.We can use basic algebra to rearrange the postulate:
Let's examine whether eloquent papers are more likely to be true. As an algebraic statement, this is: Same process: We have now proven that eloquent papers are more likely to be true if and only if ad > bc. We've also proven that, if clumsy papers are less likely to be true, bc < ad. I'm really, really hoping you can fill in the rest of the proof.Why did you insist - repeatedly - that a very basic and obvious fact was false? What were you thinking?
> It could also be the case that both types of writing, sounding bad and not sounding bad, are less likely to be right (because, say, sophistry is very prevalent).
No, it cannot be the case that every type of writing is less likely to be right. Less likely than what?
> Less likely than what?
Think of it this way: some percentage of writing that sounds bad is wrong, and some percentage of writing that does not sound bad is wrong. I am simply pointing out that it is perfectly possible for both percentages to be the same, so that whether or not the writing sounds bad gives no useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
I think you are taking "less likely" too literally. PG makes it clear that he is not talking about exact mathematical functions. His intent is much better captured by treating the statements as logical implications, as I and others have been doing.
> I think you are taking "less likely" too literally.
> I am simply pointing out that it is perfectly possible for both percentages to be the same
Come on. If you believe those percentages are the same, what's left of PG's claim?
> , so that whether or not the writing sounds bad gives no useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
He notes, and you stipulate, that if the writing sounds bad, that gives useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
> His intent is much better captured by treating the statements as logical implications, as I and others have been doing.
I have been treating them as logical implications. The difference is that I actually know what the implications are.
How do you think the argument "assuming badly worded papers are no more likely to be wrong than any other papers, it isn't necessarily the case that if badly worded papers are more likely to be wrong than other papers, conclusion X would follow" works? You want to use logic instead of algebra? Every conclusion follows from a contradiction.
No, it is not. If A -> B is Not logically equivalent as If Not A -> Not B. Many make this mistake. It is equivalent to If Not B -> Not A. In this case, if a writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right - leads to - if the writing is right the writing is likely to sound good, (and only that).
> If A -> B is Not logically equivalent as If Not A -> Not B. Many make this mistake.
But many people making a mistake won't show that everything anyone says is an example of that mistake. Your observation isn't relevant here, because a claim of that form hasn't been made. We don't have "not", we have "less", which behaves differently.
For the claim "f(a) > f(b) -> g(a) > g(b)", it is trivial to show that "f(a) < f(b) -> g(a) < g(b)". These two claims are identical to each other. The proof is one step long.
In the present context, we have f(x) representing "quality of the writing in x" and g(x) representing "likelihood that the ideas in x are correct".
Nobody said that. The comment above said that poor writing is indicative of poor thinking (about the subject).
I’m not sure about that. Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them eloquently? While clarity of thought facilitates clarity of writing, that’s in principle orthogonal to the right/wrong axis, especially in the ethical sense implied by the Moretti quote. And as the sibling comment correctly observes, the existence of language barriers rather disprove that hypothesis.
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.
> Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them eloquently?
It's about the process, not the talent. When you've carefully thought through and refined an idea to understand whether it makes sense yourself, that usually provides a lot of guidance on how you can express the idea eloquently to others. You know the questions they'll have and the answers they'll find satisfying, because you already went through the same process. When you're just tossing out your first half-baked impression, it's a lot harder to communicate it well, although some people do have the orthogonal talent of making it up on the fly.
Sure, it's not a 1:1 map, but often who does an excellent job, does it along all the line: form, content, and the best papers are even shorter normally... They don't have to justify with many pages the lack of real content.
About the nobel price quote: it shows that the most powerful language is unexpected, breaks the obviousness of things, something that ancient greeks knew very well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
I was responding to “the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.”
About the nobel prize quote, it isn’t that powerful to me because I don’t really know what it wants to say, and it didn’t lead me to any notable insight either. But maybe that’s just me.
Perhaps one sniff test for bad writing is presence of a link to the Wikipedia page for rhetoric.
Pontiggia sometimes explained parts of other writers just using rethoric figures, and showing how their application provided new insights into things and concepts.
Writing, at a level sufficient to get your point across and be well read, is within reach of most people. The writing is not really an intelligence test.
The gap is typically that if something is written poorly we can infer the underlying thinking that went into it wasn't well enough conceived to put out high quality text. You can understand this implicitly when you think about how you would write about a topic that you barely know about vs a topic that you are so comfortable with that the writing doesn't even seem like an effort. Ironically people often don't write about the stuff they know best because they presume it's obvious - and it is, to them. And then they write about the stuff they're trying to figure out - which is poorly understood and poorly expressed.
I thought about it as well.
My answer would be: "eloquence" may be a too-strong requirement, but if you can't express your ideas at least clearly, how can you be sure that they are the right ideas? Because without a detailed description that another human being can understand, this is really hard to judge. Maybe there is a lot of overlooked flaws in your flow.
I have a suspicion that there is a subset of geniuses who just intuitively "grok" some important ideas without being able to describe them to other people. Some of the autistic savants come to mind. But I am not sure if they can be induced to actually cooperate efficiently with the rest of humanity. Whatever happens in their minds, seems to be locked there.
Yep 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.
> In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
Yes, if you use some disfavored group's vernacular, there's a decent chance you also use their cultural values.
>In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
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.
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'm not a native English speaker and learned the majority of it from technical and fantasy books. It may be me, but the majority of his writing feels like powerpoint slides. You can feel the idea, but the medium is to bland to pay attention to it. I would take a more complicated and nuanced prose that would elicit some virtual landmarks in my memory.
The quote reminds me of Tucholsky, a German journalist known for this style. An example that comes to mind was his review of James Joyce's Ulysses: "It's like meat extract: you can't eat it, but many soups will be made with it".
I think putting a bit of fun writing into reports of everyday events or reviews can go a long way. Tucholsky again, I'm paraphrasing and translating from memory where he wrote a trial against dada artist Grosz who depicted army officials as grotesque and ugly: "To demonstrate that there are no faces like this in the Reichswehr (the army), they brought in lieutenant so-and-so. They shouldn't have done that."
Good writing goes a long way
Presumably, for this concept to stick with you your whole life, you'd have to have heard of "Borges"? From Googling that name, it appears the author you're referring to died in 86. Why would anyone expect him to win the current year's Nobel Prize in Literature?
He was a titan for more than half of the twentieth century. His shadow will extend far into human influence beyond that of many names that won prizes.
Are the literature prizes generally handed out for works published that year? It sure doesn't work that way in the sciences.
No, but they are only given to living people. Borges was "waited out" and won't get any anymore.
