[HN Gopher] The Shape of the Essay Field
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The Shape of the Essay Field
Author : luisb
Score : 48 points
Date : 2025-06-03 09:55 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| silvestrov wrote:
| The essay form is a tool. It is not a silver bullet that always
| leads to insight and it is not always the best tool for the job.
|
| The content in this essay applies just as well to YouTube videos
| and TikToks.
| zigman1 wrote:
| I find the analogy with the car in the beginning a bit weird. He
| says it is not important to know, and only a handful of readers
| will learn something from it.
|
| But later he states that "the essay is something you write to
| figure something out". So why contemplating about the audience
| and how important it is to them in the first place?
|
| Maybe I was nudged because I enjoy reading and listening
| knowledgeable people about (classic) cars, but i wonder if pg
| would make the same statement if the subject of the essay would
| be a computer science technicality or obscurity.
| barrkel wrote:
| When PG started out talking about three reasons you might not
| know something, I paused and thought what they might be aside
| from unimportance, to see how at lined up.
|
| I came up with difficulty, opportunity and motivation.
|
| If an idea is difficult or non-obvious, if it requires insight or
| following the steps of a particular argument, many people of any
| age may remain ignorant of it. You could kind of force this into
| the obtuse bucket, but in my experience people are less obtuse,
| than slow. Obtuse, as a label, is mostly a way of lazily flipping
| the bozo bit and cutting your losses.
|
| And if you don't encounter an idea or concept or piece of
| knowledge, you won't know it. If it's useful, you may just have
| accepted a worldview without that use. This kind of ignorance
| isn't just inexperience. It can be learned helplessness too.
|
| Motivation is an axis that isn't fully orthogonal to the others.
| Motivation can overcome difficulty, and encourage searching and
| testing behavior which gets you to opportunity.
|
| I'm not sure, having read the essay, that PG's perspective is
| more correct. I think obtuseness is too reductive, and
| inexperience strikes me as more plausible as a reason an essay
| might be impactful, optimizing for one reason for ignorance, than
| a reason for not knowing the topic of any given essay if it's not
| general common sense.
|
| On impact: I think something is likely to be more impactful the
| more ignorant you are about the topic were beforehand (the
| distance between what you knew before and after reading),
| multiplied by how motivated you are (which is related but
| distinct from importance: you can be motivated by stamp
| collecting or trainspotting). Your motivation is generally split
| among competing motivations the older you get; you can't afford
| focused monomania like a teenager.
|
| A big dose of information isn't likely to shift your momentum
| (getting close to physical impact) when it's just a glancing
| blow, rather than hitting it head on.
|
| Anyway, it sure is impactful to tell the kids stuff. I think we
| already knew this though.
| dswalter wrote:
| Your response is more textured and interesting than the OP's,
| even though we are all posting on the website from his company.
| Lalo-ATX wrote:
| I think Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow can add a useful
| perspective.
|
| In the Kahneman hypothesis, humans are naturally parsimonious
| with our mental energy, preferring to use System 1. If we are
| writing a good essay, we are investing real System 2 effort.
| When we read someone else's writing, we get a free ride.
|
| Difficulty and (lack of) motivation in your schema drives
| people towards System 1.
|
| I agree that "obtuseness" is too reductive. There are copious
| examples of people who have had brilliant insights through the
| application of their System 2, who go on to embarrass
| themselves with shoddy System 1 thinking. Anyone can be obtuse
| - or not - it's just not a clear category.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Everyone's young in some way.
|
| I've been looking at getting a Miata, and have been eyeing a nice
| 2016ish Miata because their prices seem so much lower.
|
| Then I read a post from someone saying their transmissions are
| "like glass" and how it's better off to pay a few more $k for a
| 2017+ car, b/c that's how much a new transmission would cost
| anyway.
|
| If everyone were to follow Paul's advice, these kinds of posts
| would never have been written because you're supposed to "only
| write what people want"
|
| This 2016 Miata thing is a widely known thing in Miata circles --
| I just didn't know about it.
| blast wrote:
| "Posts" is a more general category than "essays". A post about
| Miata transmission years sounds useful. An essay about it
| sounds boring.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| PSA: I did a similar thing using Claude about buying a
| 2012-2016 era Ford F150 and it was so good at providing
| information like this about each model year. I went with a 2014
| since the V8 was most mature and 2012-2013 issues resolved, and
| got there in 2 minutes instead of having to surf through forums
| for hours.
| mecsred wrote:
| I really don't think learning to rely on these tools for
| product review is a good idea. The web shows how much gravity
| the advertising industry has. As soon as the number of people
| using llms like this become statistically significant, you
| can bet product placement will find its way into the training
| data. Betting on enshittification is easy money.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's like the people who laud LLMs as a really powerful
| search tool.
|
| Google used to be a really powerful and functional search
| tool! Then, the antagonistic process of SEO and the
| perverted incentives of the company building the search
| index also taking advertising dollars ensured it was always
| going to get shitty, and serve their needs above yours.
