Elegance is Bullshit
hichvg.substack.com
hichvg.substack.com
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Miscellaneous reactions, in an elegant bulleted list:
- "Simple" sentences are certainly expressive, but "elegant" wording expands the set of meanings that can be conveyed. And vice-versa
- I think a lot of the meat of a sentence is conveyed in the connotations of words and not their literal meaning. "Simple" wording is necessarily more common, and therefore will necessarily have a less specific or reliable connotation. This is a blessing and a curse.
- More subjectively, I think ideal writing is also a window into the author's experience of the world (or moreso whatever topic they're writing about), and as a reader, I want that to come through in an authentic way that matches the author's experience. So, using a thesaurus and agonizing over sentence structure might end up 'elegant' but still vaguely bad, but on the other hand if you agonize over a sentence and come up with something more "sophisticated" that ultimately rings truer to you, then go for it.
- ^ The above points aren't direct rebuttals to TFA, but I think they relate to why elegance can be appealing.
I re-read your essay, and what you say about needing sophistication reminds me of the concept of proof-of-work -- "sophistication" could be a way to convey that effort was spent by a writer, even if it doesn't add meaning. That is kind of inherently annoying, because it implies a lack of trust between the author and reader, and in the thesaurus example, the reader would be rightfully annoyed to spent time parsing a sentence only to find that the "proof of effort" was actually just a "facade of effort".
Truth is also not the aim of these:
> Suits for interviews. Combed hair for dates. Makeup to feel prettier.
The latter is for the pursuit of beauty. The first is because the almighty British empire started wearing suits and we all followed.
Wearing a grubby t-shirt to a job is not because you value truth so much. It's failing to value the other things.
The lads on the Manhattan project almost surely dressed better than a truth-loving rationalist.
Today, a really big microphone on Youtube.
However, we have a growing problem in the world now. Our declining attention spans are killing reading, and with it reading comprehension. I regularly see otherwise intelligent people struggle to understand even high school level writing. Everything has to be explicitly stated now, and even then it's often not understood.
Fifty three percent of Americans read below the sixth grade level now, and for those TikTok people subtext does not exist. That does not mean that subtext isn't real or valuable.
If 53% of the world gave themselves intentional color-blindness we wouldn't talk about how little value color adds to painting, we would worry about those who'd forgotten how to perceive it and think of ways we might grant them the ability to perceive the world they'd gone blind to.
With a multiple ways to imply assent or dissent, while committing to nothing at all, it was an even sharper tool to divide-and-rule.
I’ve had debate coaches in both high school and college complain about my “academic utterances” and it has taken awhile to unlearn them. I think I have won— partially because I no longer make it a habit to sound cool on the internet (or in the meatspace). Partially also because I’m older now, so I don’t care. But looking back, I think that ego is the primary motivator for the prose, if I’m being honest.
The secondary motivator being our education: the complete bag-of-words LLM approach to writing and reading we all took to get A’s on our exams… you are forced to read one metric crap ton of 1700s prose, and if you catch the damn cadence and harness it to sound good, you are rewarded by your English teacher. This conditioning sticks around for awhile.
Some of you speak to the tertiary excuse: that we’re trying to convey something deeper to our audience than words alone can convey. Like you dive deep into meter, think about enunciation and the effects of sub vocalization (where hard consonants and cadence matters), or making coherent imagery out of wall of text wordslop.
I think it’s fine, but maybe you should think about whether you are alienating your listener the deeper you go.
I was hotly jealous of Kant again, was just now reading Critique of Reason on me old jailbroken Kindle. I had grandiose ideas for inflicting that prose on people everywhere I go, so that maybe we could fix stupidity “up top”. But maybe that imagery was for his time and we are mistaken to try to emulate it.
Ironically I was re reading kant because I was afraid I am getting mentally flabby with age. This article happily reminds me that the adipose was strong when I was younger though.
