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 rather forgettable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiDUbaBL9E
twodave · 5m ago
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.
antirez · 3h ago
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.
yojo · 1h ago
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.
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though.
Descriptive writing, especially for fiction, seems out of scope.
antirez · 1h ago
Great example, love this.
qsort · 3h ago
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 :)
tshaddox · 59m ago
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?
pdonis · 38m ago
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.
skybrian · 5m ago
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.
layer8 · 2h ago
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.
antirez · 2h ago
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
layer8 · 2h ago
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.
saltwatercowboy · 1h ago
Perhaps one sniff test for bad writing is presence of a link to the Wikipedia page for rhetoric.
antirez · 1h ago
Pontiggia sometimes explained parts of other writers just using rethoric figures, and showing how their application provided new insights into things and concepts.
SpicyLemonZest · 2h ago
> 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.
tbrownaw · 58m ago
> 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.
antirez · 3h ago
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.
He carries the self-confidence that billions of dollars in wealth can give you.
TimSchumann · 1h ago
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.
Waterluvian · 1h ago
Uncle Roger reviewing fried rice recipes.
mykowebhn · 1h ago
Reviewing Jamie Oliver.
kaushalvivek · 3h ago
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.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 47m ago
> I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.
As a counter-example, this article is well written but the ideas within it are stupid.
mykowebhn · 44m ago
Whether it's well written is debatable.
Waterluvian · 1h ago
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.
kristianc · 55m ago
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.
logic_node · 15m ago
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.
tptacek · 3h ago
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.
gist · 1h ago
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.
tptacek · 1h ago
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.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 42m ago
This is the essence of philosophy. Observe X, now argue that everything in the universe is actually X.
fogleman · 2h ago
Possible counterpoint: LLMs are notoriously good at writing plausible sounding ideas that are wrong.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 44m ago
Lol your response is even better than mine, thank you.
luispauloml · 3h ago
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?
gizmo · 3h ago
- He means written dialogue. Think Plato.
- It’s an example of a statement that rests on a false premise
raincole · 2h ago
Conversation is when you talk to people in your daily life. Dialogue is something from books or movies.
thundergolfer · 2h ago
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.
erichocean · 2h ago
"Jobs" is too large a category; many specific job categories have limited slots (e.g. medical residencies).
But more importantly, slots at e.g. Harvard are limited. Seats at ball games are limited. Etc. Most things in life are, in fact, limited.
Graham is purposefully misleading here, and he knows it.
wat10000 · 1h ago
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.
spyckie2 · 18m ago
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??
mykowebhn · 1h ago
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?"
bee_rider · 1h ago
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.
rossdavidh · 3h ago
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.
dragonwriter · 2h ago
> Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing
There are objective features of writing, but quality is subjective.
Of course, as to the thesis of the essay, it is both trivial and uninteresting that people, including PG, tend to have views of the correctness of an idea and the quality of the presentation that are correlated.
It is interesting that PG thinks that this is anything more than a cognitive bias to be cautious about, though.
fidotron · 3h ago
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".
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.
MinimalAction · 1h ago
Also, this article is ironically long and quite vague for PG's standards. The writing doesn't feel sound enough to be right.
cainxinth · 3h ago
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.
Wowfunhappy · 3h ago
...I find it a bit surprising that Paul Graham of all people, writing in May of 2025, managed to get through this entire essay without mentioning LLMs.
Because I think LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis. They are quite good at the craft of writing--not perfect, but probably much better than the median human--and they are just as good when the content is true as when it's false. This quality ruins a lot of my heuristics for evaluating whether writing is trustworthy, because LLMs are so good at bullshitting.
So while I agree that for humans, writing that sounds good tends to also be logically correct, that clearly isn't inherent in all writing.
pdonis · 32m ago
> 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."
pvg · 3h ago
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.
Wowfunhappy · 2h ago
> We don't listen to median human music either.
Don't we? What about the music that plays in the elevator, or while you're on hold on the phone?