|
| LLMs are the same. They WILL be made less effective for
| whatever you want. Because they are beholden to the people
| with the money. Those people don't want you to have an
| effective search tool.
| tlb wrote:
| Search engines were great for 10-15 years before
| enshittification took over. It might go somewhat faster
| with LLMs since the playbook is known. But that's still a
| long time, so why not make the most of it while it lasts?
| And something better may come after.
| dadrian wrote:
| You should absolutely buy a Miata. I have a 2021 Miata and it's
| one of the best decisions I ever made.
| beambot wrote:
| Essays are different media compared to comments on message
| boards, reddit, or hacker news... You don't need the former if
| the latter will suffice.
| doctoring wrote:
| I think this essay touches on but slightly conflates "younger"
| with "inexperienced". Younger people are inexperienced at more
| things in life, sure. But if you write essays about things that
| are new to the world (new technologies? events? societal
| changes?) then even older people may be inexperienced with it and
| could learn something, something that surprises the author and
| the reader.
| piinbinary wrote:
| > At the other extreme, writing merely puts into words something
| readers were already thinking -- or thought they were.
|
| I actually really like this end of the essay spectrum.
|
| Reading (and writing!) this kind of essay can tie together mental
| loose threads, finishing a nearly-complete bit of thinking,
| finally coalescing a bunch of static into a coherent signal. The
| essay can give the concept a name (e.g. maker's schedule,
| manager's schedule) or at minimum allow referring to the entire
| conceptual result with a single URL.
|
| They can get people talking about a thought that they've all had
| but never shared. They can provide a new starting line for
| thinking, allowing it to advance a few millimeters further.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I sometimes think the whole world would be better if more people
| learned to boil potatoes properly. It teaches attention,
| restraint, and the value of small, invisible work. There's no
| applause for a perfectly boiled potato, no headlines, no likes.
| But you know it when you taste it - soft but intact, simple but
| complete. It is the reward of not needing too much.
| jampekka wrote:
| At least in Finland boiled new potatoes are a huge deal every
| summer and there's definitely applause for well boiled new
| potatoes.
| jedberg wrote:
| > If you're writing for smart people about important things,
| you're writing for the young.
|
| And then there is the "You're one of the 10,000" XKCD comic to
| counter this point.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
|
| There is just too much to know, even important stuff, for even
| smart old people to have been exposed to it.
|
| Sure, you'll have a higher chance of surprising young people, who
| have less experience. But you can still surprise old people too.
|
| Smart old people still have a lot to learn.
| paulorlando wrote:
| Many forms of ignorance include the failure to recognize
| something that you experience.
|
| There's a scene in Michael Lewis' book The New New Thing that
| chronicles a tear in a sail on Netscape investor Jim Clark's mega
| yacht, the Hyperion. That ripped sail, way up on the 194-foot
| mast, stops the trip.
|
| The Hyperion had at the time, the most advanced electronic
| monitoring and control systems. Yet, it took a crew member, a
| rare sailor among those on board, to notice a strange whipping
| sound, climb up the mast, and verify that the giant sail was
| ripping in the wind. While everyone on board was exposed to the
| same sound, few noticed that it was unusual. Fewer knew how to
| investigate and determine that the problem existed.
|
| https://unintendedconsequenc.es/acquiring-ignorance/
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| By that standard most people are ignorant of every new
| advancement past the (early?) middle ages, outside of the
| niches where they have significant experience.
| neilv wrote:
| > _If you 're writing for smart people about important things,
| you're writing for the young._
|
| PG has seemed to have a fixation on youth, since at least one
| essay before YC was started, and there's still hints of it in YC
| practices today.
|
| And I sometimes wonder whether our field would have so much
| techbro ageism, and the irrationally large egos of many early-20s
| 'founders', had PG not influenced tech industry culture quite so
| much.
|
| Traditionally, in our teens and early 20s, we'd be vapid hormonal
| know-it-alls. (That's OK, it's normal, I did it too; no
| criticism.)
|
| And the most validation of that we'd get (outside our equally
| naive peers) would a condescending pat on the head, from people
| who'd gone through that enthusiastically naive developmental
| phase themselves.
|
| About up until the time we had to get a real job, and then we
| were confronted with not being as good as the experienced people,
| and the real world wasn't putting congratulatory star stickers on
| our homework.
|
| So we'd grow out of it, and buckle down for the real education of
| post-school life.
|
| Until then -- unless we were a not-yet-injured athlete in a
| marketable spectator sport, or an aspiring star working our way
| up the Hollywood casting couches, or being lured into a cult --
| not many people would tell us that we were the _superior_ person
| to be pursuing something, better than the people with experience
| and wisdom.
|
| Maybe that was a good thing. (Not the youth who got exploited,
| but that the rest of us weren't given stuffed heads when we
| needed to start learning with humility.)
|
| But then we got survivor bias kids of the dotcom boom and early
| PG influence era, like Zuckerberg, who, once they won the
| lottery, very vocally promoted the ageism. Because, hey, it
| worked for them.
|
| The current tech industry jobs bloodbath will disabuse a lot of
| people of the silliness, too late for them. But we'll still have
| founders/managers aspiring to be billionaires, taking astrology-
| based lottery number-picking advice from past lottery winners.