Yes I think I know what you are getting at. Although PG essays are great if the idea is new to you. But for this one I am thinking "yes I know" skim skim skim! I have experienced the same thing. Anyone who has has their writing edited probably has.
If someone wants to find the original quote, https://salvatoreloleggio.blogspot.com/2014/10/borges-dove-i... says, translated:
> 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.
Who reads the latest "Nobel winner" anyway? Or, think about the person complaining "why didn't this movie get an Oscar?" in the Youtube comments. There's only 5 people in the Nobel literature committee and the person they elect says more about them than about what good writing is.
I find Paul Graham's writing style to be a bit off. I think he is too overly reductive and simplistic in his use of language and imprecise in his choice of words, and I genuinely don't understand the praise for his writing. You should read his work because these are the thoughts of a highly influential VC, not because they are gems of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Sometimes a longer, more nuanced word has all the right connotations, and sometimes a more complex sentence carries the perfect rhetorical structure. Paul Graham's writing seems to ignore (or perhaps purposely eschew) such details.
Same. I always get the feeling his ideas aren’t sufficiently thought through or communicated well enough to be actually be useful.
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 think he is too overly reductive and simplistic
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.
A great author drags you into their PoV whether you want to see it or not.
And a bad reader makes up concerns before even engaging with the authors ideas.
Wait, I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make here. Is it that I commented about Paul Graham's writing style in response to a PG essay on writing style? Is that "making up concerns before even engaging with the author's ideas"? The whole point of the essay we're discussing is writing style, and in particular a set of suggestions he has based on his own work.
It's valid to criticize someone for not giving a piece of writing a charitable read before criticising the author's style, but that does not seem to apply when the topic of the essay is the author's style. Writing style is largely about figuring out how to direct the reader to your ideas, so it seems axiomatic that any piece of writing that needs a high-effort charitable read is poorly written (this, by the way, is in TFA).
As to your original point, being too vague also doesn't increase signal to noise ratio. It just lets you write as though a lot of noise is signal.
> Is that "making up concerns before even engaging with the author's ideas"?
I am responding to the point that pg’s writing is too reductionist. Comments on these articles often include “what about [obvious exception that distract from the main idea]”.
These comments indicate they are trying to dismiss rather than understand (the author didn’t even consider my idea!)
As an example, “San Francisco is wealthier than Bakersfield”. Almost certainly a bad reader will complain that this does not apply to every resident. But we all know what is meant.
So my general takeaway is that making broad statements without qualification can be a strength, because you filter out bad readers who aren’t interested in big ideas. And catering to them (who cannot be satisfied) only worsens the experience for your interested audience.
This itself is of course a broad statement with exception.
PG's writing is often so reductionist it muddies his points and HN commenters are often pedants about meaningless issues. Both can be true.
I don't blame PG for the pedantry over the minutiae. That's on the readers, and people on HN specifically are prone to this kind of pedantry. I do blame him for weakening his points by using bad language to express them.
TFA isn't about how to read, though. It's about writing.
See? I write twice as many words with nuance and responses and we are no closer to the main idea.
I can tell you that loading down your writing with parentheticals objectively makes your writing worse.
Thank you for that quote, indeed memorable.
For me the issue with PG's writing, is that it has tiny hints of Narcissism, and that, by itself, hurts his ability to convey ideas. In classic writing, and in my opinion, also in great modern writing, there is a lot of humbleness and even some self deprecation. Sometimes the more the author doubts themselves, the more convincing they are, as it shows self critique, and lack of "Dunning-Kruger effect".
p.s. I wonder how many here are not aware you are the creator of Redis. (I assume most do, but chances are many have no idea).
Paul Graham is a very good writer, but one of the things I admire most about him is that, when he happens upon a truly excellent writer, he doesn't show the jealousy for which writers are infamously known. There has never been a case of a truly excellent writer being penalized, harassed, and eventually banned here.
I don’t understand the reference being made here, but I’m getting the impression that these things have indeed happened?
This is wrong in so many different ways it's like an art piece. Every part of it that tries to defend the central thesis is actually disproving it. It's kind of funny actually. Here's a dude that's been writing for 30 years, and not only is his writing bad, his ideas are crap. It has the feel of somebody who's completely convinced of his own ideas, despite the fact that they're based solely on his personal experience.
I have a simple proof that the thesis is wrong. Take a moron, and have him work on a farm for 30 years. Then have him write a book about running a farm. Now, he's going to sound like a moron, and will write very poorly. But most everything he writes will be right. Despite his bad writing, he can still communicate his observations of how and why simple things work. So it's not hard to be right while sounding wrong. You just have to be a moron.
I don't think your proof works. Here is a line from the article where he elaborates on what he means:
> By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas right means developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail. So getting the ideas right is not just a matter of saying true things, but saying the right true things.
I'm guessing that a moron with 30 year's experience on a farm would not successfully do that, even when writing a book on farming.
Even 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.
keep 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
> But most everything he writes will be right.
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.
I 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.
...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.
The point about end-notes being a mechanism to ease the strain of fitting tree-like ideas into a linear essay is lovely. It brings to mind David Foster Wallace's writing, which is obsessively end-noted and if you listen to his speeches, you can see that he basically tortures himself in sanding down his ideas, much like PG says.
PG's ideas in here, to the extent that I agree with them (which is not fully), does break down for ideas. Example being: brilliant engineers who are incredibly capable at having ideas and executing against them but incredibly incapable of communicating said ideas. Their ideas are very true, evidenced by their ability to produce real results, but also oftentimes ugly when communicated.
A final counterpoint is JFK's eulogy, which sounds amazing, but, after the initial emotional appeal wore off, I realized doesn't really have a strong unified thread running through it, and is thus forgettable in terms of the truths it ostensibly delivers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiDUbaBL9E. Compare to "This Is Water" by DFW, which doesn't have the same epic prose, but is maybe the most true-seeming speech I've ever heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw. It could be that PG's ideas were never intended for spoken speeches, but whatever this is still an adjacent truth != beauty example.
A tree structure of ideas naturally fits into a linear essay of text, so I don't understand this. The opening paragraphs of a section of text are a broad theme on which subsequent paragraphs expand. Paragraphs also carry a similar structure in their sentences, and every great essay builds large trees of logical ideas within a linear rhetorical structure. A footnote as an expansion is a crutch: either the text of the footnote is important enough to appear on the page, in which case you should generally find a way to put it in the prose, or it is not, in which case you should omit it entirely.
The only truly good use of expository footnotes is to expand on things that the reader might be interested in (and point to further reading), but are orthogonal to the main argument of the essay. They are not for expansion of the tree of logical arguments present in the body of the essay.
