Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

As a counterpoint, I'd argue that the "mathematical" approach to good writing is inherently flawed. That is, trying to arrive at the formula for the "best" essay via dialectic (argument) is to miss the forest for the trees. Writing is an art, not a science. Formal logic was developed to display arguments, so if you are trying to be as precise and mathematical as possible, use that instead.

Instead, I'd suggest reading the great writers of the past and present (but focus more on the past). Study what works, what speaks to you, what stylistic approach you favor, and so on. As a bonus, you'll learn more about what has been said by other intelligent people and subsequently avoid writing over-confident, ill-informed essays...

If you're looking for stellar examples of essay-writing, I personally recommend Jorge Luis Borges and David Foster Wallace. Both manage to write in a manner both erudite and coherent, without seeming too florid or too simplistic. Here are a few samples:

- A New Refutation of Time, Borges: https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1947-borges-anewrefutation...

- The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, Borges: http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.htm...

- David Lynch and Lost Highway, Wallace: http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere.html

- Laughing with Kafka, Wallace: https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-...

- Consider the Lobster, Wallace: http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf

Edit: added some more essay links.

I think the fallacy is in the premise: "An essay should be useful."

Well, useful is always in the eye of the beholder. There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all. And pretending there is, and it's even attainable, is intellectually dishonest.

Sure, an essay could be a formal piece that approaches an almost "mathematical" approach. After all, an essay a first and foremost an argument presented by the author. Even a flawed argument is still an argument. And a flawed essay is still an essay.

The fallacy here is being implicitly reductionist. If your premise states "an essay should be useful" then you're basically reducing the definition of what an essay is to a formal argument based on logic and falsifiable facts, and rejecting any other text as "not an essay" or, worse, "not useful" - whatever that might mean - or, worse, "nonsenses" or "a dumb thing to say".

A quick glance on Wikipedia dispenses such reductionism rather swiftly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essay

Not-withstanding, I think PG's essay does contain some excellent personal advice on writing style and technique itself. No more, no less. His sin is confounding form and function. The former always follows the latter, never the inverse.

>There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all. And pretending there is, and it's even attainable, is intellectually dishonest.

You seem to be stating this as an absolute truth.

Generally, I agree with what you are saying about essays and stating that "they should be useful."

But I was surprised by your comments about truth:

> There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all. And pretending there is, and it's even attainable, is intellectually dishonest.

Could you expand on what you mean by "an absolute truth?"

I may be misunderstanding you, but I suspect you mean that we can never know anything with absolute certainty. For example, it may _seem_ that I typing on a keyboard, but in actual fact, I am dreaming.

In this example, there _is_ an absolute truth. I am typing on my keyboard, or I am not. But that truth is not knowable without any doubt.

If we use "truth" as high as knowing without any possible doubt, then nothing is "true." Thus, the word true is useless during everyday communication. For this reason I don't think it is appropriate to qualify everything we say with, "we don't know with absolute certainty this is true, but here is my best guess." Rather, we just say it is true.

> There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all.

In a relative sense, it's true that there's no such thing as an absolute truth, but it's also true that there is such a thing as an absolute truth. However, in an absolute sense — the sense in which, for example, real-number multiplication is commutative — it is only true that there is such a thing as an absolute truth, and the assertion that "there's no such thing as an absolute truth" is simply an error of reasoning.

> And pretending there is, and it's even attainable, is intellectually dishonest.

No. You know what's intellectually dishonest? Asserting that your viewpoint is so obviously correct that nobody could possibly disagree with it sincerely, and that if they claim to disagree, they are simply being dishonest.

Given the self-referential and self-refuting nature of your comment, I'm guessing that it's merely an elaborate joke, intended to expose the moral relativism it ostensibly espouses to ridicule.

Entire libraries, fields of study and lives have been dedicated to the topic with no formal conclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth

With great minds such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Baudrillard_(1929%E2%80%... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Foucault_(1926%E2%80%931...

I'm not interested in discussing various epistemic theories of truth as such. That's entirely besides the point I'm trying to make.

It's that the word "useful" used by PG hides a potential tyranny of truth. The notion that one can refute any argument or claim with the criticism "not useful" because it was "not novel, not important, too florid" and so on. As if there is some universal definition or bar that describes what "useful" is outside of our experience. A false presumption. "useful" in this context risks being used as a crutch to dismiss any opinion without having to critically consider your own thoughts and feelings.