Similarly for writing, I would imagine you read plenty of emails that are of more-or-less median writing quality. And yet, these emails may discuss pivotal decisions, where it is very important whether their arguments are logically correct.
pvg · 2h ago
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.
envirogis · 29m ago
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.
breckinloggins · 1h ago
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.
pdonis · 35m ago
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.
windowshopping · 18m ago
This is one of the stupidest things he's come out with yet. Damn.
ahmadtbk · 3h ago
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.
ashoeafoot · 28m ago
Good writing comes from horny, hungry desperate artists. Everything else is content.
legends2k · 2h ago
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.
ajoberstar · 52m ago
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.
baxtr · 2h ago
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.
pdonis · 32m ago
> Maybe it’s true that writing that sounds good is also more likely to be right.
That's not what PG is saying in the article. He explicitly says that you can't conclude this.
RandomLensman · 3h ago
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.
keiferski · 3h ago
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!”
robertpateii · 2h ago
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.
RandomLensman · 3h ago
Maybe the first paragraph could have been written less sweeping?
bigyabai · 3h ago
I don't think Paul knows that he's writing rhetoric and not prose.
wat10000 · 1h ago
I find that Moby Dick passage to be quite clear and straightforward. It uses metaphor, but a simple and direct one.
munificent · 2h ago
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.
robertpateii · 2h ago
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.
adamgordonbell · 3h ago
Counter point:
systems that force complexity into legible forms often destroy valuable nuance, and richness.
- seeing like a state
pvg · 3h ago
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.
adamgordonbell · 1h ago
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.
pvg · 1h ago
That’s your thesis but it’s not clear to me how it’s related to those in Seeing like a State
wat10000 · 1h ago
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.
adamgordonbell · 1h ago
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.
codr7 · 20m ago
Nope.
jdoliner · 3h ago
Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.
SpicyLemonZest · 3h ago
> But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.
I wouldn't phrase it exactly this way, but this is an important point that I really struggle to get across. I regularly see proposals and such that are very challenging to reason about because of their writing. But when I ask for terms to be more rigorously defined, or for the document to be reordered into a more principled structure, some people seem to have a strong instinct that I'm just being difficult for the sake of it. I still remember one guy who insisted that I need to make a specific technical criticism or sign off, and absolutely refused to accept the answer that my structural feedback was intended to help us reason about the technical details.
lutusp · 1h ago
"Good writing" nearly always collides with something else, for example a writer paid by the word. Or a writer granted too little time to compose prose, as opposed to merely creating it.
A shorter exposition is nearly always (a) better, and (b) more work. I'm reminded of Mark Twain's remark, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
An underlying cause is that people don't read enough, before presuming to write. This results in malaprops like "reign him in", an example I see almost daily now. (A monarch reigns over a kingdom, a cowboy reins in a horse.) Examples abound, this is a common one.
Even worse, I now see automatic grammar checkers making ungrammatical "corrections" (incorrections?) like replacing "its" with "it's," or the reverse, but in the wrong circumstances.
But my all-time greatest annoyance are constructions like "Similar effect to ...", which in nearly all cases ought to be "Effect similar to ..." with copious variations, all wrong. Online searches discover that, in many such cases, the wrong form prevails over the right one.
Someone may object that language is an art form without fixed rules, that seems right. But granted that truth, many popular word sequences sound like fingernails on a chalkboard.
davidivadavid · 1h ago
Elements of Style is one of the most assigned textbooks around. It's far from "forgotten."
jmorf · 2h ago
“It’s hard to be right without sounding right.”
No. It’s hard to sound right even when you are. And if you don’t, you might as well be wrong.
throwanem · 1h ago
End of the first paragraph and we're already in the weeds with a totally nonsensical and implausible thesis. Never change, Paul.