> 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.
This reminds of this cognitive bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme-as-reason_effect
Marx 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.
Marx and his hot takes are highly overrated
And 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.
[flagged]
Paul Graham, as a writer who writes sentences that sound bad and who promulgates ideas that are stupid, is an expert in neither good sounding sentences nor sound ideas, hence is unqualified to hold forth on the topic.
I was wondering if I’m the only one who thinks that way. He might be a better writer than some (including myself), but that’s a pretty low bar. The ideas are neither novel nor deep, and the writing is subpar.
I pasted the essay into ChatGPT, and this is what it said (just for fun; I’m not taking ChatGPT’s evaluation seriously.)
I'm VERY curious as to what your prompt was. Because I just did the same thing, simply asking "do you think this is an example of good writing?" and it responded with this
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.
Evergreen genre of tweet: "Wow, look at this crazy thing an LLM said! Incidentally, in the prompt I told it to say something crazy."
Exactly. That's why I said I'm not taking it seriously. LLMs tend to always agree with you (i.e. your prompt). I don't have the exact prompt handy but it was something like
If I used a more positive prompt, I'm sure it would have told me that it's a great article.[flagged]
I 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?
Why 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?
Because 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.
Dear Paul, I'm sure it has been said elsewhere in the comments, but ironically I struggle to agree with this essay...which happens to be nicely and succinctly written.
I'm arguing that it's your own bias generated from the synthesis of your own idea that selects for sentences that effectively express the idea, and nothing to do with the writing itself.
The anecdote about the puddle who suddenly gains consciousness and remarks that the world is so perfectly formed around it, that it's proof of divine creation, seems to apply here.
The author generates an idea and is trying to articulate it. A well written sentence or paragraph that flows, pleases the author. This is because the idea they are trying to express is done in a satisfying way.
Thus the more pleasing the writing to the author, the more efficiently it articulates the original idea. It's the author's bias, based on their own idea, that defines the level of 'pleasingness'.
Lastly, Paul, do you think the LLMs are any less satisfied with their confident and irrational hallucinations, than they are with their more well supported claims? Further, if you weren't aware that the output was ridiculous, would you be able to tell a accurate statement from a false one?
Thanks for the essays. Love them.
It'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.
Look, 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.
Writing wise I have a great deal of respect for you (and other top commenters) because you don't have people edit and review what you say you just write it (and take lumps or accolaydes).
Something I've mentioned before is I can't get over the fact that Paul has mulitiple people review his essays prior to publishing (which others have defended when I've made the same comment before).
I (as most people do) write clients every day with proposals or results or reports. Nobody reviews my writing first and the end recipients they either like what I say and pay me money and refer others to me or they don't. I certainly don't have the time to perseverate over the perfect phrase or paragraph '50 or 100 times' but yet I get results more often than I don't.
I 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.
If there's more than "good editing often improves writing" I didn't see it in the essay.
good editing often improves writing, and good writing often improves ideas
That's fair; I appreciate it.
This is the essence of philosophy. Observe X, now argue that everything in the universe is actually X.
I see nothing wrong at all with asking people for feedback on an essay that will be broadly published and read. That just seems prudent.
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.
> I see nothing wrong at all with asking people for feedback on an essay that will be broadly published and read.
Is he really 'broadly published and read'? Most people outside of tech have no clue (and no interest) in what PG says.
Yes there is 'nothing wrong' except if you put yourself out there as having good unique thoughts why does it not show that you are lacking confidence to have others (again in this situation maybe in another I'd agree) always review what you are posting on your personal site or blog?
And very importantly he doesn't allow comments (on his blog) the only comments are on HN which he doesn't link to. It's unknown if he even reads the HN comments anymore. Or (last interaction over a year ago) comment on HN anymore (to defend his thoughts or position).
Many reasons for this of course but if you can't handle criticism and think so little of what people on HN says why are you publishing at all? That's your biggest audience isn't it?
(Side note YES HN is can be a brutal crowd for sure. Would be interesting if he ever publishes the changes he makes in the essays or what the people reviewing the essay have to say).
There's probably not many people who write essays generally focused in tech who have a larger audience (or even following). Though it's beside the point how generally popular he is. It can only be helpful to get feedback on anything that we ever do - it doesn't mean we have to incorporate it.
And seeking feedback from specific people who you respect is a vastly different thing than opening up your digital home to the slovenly masses to come and shit in with their comments.
Though, I think he probably should have sought feedback from some actual good writers for a topic like this...
What is wrong with having someone edit and review? It is just feedback. If the writing itself is an assignment editing is normal. If the writing is part of another process maybe not.
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.
Having an editor isn't wrong, but it's an luxury for something as small as a Hacker News comment or an email.
Paul having an editor isn't a luxury. His essays are edited because it's important for his business. He can easily justify a paying someone.
More to the point, we're contrasting Paul's essays to people who don't have the luxury. Paul's essays could be seen as less genuine, even if they seem wiser.
> His essays are edited because it's important for his business. He can easily justify a paying someone.
First he is not paying someone to edit these (any person I've seen appears to be unpaid and affiliated with HN in some way). Second he's not (as far as I can tell) angling these posts for business purposes (for example if the head of some corporation were doing that that would make sense).
Seems wrong.
Y'all, we definitely edit those posts. ;)
That the 'studiedly mussed' style of fly.io blog posts comes across as 'unedited' for some is a terrific compliment, even more so for being unintended.
Yes unedited just means "one person wrote it", so if something is good and seems unedited that's a great thing.
I think it might just mean we need to get better at editing.
>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.
Also,
> 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?
An even better example is just a few sentences back in the essay: The speed of a car has nothing to do with its color, and yet you can improve the speed without changing the color.
Good find. Sadly there are many such examples
You can't optimize for two things at the same time in the /same system/.
In your example, the best volume for the stereo will change based on how fast you're going. Noise from air going around your car will require a slightly louder volume. It technically goes the other way too, I'm sure louder music will affect your mileage slightly, reducing your MPG due to increased power draw. Realistically it won't matter, but they do exist in the same system.
You can absolutely optimize for two things at the same time in different systems. The ideal speed optimizing for MPG in different cars aren't really linked and can be found independently.
> 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.
> > 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.
In 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.
It's from Boileau! Beautiful alexandrine verses:
> Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement, > Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.
A similar idea in English is David McCullough's quote, "To write well is to think clearly."
Isn't that the same thing as the oft-repeated "if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough", which is a saying I really, really, really dislike a lot, because understanding is one thing, and transferring that understanding is a skill unto its own.
not the exact same meaning (clairement really is "clearly" and not "simply") but very similar, yes.