An essay geared towards making a formal argument based on falsifiable facts may be "useful" to a specific audience, or may enshrine a particular genre - academic publishing - but how PG constructs his article may - erroneously - be applied to any form of essay writing. Which would be quite a reductionist take.

> Entire libraries, fields of study and lives have been dedicated to the topic with no formal conclusion.

On the contrary, many formal conclusions have been reached. One of them is that it is self-contradictory to say that it is an absolute truth that there is no absolute truth, which is what you seemed to be saying, and that it is meaningless to say that it is a relative truth that all truth is relative. These are ontological propositions, not epistemological propositions.

I don't think the reductionism/wholism axis is really relevant here. I don't read Paul as making any reductionist claims; I think they're much more easily read as wholist claims.

It's true that Paul is making objectivist normative claims about essays, which is to say, claims about what is good or bad in an essay — what kinds of essays people should or shouldn't write. That seems to be what you object to; you're a subjectivist. The same self-contradiction objection applies: you're implicitly claiming that it's objectively bad to make claims about what is objectively bad. (So it is not in fact entirely beside the point you were trying to make.) If you really believed that, you wouldn't be doing it.

I like David Foster Wallace as a writer and he’s as much an authority as anyone when it comes to writing well, but I think there’s a pretty major difference in terms of goals and priorities. PG is writing about writing as a means of processing ideas. He’s taking the perspective of a structural engineer, not an architect. While Wallace wrote beautifully, PG is writing about writing usefully, even if that writing is bare and unornamented. And while that may not be your preferred style, I wouldn’t dismiss it as something that someone would want to do.

Have you read Consider the Lobster? It is absolutely a clear, informative, educational essay that also happens to be beautifully written.

I have. And to my analogy, some architects can also design buildings that are structurally sound ;)

> While Wallace wrote beautifully

Beautiful writing is useful.

> Writing is an art, not a science.

Writing fiction may be an art, but writing nonfiction is a craft. And essays are nonfiction.

The creator of art seeks somehow to offer fresh insight, often employing some form of novelty, be it technique, medium, context, perspective, etc.

Craft, however, isn't about novelty; it's about engineering a clear convincing message effectively, efficiently, and ideally... memorably and with elan.

I admit the line between art and craft is often blurry (probably because the craftsman has taken too much artistic license). Unlike art, the techniques employed in an essay should never impede its purpose. There, it's only the message that matters, not the medium.

I'm not sure I quite share your view of what art aims to do. Iris Murdoch had a line that tyrants fear art because art forces them to confront the truth.

If one believes, as Murdoch suggests, that art aims to express a truth as clearly as possible then the qualities of good technical writing and good fiction are entirely compatible. I'd suggest the distinction lies more in the extent to which the sensibilities of the author are present in the writing.

For instance, Vonnegut's guidelines on good writing (summarised here: https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/14/how-to-write-with-s...) could equally be applied to technical writing as fiction, I think.

>Unlike art, the techniques employed in an essay should never impede its purpose. There, it's only the message that matters, not the medium.

On the other hand, it's very possible for the techniques employed to work in service of its purpose. Many of Adorno's essays are arguing for a point of view both aesthetically, in form, and argumentatively, in content.

> Writing is an art, not a science.

I agree with this, but avoiding writing nonsense is science, and not art. So there definitely is a scientific aspect to writing.

First of all: interesting post!

But since you mentioned Borges let me offer a counter-counterpoint: Borges was obsessive about his writings and can be considered "mathematical" about them. He chopped away anything that didn't fit and was very careful about the construction of sentences. He was so obsessed that he recalled -- or so I read somewhere -- something that was already printed in order to make corrections to it.

Poe claimed he was quite "mathematical" (or maybe the word is "methodical", or "analytical") about the construction of his famous poem The Raven. While this claim is disputed, or maybe he exaggerated, at least it's something he liked to claim about some of his work.

Sorry if I was unclear. By “mathematical” I meant looking for an underlying rule, a universal applicable to all particulars - which is essentially what the original essay is looking for.

Borges absolutely was extremely specific and analytical, but that’s not what I meant.

Oh. I misunderstood. In that case, we agree.

there is a difference between a literary essay and the kind PG is talking about here. PG's essays are more like maybe business commentary than literary essays. Some of these insights apply anyway, to all essays - but don't confuse different types of essays.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com