DanAtC · 2h ago
I know this is his site, but who here honestly gives a shit what Paul Graham thinks? If you do, touch grass.
vzaliva · 2h ago
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.
hn_throwaway_99 · 2h ago
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.
intermerda · 2h ago
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.
tzury · 2h ago
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.
-__---____-ZXyw · 1h ago
> 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.
raincole · 2h ago
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?
If you didn't tell me this is from PG I would think it's from some self help book.
-__---____-ZXyw · 1h ago
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.
ryandrake · 1h ago
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.
lumenwrites · 2h ago
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.
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.
ofcourseyoudo · 2h ago
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.
tzury · 2h ago
100%
bilater · 1h ago
I think he's put an order of magnitude more effort into writing than you
n2d4 · 1h ago
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?
gist · 1h ago
> 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.
oulipo · 2h ago
Paul Graham is spewing rightwing nonsense for a long time now
ofcourseyoudo · 1h ago
TLDR => Writing that sounds good probably sounds good because it is internally consistent which might mean that it is more true, assuming the writer is working in good faith.
This essay is not worth any extended discussion.
kazinator · 3h ago
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.
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Barrin92 · 1h ago
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"
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 rather forgettable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiDUbaBL9E
But often writing is also a process of discovery. Maybe you are trying to write something that hasn’t been written about before. This is like building software without a spec. You can still write well and be irrelevant, just as one can build great software upon bad assumptions and fail to sell it. This doesn’t make it bad writing in its own right, but it also may not be very useful to anyone. In my opinion both software and prose should be produced for a purpose.
Thus, if there’s no meaning to it, writing, like software, falls pretty flat.
I'll make an example that makes this concept crystal crisp, and that you will likely remember for the rest of your life (no kidding). In Italy there was a great writer called Giuseppe Pontiggia. He had to write an article for one of the main newspapers in Italy about the Nobel Prize in Literature, that with the surprise of many, was never assigned, year after year, to Borges. He wrote (sorry, translating from memory, I'm not an English speaker and I'm not going to use an LLM for this comment):
"Two are the prizes that each year the Swedish academy assigns: one is assigned to the winner of the prize, the other is not assigned to Borges".
This uncovers much more than just: even this year the prize was not assigned to Borges. And, honestly, I never saw this kind of style heights in PG writings (I appreciate the content most of the times, but having translated a few of his writings in Italian, I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs). You don't reach that kind of Pontiggia style with the process in the article here, but via a very different process that only the best writers are able to perform and access.
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
He could have written something like: “The blocky ships hovered seemingly in defiance of gravity.”
Instead he picked a phrasing that’s intentionally a little hard to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to get the joke, and remembers it.
Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick.
Check out Keynes or 1950s American writing such as https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v01/d8....
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though.
Descriptive writing, especially for fiction, seems out of scope.
"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 :)
What PG is saying is that if something is ugly, you can conclude that it's most likely wrong as well.
Attention to detail is a signal of quality, but these things are just heuristics, not reliable truths.
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.
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
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.
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.
Yes, if you use some disfavored group's vernacular, there's a decent chance you also use their cultural values.
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.
As a counter-example, this article is well written but the ideas within it are stupid.
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 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.
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.
1. "An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation"
I thought dialogue and conversation were the same thing. What is the difference between them besides one being a cleaned up version of the other?
2. "If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs."
What does this even mean? Is it an exemple or an analogy? It sounds like at this point in the text there should be an analogy, but this sentence sounds like an example. So, which one is it?
Also, did anybody else got confused too?
- It’s an example of a statement that rests on a false premise
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.
But more importantly, slots at e.g. Harvard are limited. Seats at ball games are limited. Etc. Most things in life are, in fact, limited.
Graham is purposefully misleading here, and he knows it.
What people fail to understand is that immigrants add to both the supply and demand side. An immigrant sitting in a stadium seat is taking a place that could have gone to someone else. But their presence also drives the capacity to build more seats. More demand for higher education results in more capacity for higher education.
That's the entire essay's point and I largely agree with it.
