Graham takes the nebulous concept of “best” and, at great length and with great effort, fails to bring clarity.

Currently #2 on HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39662615

I have zero interest in reading the post or the comments, the link is provided as a public service.

(BTW not everything by paulg submitted to HN is received rapturously. At least some members of the community can recognize his fatuousness)

holy fuck this is meandering and written like shit. like, marvel at this early paragraph:

There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the one I started with. Instead of asking what would the best essay be? I should have asked how do you write essays well? Though these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer to the first question, as we’ve seen, isn’t really about essay writing. The second question forces it to be.

this quote looks like nonsense because Paully’s paragraph flow is absolutely fucked and his sentence structure isn’t much better. did he copy Marc Andreessen‘s absolute garbage writing style, or did he figure he no longer needs to pay an editor now that he’s tricked my industry into thinking he’s a great writer?

Despite its title this isn’t meant to be the best essay

Oh, thanks for clarifying, that was really hard to figure out. /s

I graded a lot of humanities papers in a previous career. One of the weirder genres of bad paper would come from very smart computer science/math/physics majors who didn’t have time to do any of the assigned reading and just kind of tried to answer the prompt from first principles without citing any primary sources or other scholarship.

This feels like that paper, except the author isn’t a stressed-out college sophomore but a 59 year old “thought leader” with a large audience who gets Sam Altman to read his drafts. No attempt to engage with the history of the genre at all, or with the many other writers who have considered the form, and no examples cited except a famous scientific article by Darwin.

This is basically the quintessential example of “I am a smart person, I think like an LLM, therefore the LLM is smart too”:

While comparing ordinary human activity to language modeling is perhaps the greatest intellectual cliche of 2024, what PG describes in the essay-writing process itself essentially boils down to beam search. Autocomplete, find wrongness, backtrack, predict more consistent series of next tokens. The fact that only one of those options is actually reflected on the screen doesn’t change the fact that the writer is probability-weighting continuations in their head.

Uhhhh what now? How does writing an essay about how an essay should be an essay that is surprising, somehow fail to be utterly surprising or even all that interesting?