Lacan developed the idea of "deferred understanding" in his clinical practice and (infamously) deployed it in his teaching as well. It sounds a little suspicious at first, but it's not difficult to grasp what it is or why it might be beneficial in certain contexts where repression is faced. For example, it's a cliche on the left that far more people like the idea of socialism when it's described to them piecemeal without being labeled as such than would be willing to endorse "socialism" by name. Drawing out that tacit endorsement is a matter of "deferring understanding"--bypassing someone's resistance to an idea they don't understand well, but nevertheless have strong feelings about, by introducing them to it in a somewhat confusing way, so that they come to understand it better before they realize what exactly it is that they're coming to understand. In Lacan's approach understanding is a specific process with its own benefits and drawbacks, rather than the universal purpose of all communication, nor beneficial for every purpose communication might be engaged in to pursue. Confusing writing is like the proverbial knife that can be used to injure or, in the hands of a surgeon, to heal. This is why art students sometimes practice drawing images that have been turned upside down, so that they can focus on the details that are there in front of their eyes without being distracted by their own comprehension standing in for the colors and shapes actually present: "this is an image of a cow and I know what a cow is supposed to look like, so once I have recognized that it is a cow, there is no longer any need to keep looking." One of the big leaps that art students make is in learning to rigorously look at what they're drawing beyond merely seeing and recognizing what it is, which is the usual everyday way of looking. In the same way Lacan taught his students to rigorously listen to their patients and all the little oddities in the way they describe their problems that might otherwise be dismissed out of hand by a less attentive doctor who too quickly decides they know what is going on. This way they might avoid being fooled by their own understanding before they've had a chance to engage with the irreducible complexity and uniqueness of this or that specific neurosis. Understanding is not always the right tool for the job, or at least not the right tool for every step of every communicative job.
interesting, thanks. But isn't this just playing with definitions ? It seems like what lacan described was a way to fight against pre-judgement, in order to reach a better understanding of the subject.
> 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.
> 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.
Like who?
Abhorrent doesnt mean the message was not conveyed well, which ultimately is the purpose of good writing
I think a strong sense of confidence (perhaps overconfidence) and inflated self-worth are likely closely related to increased likelihood of success. “Those who dare, win” and all that.
But I think most of the opinions and advice rich, successful people like to share is just a side-effect, not a productive output, of these traits.
Sometimes 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.
I'm solidly in the camp that believes that if Graham wasn't rich no one would read this stuff or claim to admire it. He also should have run this through a spell checker.
I think it’s true that the impactfullness of his essays has gone down in the recent years. However, note that a lot of people that gathered at HN in the early days came because of his early essays, such as Hackers and Painters. Me included.
> 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.
Gonna leave that as an exercise to the reader. (You could run it through a spell checker, too.)
There aren't any spelling errors. If you want to claim otherwise it would be easy for you to show examples.
By now, it has been corrected. When I wrote my comment, "surprising" in end note [1] was misspelled "suprising."
Still visible at the internet archive, btw.
i don’t think he was rich when he first started?
also other rich people also write stuff. nobody reads that shit.
I also have the very strong suspicion that he was never poor
A 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.
> 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
[2] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=162573063275994
TBH, I've written 12 books and rarely deal with orphans or widows. Good typesetting helps take care of this.
(LaTeX previously and now Typst.)
I think I agree with the central point here. I think the key phrase is “internal consistency”. This is also very true of programming. It’s difficult to build good software without having a handle on the subject matter (and/or a domain expert to get feedback from).
But often writing is also a process of discovery. Maybe you are trying to write something that hasn’t been written about before. This is like building software without a spec. You can still write well and be irrelevant, just as one can build great software upon bad assumptions and fail to sell it. This doesn’t make it bad writing in its own right, but it also may not be very useful to anyone. In my opinion both software and prose should be produced for a purpose.
Thus, if there’s no meaning to it, writing, like software, falls pretty flat.
Interested to know how much Immanuel Kant pg has read. Kant's whole project was about grappling with how the mind structures experience—and how language mediates, rather than transparently transmits, thought. You can never fully get to the thing in itself.
I can see how re-editing can make the ideas more coherent within pg's frame of representation, but I'm struggling with the idea that it makes them any more true.
I would like to imagine that pg's obsession with pared-down, simple sentences is a post-traumatic stress response to an early encounter with Kant's prose.
Kant was an awful writer and _nobody_ thinks otherwise.
I 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.
That tracks. Language is a kind of technology, that evolves to adapt to new uses. A simple elegant python program that fits on a slide might have taken tens of thousands of lines of obtuse fortran.
Yep, and Kant's writing in many ways is like early compiler design. Painful. Necessary. And built at a time when the cognitive architecture didn’t yet have shortcuts. He was writing in metaphysical FORTRAN.
There 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.
There are two sentences in this essay that I couldn't understand. Can someone help me?
1. "An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation"
I thought dialogue and conversation were the same thing. What is the difference between them besides one being a cleaned up version of the other?
2. "If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs."
What does this even mean? Is it an exemple or an analogy? It sounds like at this point in the text there should be an analogy, but this sentence sounds like an example. So, which one is it?
Also, did anybody else got confused too?
- He means written dialogue. Think Plato.
- It’s an example of a statement that rests on a false premise
Conversation is when you talk to people in your daily life. Dialogue is something from books or movies.
"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.
Slots 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.
Even 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?
Was there a point to your comment, other than making a racist remark?
This strawman worked in 2020, not in 2025.
Dialogue and conversation are not the same thing, though they’re related, just in the same way that stress and anxiety are related but not the same. The task of reading comprehension involves being able to track important distinctions between synonyms.
The second is a counterfactual, and it is correctly deployed to help show the difference between a valid argument and a sound argument. Graham is saying that a good liar presents pleasing and valid but unsound arguments, or rather sophistry.
I think your confusion here is from reading comprehension problems.
I’m a sucker for when the form serves as an example for the author’s idea.
> If it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and you just state them. But other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications.
From William Zinsser’s On Writing Well:
> The growing acceptance of the split in-finitive, or of the preposition at the end of a sentence, proves that formal syntax can't hold the fort forever against a speaker's more comfortable way of getting the same thing said—and it shouldn't. I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
Another from the same book:
> CREEPING NOUNISM. This is a new American disease that strings two or three nouns together where one noun—or, better yet, one verb-will do. Nobody goes broke now; we have money problem areas. It no longer rains; we have precipitation activity or a thunderstorm probability situation. Please, let it rain.