Its why I think current LLMs are bad writers, not because their prose or ideas are off, but AI generated writing does not have the same quality of robustness from ideas that are thoroughly vetted through the author's editing of it.
At the end of the day, good writing takes a lot of time thinking through what you are really saying and standing behind it. LLMs cannot do that for you (yet).
LLMs can certainly be a helpful tool, mostly by unblocking authors via creating prose, honing in on accurate expressions, researching edge cases and suggesting arguments or counter arguments.
But the craft of sharpening an idea to a very fine, meaningful, well written point is something that is still far off.
Of course, until the next research paper completely proves me wrong.
Step 1. RLHF on real time edited documents Step 2. Profit??
But, most of humanity’s endeavors have been ephemeral.
1) court testimony which we know (from outside evidence) is either true or not true 2) scientific papers which we know to have been reproducible, or not 3) stock pundits predictions about the future of some company or other, which we know with hindsight to have been accurate or not
Much more convincing to me than any amount of good writing about writing, would be to have some empirical evidence.
There are objective features of writing, but quality is subjective.
Of course, as to the thesis of the essay, it is both trivial and uninteresting that people, including PG, tend to have views of the correctness of an idea and the quality of the presentation that are correlated.
It is interesting that PG thinks that this is anything more than a cognitive bias to be cautious about, though.
PG going for the "they're connected" angle, not too convincingly as shown mainly in the paragraph starting "This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas".
[1] https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3774-legal-prose-and...
I propose the following -- writing the sounds good manipulates the reader into thinking that it is right. Feels better to believe it.
> In all life, when a thing works better, usually it is more beautiful to the eye.
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.
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."
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.
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.
It might be that it’s hard to create sophistry accidentally in one’s writing, but it’s certainly a possible - and common - trick.
The danger is when you convince yourself that what you’re writing isn’t sophistry… because - after all - it looks good.
What he's saying is that writing that is ugly is highly likely to be wrong. Which has nothing to do with sophistry.
Another related point: I've seen geeks who're solid in thinking but terrible at explaining what they think.
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in some other way and then write about them afterward — for example, if you build something, or conduct an experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such cases the ideas often live more in the work than the writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas are good.
Writers who have trouble expressing thoughts in a non-native language are not actually developing the idea in that language. That doesn't mean they are producing bad ideas, but it _might_ mean they won't produce good writing (in that non-native language).
I took the essay to be highlighting that if you use writing as a tool for thinking, clunky writing is likely to highlight places where your ideas themselves aren't clear or correct yet. The iterative process of refining the writing to "sound good" will help shape the ideas.
This seems to be a commonly expressed idea in other forms. For example, when thinking through ideas in code, the process of making the code more "beautiful" can also result in a clearer expression of more correct ideas.
But I’m pretty sure this doesn’t hold for speech.
That's not what PG is saying in the article. He explicitly says that you can't conclude this.
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!”
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.
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.
systems that force complexity into legible forms often destroy valuable nuance, and richness.
- seeing like a state
That loses specific things. Understandability and nuance can be in conflict. Legibility is not specific to governments.
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.
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.
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.
No. It’s hard to sound right even when you are. And if you don’t, you might as well be wrong.
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.
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.
[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.
Have you read ANSI Common Lisp? Or even the introduction to it?
I have criticisms of Mr. Graham, but the man can write, and consistently. Some of the essays can be a tad too terse for me at times, but when he gets it right, his stuff can be exquisite.
Another example that comes immediately crashing to mind is Donald Knuth - have you read any of his tech writing? It's glorious.
Anyone who wants to claim there's a hard line between writing worthy of "literary merit" and tech writing is going to have their work cut out for them with those two already.
So many years later, I still haven't read a better writer (except maybe Scott Alexander). So, at least from my perspective, if anyone has the authority to write about good writing, it's this guy.
"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=...
I wonder if you're just unaware of all of this, or if you just have an axe to grind here?
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.
This essay is not worth any extended discussion.
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