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| The argument is contradicted by his own strongest example.
|
| I don't think that young people are the primary audience for the
| selfish gene, despite this being the archetypal example of
| writing to smart people about important topics.
|
| Paul, your audience doesn't skew young. It skews credulous.
| nilirl wrote:
| Main claim made: You can write about widely-applicable topics and
| give the reader a strong sense of learning as long as your
| audience is young. For older audiences, you need to pick a trade-
| off between how general the topic is and how strong a learning
| experience you can expect.
|
| The argument was built on a weak premise. Ignores that learning
| is time consuming. And in some cases, money consuming. So, it
| does not follow that 'If you're writing for smart people about
| important things, you're writing for the young'.
|
| Also, simpler explanation for the author having a young audience:
| The author is associated with a popular VC firm and writes a lot
| about tech entrepreneurship.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| I think a better analogy is to think of an essay as a set of
| diffs to be applied to a brain.
|
| For example, if I write an essay about how the world is round,
| most people would ignore it because they already have that
| "diff". But the essay (the diffs) presuppose some knowledge: what
| we mean by "the world" and what "round" means. A 2-year old might
| not have the base knowledge for the diffs to be effective, and so
| it wouldn't affect them either.
|
| The more knowledge you assume, the more likely it is for the
| essay to be novel. Science papers are like this. They are almost
| all novel because they only include the diffs from the current
| knowledge in the field. But, of course, only a small set of
| people are affected by the diffs because only a small set has the
| baseline knowledge.
|
| Paul Graham's idea is that young people don't have a large
| knowledge base, so it is easy to create diffs for them that are
| novel (and therefore impact them). But that assumes that
| knowledge is a scalar quantity: young people have knowledge level
| 2 while older people have knowledge level 5.
|
| Instead, I think knowledge is an n-dimensional field. There is
| knowledge about how to cook, how to dress, how to solve
| differential equations, etc. There's a vast sea of ideas that I
| never understood until I had kids. I understand exhaustion now in
| a way that I never could before. Fear too. And joy. Until I had
| that baseline, all those diffs failed to merge.
|
| Reading one essay may not change much for you. Sometimes you
| can't even tell what the diffs were. But each essay you read adds
| more baseline knowledge that makes the next essay more impactful.
| Maybe that's why I like reading Paul's essays: now that I've read
| enough of them I have enough of a common baseline to understand
| the diffs.
|
| I think it's not the shape of the essay field that matters, but
| the baseline in your brain.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| > At the other extreme, writing merely puts into words something
| readers were already thinking -- or thought they were.
|
| This is remarkably similar to the thesis of Strange Tools by Alva
| Noe. Noe argues that art is method for making perceptual and
| conceptual processes visible, often by disrupting or
| defamiliarizing them.
| woopwoop wrote:
| I think this point is less forceful than it seems due to the high
| dimensional nature of knowledge. I just don't know that much more
| than I did when I was younger; there are too many directions to
| set out in from any given point. I learn important new things all
| the time.
| BobbyThrowaway wrote:
| [flagged]
| NaOH wrote:
| > _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| colmmacc wrote:
| I work with a lot of smart people, many smarter than myself, and
| a goal I've always set myself is to leave them knowing less.
| Smart people are almost always more efficient at knowing more all
| on their own; they tend to be autodidacts and information hungry.
| But knowing less is much harder.
|
| We all build up mental frameworks and systems for how we think
| the world is organized, and that's how we come to "know" it. It's
| mostly assumptions and invariants we've collected here and there.
| With age and experience, they become instinctual and habitual
| too. "Change X and Y will happen".
|
| But when someone comes along and pops one of those foundational
| assumptions, "You know 'Y' doesn't always have to be true, and
| here's how", it is an incredible gift. A smart person will
| suddenly see new landscapes of possibility, optimism, and
| exploration that were previously out of view. What they thought
| they knew they now see anew.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| > But if you're going to write about things that are important to
| know, you have to ask why your readers don't already know them.
| Is it because they're smart but inexperienced, or because they're
| obtuse?
|
| What's missing is the third and most obvious explanation.. that
| what you think is important isn't necessarily what others think
| is important..
|
| Perhaps PG things this falls under the "obtuse" category.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> So the three reasons readers might not already know what you
| tell them are (a) that it's not important, (b) that they're
| obtuse, or (c) that they're inexperienced.
|
| (d) because it's false.
|
| I'm not saying PG's essay is false, but my scientific upbringing,
| and rare moments of humility, compel me to include this option.
| westcoast49 wrote:
| Or:
|
| (e) because it's subjective.
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