> Today as many as four or five concept nouns will attach themselves to each other, like a molecule chain. Here's a brilliant specimen I recently found: "Communication facilitation skills development intervention." Not a person in sight, or a working verb. I think it's a program to help students write better.
> the rhythm of writing has to match the ideas in it
It's hard for me to tell what the point of the author was from just the part you quoted, but why does this have to be the case? I don't have trouble believing that many complex ideas require complex language to describe them, but the idea that it's literally a requirement in order for the writing to be "good" rather than just a usual circumstance isn't obvious to me. If anything, the complexity of this quote just seems to hide the dubious premise.
> but 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.
So, this would seem to be fairly easy to test empirically. Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing, and use it on something where you know if it's true:
1) court testimony which we know (from outside evidence) is either true or not true 2) scientific papers which we know to have been reproducible, or not 3) stock pundits predictions about the future of some company or other, which we know with hindsight to have been accurate or not
Much more convincing to me than any amount of good writing about writing, would be to have some empirical evidence.
> Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing
There are objective features of writing, but quality is subjective.
Of course, as to the thesis of the essay, it is both trivial and uninteresting that people, including PG, tend to have views of the correctness of an idea and the quality of the presentation that are correlated.
It is interesting that PG thinks that this is anything more than a cognitive bias to be cautious about, though.
So one thing to note is that the essay mentions that it refers specifically to "writing that is used to develop ideas" vs. "writing meant to describe others ideas".
The way I interpret this is that it refers to claims that build on each other to come to a conclusion. So the way to test for truth is to somehow test each claim and the conclusion, which could vary in difficulty based on the kind of claims being made.
As this essay exemplifies, it is difficult to test for truth if you make broad claims that are so imprecise that they can't be verified or don't tell you anything interesting when verified using reasonable assumptions.
> But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.
I wouldn't phrase it exactly this way, but this is an important point that I really struggle to get across. I regularly see proposals and such that are very challenging to reason about because of their writing. But when I ask for terms to be more rigorously defined, or for the document to be reordered into a more principled structure, some people seem to have a strong instinct that I'm just being difficult for the sake of it. I still remember one guy who insisted that I need to make a specific technical criticism or sign off, and absolutely refused to accept the answer that my structural feedback was intended to help us reason about the technical details.
...I find it a bit surprising that Paul Graham of all people, writing in May of 2025, managed to get through this entire essay without mentioning LLMs.
Because I think LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis. They are quite good at the craft of writing--not perfect, but probably much better than the median human--and they are just as good when the content is true as when it's false. This quality ruins a lot of my heuristics for evaluating whether writing is trustworthy, because LLMs are so good at bullshitting.
So while I agree that for humans, writing that sounds good tends to also be logically correct, that clearly isn't inherent in all writing.
Most people don't want to spend much time reading 'median human' writing so the claim that LLMs are 'better', even if true, doesn't really say that much. We don't listen to median human music either.
> 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.
Get 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.
I think emails summarizing meetings, or making a case for something, or describing something, match the kind of writing PG means in his essay.
And like the commenter you're replying to, I think that LLMs today can write far better than your average coworker (assuming they don't go on a hallucinated tangent; then again some coworkers also do!).
So it's fair to compare LLMs and work emails.
Not to speak of work wiki pages (Confluence etc) describing technical things, decisions, policies, etc.
Why do you think pg is writing about emails and meeting notes? I don't readily see anything in the piece to suggest that. 'making a case for something' or 'describing something' covers the bulk of writing, the piece is quite explicit about not being about all writing.
Why do you think he's not?
It seems to me there is no difference in kind between an email arguing for or examining an important decision or idea, and an "essay" on an important decision or idea.
I definitely don't think these documents are just "written speech". Some emails are—a quick message asking if you'll be in the office tomorrow, for example—but major ones require significantly more thought.
It seems to me there is no difference in kind between an email arguing for or examining an important decision or idea, and an "essay" on an important decision or idea.
Why are there people who make a living as, say, newspaper opinion columnists or magazine staff writers? Or hell, why aren't we all rich substackers given that writing a substack is literally email?
> LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis.
No, they don't. His thesis is not that writing that looks good--that seems plausible and convincing, like the output that LLMs often produce--actually is. He says explicitly in the article: "we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true".
His actual thesis is in the very next clause of that sentence: "it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
> 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.
To be fair, most people commenting on it here on HN seem to understand the first meaning (looks good => is good).
I can guess what this says about the readership of HN, but what does it says about the clarity of PG's essay?
> what does it says about the clarity of PG's essay?
This seems pretty clear to me:
"[W]hile 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."
And I'm not the only one who has quoted that passage in this discussion.
It's the second to last paragraph, when someone reading the essay may have already formed a hard to dislodge opinion on the kind of writing PG means. And indeed, many people here on HN did so.
The order of paragraphs, how early in the text ideas or clarifications are introduced, etc, all make for clear writing.
I'd say this is an example of an essay that lacks clarity, i.e. one that is not "good writing".
I had the same reaction. I spend an increasingly large part of my day reading and being required to edit AI slop. Part of what makes that hard as well as annoying is that it is all reasonably well written and plausible. Just not factual. That’s the real problem I think all of society is likely to face soon if not already. Not to mention the upcoming problem of new AI models trained on the internet of slop.
...can I ask what your job is where you're spending a significant portion of your day editing an AI's prose?
> LLMs are so good at bullshitting
They are trained on it.
There is a famous line about legal writing: “There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.” [1]
PG going for the "they're connected" angle, not too convincingly as shown mainly in the paragraph starting "This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas".
[1] https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3774-legal-prose-and...
> 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.
I do not agree with the premise of the article --- writing that sounds good is more likely to be right. I've seen enough beautiful lies, fictionalized versions of the truth, and cunning orchestrations of a string of well-woven sentences, none of which had any intention of revealing the truth, but of convincing the reader to believe it's true.
I propose the following -- writing the sounds good manipulates the reader into thinking that it is right. Feels better to believe it.
Also, this article is ironically long and quite vague for PG's standards. The writing doesn't feel sound enough to be right.
A 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.
>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.
"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) -- 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.
Elements of Style is one of the most assigned textbooks around. It's far from "forgotten."
> “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.
Didn’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.
PG agrees that you can't conclude that beautiful writing, writing that seems plausible and convincing, actually is. Sophistry is writing (or speaking) that seems plausible and convincing, but is false. PG is not saying that's not possible.
What he's saying is that writing that is ugly is highly likely to be wrong. Which has nothing to do with sophistry.
This article's claim is a good demonstration of Brandolini's law. End of discussion.
Hat tip! I had to look it up on Wiki to remind myself. To quote:
> 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.
> If the writer is honest, internal consistency and truth converge.
Can't one be honestly mistaken?
Paul 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.
It doesn't seem like you're talking about the same thing the article is. Graham doesn't say "you must be a good writer to be a good thinker".
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in some other way and then write about them afterward — for example, if you build something, or conduct an experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such cases the ideas often live more in the work than the writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas are good.
Writers who have trouble expressing thoughts in a non-native language are not actually developing the idea in that language. That doesn't mean they are producing bad ideas, but it _might_ mean they won't produce good writing (in that non-native language).
I took the essay to be highlighting that if you use writing as a tool for thinking, clunky writing is likely to highlight places where your ideas themselves aren't clear or correct yet. The iterative process of refining the writing to "sound good" will help shape the ideas.
This seems to be a commonly expressed idea in other forms. For example, when thinking through ideas in code, the process of making the code more "beautiful" can also result in a clearer expression of more correct ideas.
For 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.”
Grunt. Sniffle.
Paul Graham's notion that good writing and stylistic quality are mutually required represents a false dichotomy. He understands this, which is why the essay is so good.
Style is a distraction while clarity and sophistication are inherently aligned.
In reality, there is opposition between style and substance. Sophistication does not increase clarity, clarity is not always the byproduct of aesthetic refinement. True writing excellence lies in the deliberate orchestration of form and meaning.
Good writing has the benefit of helping others for many decades and centuries. That's a realization I came to recently. My goal now is to write a variety of essays, articles, and books on topics that I excel in.
If I am drunk, or have brain damage, my ideas will be bad and so is my writing.
It’s not about what makes writing good. It’s about what makes it bad. People don’t agree on good writing.
I think Paul is talking more about not bad writing. Otherwise, he’d be talking about poetry, which also asserts truth and style as inseparable. People disagree about poetry. Most people agree Paul is a good (not bad) writer, not a poet.
Why there is no reading mode available on Paul’s website? :( reading his blog from my phone is physically painful
Graham says good writing sounds good and is more likely to be true. But his own writing is hard to read and confusing. His sentences are long and messy. If he’s right, then his own ideas must be wrong because his writing sounds bad.
To me this looks like a false dichotomy. Writing beautifully and having a good argument are not mutually exclusive. So I think the article sets out a false proposition and discusses it at length.
Reading 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), or a Malaysian guy has to watch a BBC cook make rice (https://youtu.be/53me-ICi_f8?si=0AaZ82dk_AYFqJAx&t=226).
It helps when you never question if, as in his own essay describing other ‘bad writers’ weaving falsehoods, you’re the one lying to yourself.
Especially about your own significance.
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.
For me the beauty of idlewords's own blog (https://idlewords.com/) is that it's so good it makes me want to write.
Similarly, I find Graham's writing so bad that it also makes me want to write.
(note: idlewords, if you see this, your blog is misbehaving at the moment. For example, PHP is complaining bitterly on this page right now: https://idlewords.com/2018/10/ )
Paul Graham is a good writer. He's not an elite-tier writer's writer like "the dead guy" who's not actually dead, but he's still better than 99% of business executives, and he's better in the skills that businessmen want.
He carries the self-confidence that billions of dollars in wealth can give you.
It'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.
[flagged]
> ... 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.
His comment got deleted but it was funny hearing him say PG hasn't created anything while commenting on a website PG created
Uncle Roger reviewing fried rice recipes.
Reviewing Jamie Oliver.
> Malaysian guy has to watch a BBC cook make rice (https://youtu.be/53me-ICi_f8?si=0AaZ82dk_AYFqJAx&t=226)
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.
Possible counterpoint: LLMs are notoriously good at writing plausible sounding ideas that are wrong.
Fire up an LLM and write a Malcolm Gladwell article.
“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.
Lol your response is even better than mine, thank you.
If 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.
You'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.
What how does that concept work in poetry or lyrics, for example? Something could be completely fictional (and artificial) and still be exceptionally well written.
My weird take on fiction is that much of the appeal is that the entire story is just an elaborate analogy to explain true facts about human nature that are otherwise hard to make clear.
You could try to write a non-fiction essay about how being a parent sets you up for potentially the worst pain and most intense grief you can imagine but yet also the experience is so meaningful and rewarding that it's worth it. But that essay would be abstract and wouldn't really hit you in the gut.
Or you could read Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" or watch Arrival which is nominally completely made up about aliens that don't experience time like us and it will convey the same concepts more effectively than an essay could.
Totally, it's not a weird take though. It's actually a pretty standard fare account of the purpose of fiction in literary theory that's been with us for a long time.
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.
It doesn’t, really, which is okay, because the subtext here is that Pg is writing about essayistic writing, or more specifically, communicating ideas in the form of written words. I don’t think he is commenting on “good writing” in the sense of a novel or line of poetry.
Moby Dick is my go-to example of a novel that is incredibly well-written, but I wouldn’t say it’s particularly clear or straightforward in its presentation of ideas.
An example, if you haven’t read it:
”The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”
Maybe the first paragraph could have been written less sweeping?
I don't think Paul knows that he's writing rhetoric and not prose.
Imo, 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.
True, 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.
I find that Moby Dick passage to be quite clear and straightforward. It uses metaphor, but a simple and direct one.
Fiction still has ideas to get across and internal consistencies it needs to maintain to be enjoyable and get those ideas across.
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'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.
While writing, you edit your writing towards both sounding good and having solid ideas.
That's the entire essay's point and I largely agree with it.
Its why I think current LLMs are bad writers, not because their prose or ideas are off, but AI generated writing does not have the same quality of robustness from ideas that are thoroughly vetted through the author's editing of it.
At the end of the day, good writing takes a lot of time thinking through what you are really saying and standing behind it. LLMs cannot do that for you (yet).
LLMs can certainly be a helpful tool, mostly by unblocking authors via creating prose, honing in on accurate expressions, researching edge cases and suggesting arguments or counter arguments.
But the craft of sharpening an idea to a very fine, meaningful, well written point is something that is still far off.
Of course, until the next research paper completely proves me wrong.
Step 1. RLHF on real time edited documents Step 2. Profit??
Maybe 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.
> 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.
I’ve also read some of your other comments.
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.
What can you conclude then?
That writing that sounds bad is likely to be wrong.
The 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.
> Are the standards for whether something “sounds bad” based on the average person’s reading or the intended audience.
As pg describes it in the article, it's neither; it's based on the writer's judgment. The writer of course is writing for some intended audience, and their judgment of what sounds good or sounds bad should be influenced by that. But pg is describing the writer's process of judging what they write.
> The reason is that it makes the essay easier to read. It's less work to read writing that flows well. How does that help the writer? Because the writer is the first reader
Note that the writer's judgement only serves as an initial proxy for how well the essay reads. This implies that the reader, whoever that is, is the true judge of how well it reads. My point is that that group is ill defined.
If it were sufficient for the writer to be the only judge of how well something reads, surely PG wouldn't feel the need to have other proofread his essays. And surely it is not sufficient for someone who lacks taste to judge their own writing as good.
The way I read that statement is the same as the startup advice of "build what you would yourself want". However you still have to validate that the market exists and is big.
There is really nothing profound in that paragraph anyway, all it is saying is that a writer should edit and proofread their work. That whole paragraph could be deleted honestly. It is obvious table stakes for one to edit their work. What differentiates good from bad is a matter of taste + who is judging it.
Thanks. 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.
This feels like a cousin of the idea that the funnier the joke the more truth it uncovers.
If people would just quit writing "Me and my friend..." I would be happier.
Counter point:
systems that force complexity into legible forms often destroy valuable nuance, and richness.
- seeing like a state
Scott's 'legibility' comes with a very explicit consumer - a large power structure like a state. Written style is not like that at all - pg can't force to anyone to write in his preferred way nor is anyone obliged to like it.
If 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.
I’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.
Perhaps ironically, I'm not communicating my point well.
There's a book called 80/20 running and the concept is you should do 80% of your running running slow. To me, that's a very legible concept. It's very clear and small and easy to explain.
I think his book is well packaged by having a title that condenses all of his thoughts into one little sound bite concept.
But actually you know his advice about training for running is much more complex. And you know he puts together running plans and they have a thousand types of running and it's not always 80% slow running. Sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that. It's rarely exactly 80% slow running. There's a million pieces of nuance to how he would train people to run faster but to get the concept across to write it down, he makes it more legible. He simplifies it to 80% of your running should be slow.
To me, and perhaps I'm learning only to me, that concept is very related to the concept of legibility in seeing like a state. You're taking the complicated forest with many different types of trees and you're simplifying it down to one uniform thing. That's much easier to understand and easy to track and communicate. 97 trees in this area.
The same thing can happen to concepts. They have a lot of nuance and complexity but to write them it down so that they can best be communicated, you often need to remove a lot of that.
That’s your thesis but it’s not clear to me how it’s related to those in Seeing like a State
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Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.
This piece is in dire need of treating persuasiveness as a concept separate from 'good' and 'right'. Persuasive writing considers its audience and identifies avenues to create a train of thought that feels natural and true to them. What PG is describing is essentially the process of writing something that you yourself find persuasive. That can be a useful technique if your audience is people like you, but it can also amplify your biases and isolate your work from other perspectives that could provide value (increase 'right'ness per PG's definition).
Writing to convince yourself can help to refine your ideas, but writing to convince your detractors can point out blind spots and encourage finding strong evidentiary support for your argument. Equating "good" with "I would find it convincing" decimates the value that PG rightly identifies in using writing to enhance your ideas rather than just convey them.
Holy airball. LLMs exist. Good writing is now as cheap as wifi.
> 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
And then you have people like Kant and Hegel who have both been criticized for their writing styles, but I would bet in 200 years time people would still be reading and studying them. And with Paul Graham they'd ask, "Who?"
He’s like some startup guy or something, right? His blog posts are well written, and the arguments seem… I mean, fine. I think there’s a third dimension here; in 200 years people will probably be more likely to talk about Kant or Hegel because Graham’s subject matter is just inherently more ephemeral.
But, most of humanity’s endeavors have been ephemeral.
The web site, on my browser, is typical of so many I encounter these days: patently unreadable. Chrome in dark mode renders it white-on-white text. I press contral-a, and it can be read, but it is still not easy.
Paul, I’m begging you to read the Gorgias!
This essay nails it, clear thinking really does lead to clear writing. It’s a good reminder that writing is less about sounding smart and more about being understood.
Oh Mr. Graham again. I’m not a fan. I tried to read along, I really did, and then I came upon this sentence:
“But not without method acting.”
This is one of the most terribly written sentences in the English language I’ve seen since getting out of jail in January. It violates every reasonable convention regarding communication. It is terrible and please take note that a person who put this sentence out into the wild, without intentional comedy, is a fucking terrible writer.
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All the woke and progressive ideas "sound good" on paper.
But they are detached from reality, scientifically wrong, and lead to disastrous outcomes.
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All of marketing "sounds good" and even "looks good" - that is the entire point - but it is actually all lies.
pg is an expert at cranking out vapid, insubstantial pieces of writing that the gullible eat up as the pronouncements of genius. If I actually wanted to be known as a writer the last person I'd consult for advice is Paul Graham.
> 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.
End of the first paragraph and we're already in the weeds with a totally nonsensical and implausible thesis. Never change, Paul.
“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.
Ive read most of the comments here, and this is one of the only actually insightful ones.
Communication is very hard - we have to first translate some scattered notions into a coherent idea, then find the right words to express that idea, then the people receiving them have to understand those words, translate them into their scattered ideas. And then do the same in the other direction.
The act of writing - and especially editing - helps us refine the ideas and find the words to best express them, and especially in a way that they are to have the intended effect on others.
I'm sure this essay has some good ideas at its core, but I don't think it had nearly enough editing...
Too much meta, too much narrow. This writing is not for us. It's for you.
I'm so tired of this guy
Paul Graham clearly loves writing and spending many iterations on producing something perfect. That was also his approach with the Arc language.
I may be projecting my own preferences here, but such a person is likely to have an ambivalent relationship with LLMs, which just output bland mediocrity or falsehoods.
In his previous essay, he warned that one should not create things that make the world worse. He softened it up by saying, without proof, that creating awesome things is probably fine (are LLMs awesome, I don't think so?).
Now he talks about good writing. I get the impression that he is one of the last remaining humanists in Silicon Valley, who at least has doubts about the direction we are going in and would be happy if YC startups created something else.
What happened to this man? A few years ago he wrote a glorious Rosetta stone of second-order functions in several programmng languages. Now he's spewing tired tropes about journalistic-style writing.
The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time, they often become convinced they can succeed at anything. Musk is a glaring recent example - and now Paul. I do appreciate his essays on tech and related subjects, but not for their literary merit. If I’m seeking advice on writing, I’d turn to actual writers - people who’ve earned recognition and acclaim specifically for their work in that field.
I've commented many times before how I've become a bit disillusioned with pg's writing over the past decade or so, because it always seemed to lack anything beyond a surface level of introspection. He always seemed to be pushing the idea that qualities that make a person great at startups are the most important thing in the world - not surprising given his industry, but to me many of his essays just felt more and more self-serving, while never commenting on (or, in my opinion, really even understanding) the real societal negatives that I think have been a consequence (admittedly unexpected) of the startup boom.
But, in pg's defense, when it comes to his writing style and the quality of his prose, I think he's generally top notch, and even though I may disagree with him more often now, I appreciate the structure and clarity of his writing. Given how influential his essays have been, I think he's qualified to write about how his communication style makes an impact.
How do you reconcile
"pg's writing... always seemed to lack anything beyond a surface level of introspection"
with
"when it comes to his writing style and the quality of his prose, I think he's generally top notch"?
And "Given how influential his essays have been, I think he's qualified" - do you not see a problem with equating influence/popularity with quality/truth (let alone morality)?
He is the quintessential tech bro. His selective caring about “free speech” only when it serves to feed into right wing outrage was when he showed his true colors years ago. The recent essay on “Wokeness” just confirmed it.
Paul Graham's essays read like typical self-help books. Considering how popular self-help books are, I guess you can call that "good writing" for general population?
[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.
Paul Graham doesn’t moon-light as a writer, rather, writing is one of the core skills that made YC what it is.
He spends months chiseling each essay because he understands that clear thinking is expressed through clear prose. Dismissing that craft because he also knows Lisp is like trashing Stephen King’s storytelling because he can ride a bike.
If you only grant “literary merit” to people who never shipped a line of code, your definition’s too narrow for the real world—where ideas, not résumés, decide who we read.
> He spends months chiseling each essay
I like Graham's writing, and defend it elsewhere in this thread, but that has such an obsequious and somehow macho smack to it, wow. One imagines Hercules chiseling his abs. If that's what his writing does for you, fair enough, but it sure is intense.
I'll do it once for the sake of the rest of us.
this is April 6th -
Essay was published May 24th, that is the better part of two months.Fact is you are most likely one of those:
Therefore, my advice to you is simple, care less about "what his writing does for me", and focus only on what is your own writing does for you.I pity you and the likes of you who are coming here to shit all over as if there aren't any better things to do during the day.
The commenter did not say Paul Graham writes quickly, so I'm not sure why you keep fixating on that point.
> I pity you and the likes of you who are coming here to shit all over as if there aren't any better things to do during the day.
Good lord. They said they like his writing, but found the particular tweet you shared pretentious. Your response to that light criticism is so disproportionate it reads sycophantic. This is a thread about good writing, I think criticizing anything is fair game.
> Fact is you are most likely one of those: https://x.com/paulg/status/1903066759302725698
So you're just blindly accusing someone who said they liked his writing of not reading his writing?
When people become insanely rich, they tend to attract a dozen or so sycophants into their orbit who never tell them “no”, never say they’re wrong, and basically spend all their time praising and enabling them. Otherwise, they’d be out. It’s not surprising that some of them start to believe they are always right and that they are good at everything.
Successful people outgrowing their jodhpurs and losing their reason is a thing, sure, but that does not apply in this specific case. Tech writing is still writing, my friend.
Have you read ANSI Common Lisp? Or even the introduction to it?
I have criticisms of Mr. Graham, but the man can write, and consistently. Some of the essays can be a tad too terse for me at times, but when he gets it right, his stuff can be exquisite.
Another example that comes immediately crashing to mind is Donald Knuth - have you read any of his tech writing? It's glorious.
Anyone who wants to claim there's a hard line between writing worthy of "literary merit" and tech writing is going to have their work cut out for them with those two already.
I have learned about YCombinator, hacker news, Paul Graham, and startups in general through one of his essays. I was first blown away by the brilliance and clarity of his writing, and only then did I learn that he's a prominent tech figure.
So many years later, I still haven't read a better writer (except maybe Scott Alexander). So, at least from my perspective, if anyone has the authority to write about good writing, it's this guy.
Reminds of this classic tweet:
"Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this..." https://x.com/afraidofwasps/status/1177301482464526337?lang=...
One can readily argue that Graham has earned recognition and acclaim specifically for his essays. They're part of what drew early founders to YC.
Impossible 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.
100%
> The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time, they often become convinced they can succeed at anything.
I think at the core the problem (if you want to call it that) can be boiled down to the following:
"I am smart. That's why I was successful at what I did. So I need to prove to myself and others that it wasn't luck it was I am damn smart"
The problem with hubris is that if you took someone like Musk or PG and you kept them in some off the beaten path place ie not Silicon Valley, not NYC pick your hot location (and stipulate they couldn't move because of family or other obligations) and they weren't surrounded by others who were top notch (as a result of also being in the right place at the right time) there wouldn't be anything particularly notable about them.
Having gone myself to one of those 'good' universities I will say that Paul being at Harvard would certainly amplify this type of behavior by being surrounded early on at a formidable age by accomplished members of that community.
I think he's put an order of magnitude more effort into writing than you
Paul Graham is spewing rightwing nonsense for a long time now
You're saying that about Paul Graham, of all people? His Wikipedia page lists him as a "computer scientist, writer and essayist, entrepreneur and investor", in that order. He wrote various Lisp books before founding Viaweb, and arguably it was the essays that made YC a thing in the first place. He is arguably one of the best writers in the startup scene.
I wonder if you're just unaware of all of this, or if you just have an axe to grind here?
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Wow, is this ever out of touch. People are currently confronting smoothly delivered, glib sentences that are wrong at an unprecedented scale due to widespread adoption of language model AI.
TL:DR: Writing is rewriting.
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Whether it's well written is debatable.
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This is HN, PG posts will be instinctively and reactively upvoted.
That being said, this is pretty intellectually absent by the standards of a PG essay. "Writing good is hard" says man who has made his living off issuing advice that other people unconditionally obey. It feels less like a piece of solid writing advice and more like a selfish way to cover his ass now that the auspices of tech startups are shifting towards fascism. Like if the man behind the curtain started apologizing for the Emerald City and green-tinted glasses.
pg
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I know this is his site, but who here honestly gives a shit what Paul Graham thinks? If you do, touch grass.
Good writing comes from horny, hungry desperate artists. Everything else is content.
This is actually true. Also, the mentally ill. A model citizen (NPC) will never produce great art.
In which Paul Graham (re)-discovers Aristotelian and medieval metaphysics and the unity of truth, beauty and goodness. Or maybe more pragmatic in the word of Andrei Tupolev, head of the Soviet design bureau of the same name, "An ugly plane doesn't fly"