> An ice cube melts with quiet discipline, surrendering its edges before its core, shaping the drink long before flavor has a chance to speak. Even in something so small, form decides outcome.
This doesn't sound good to me at all, it sounds like whoever wrote it is either an LLM, a lazy student padding the wordcount their essay, or thinks too highly of themselves.
If there's any reason that people think more of it, it's that the non-straightforward manner in which it's written forced us to process the words rather than filter them out as the bullshit they are.
> and disregard sentences as meaningless when they sound disorderly and bland?
> Climate change is killing people. I am upset when people die. I want polar bears to live longer.
They're just too short and do not contain any explanation/justification/making a case for the core claim.
I think in both cases, easily written simple sentences and easily written pretentious ones, the author fools themselves with a false understanding. Instead, when they’ve really considered the words and the meaning — they’ve extensively thought and worked on what they are thinking — then writing either way can be impactful.
No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.
Both Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain began their careers at print newspapers, where every word counted. They learned how to say much with few words. No amount of clever prose can substitute for this ability to set aside style in favor of substance.
I wonder if it's a limitation of my linguistic capabilities, insanity or if language simply cannot describe certain things.
I believe that some people don't think in words at all, and instead think in maths, images, or vague concepts, but I think the result is the same. Regardless of which type of token you use, if you don't have a token for a concept you can only express it as a relationship between other related concepts. This is a less efficient way to think, and is very limited when it comes to processing. It also makes it impossible to think about truly 'unique" concepts which can't be expressed by relationships to something else.
So you make the beautiful splash page to show you can. But then suddenly it became trivial. No longer a useful signal.
Perhaps language is like that. Once you could not do it without also being smart. Now (in the era of modern education and literacy) it is within reach of many (perhaps all), so even the most stupid of sentences can be rendered poetic.
[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
Every form of language is super effective. But I believe if 100 people around you say the same idea, and only 5 oppose it, you will believe the 100 people. Since digital media is so easy to upscale to thousands, and even millions of users, I believe digital language has the biggest capability of making a change (good or bad (often bad imo)).
We must distinguish between rhetoric and sophistry. In our sloppy speech today, we have taken on the bad habit of calling vapid or dishonest or rabble-rousing political speech “rhetoric”…which it isn’t. Sophistry is a much better term, as the sophists were master bullshitters. Their aim was the same as that of our politicians and ad men: to say things that produce desired effects with total indifference to the truth of what’s being said. Language as an instrument of domination and manipulation rather than communication.
Rhetoric is not like that, strictly speaking. Rhetoric is the skillful use of language to communicate and persuade someone of the truth, at least as the speaker sees it. The presupposition is that what you wish to communicate is true, hence the emphasis on logos, ethos, and pathos. Sophists don’t care about logos. True rhetoricians do.
Rhetoric is to persuasion what the greasy used car salesman is to advertising. The rhetoricians only care enough about logos to use it as a cudgel against their foes.
The folks that portray it in a positive light overlook the fact that it is ALWAYS used to persuade, by definition.
They convince themselves that this manipulation is a noble thing to do because THEIR truth is the ONE truth and that by manipulating others they serve some higher ideal. Meanwhile their opponents attempts at manipulation are still held in disdain. Humbug.
They serve mammon more often than not.
Plato and Aristotle argued they were different things in antiquity, but even then some/most of their peers disagreed.
OED literally defines it as "the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques."
Figures of speech and compositional techniques do NOT bring one closer to truth, they obscure it.
That said, I appreciate that when YOU use the term it's not what you mean. I would be careful with that though. Your definition is not what it means to anyone else now outside of academia.
As a counterpoint we have the quote: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
I love the way you've expressed this! This was my experience doing the lit review for my PhD. I read more than a few "scholarly" texts that were perhaps impressive from a language/vocabulary standpoint but contained ideas that were either poorly supported or too simple to amount to any meaningful contribution to the field.
In LLM's we have tokens and tokens represent concepts or partial concepts. Some LLM's use relatively few tokens, while others use more. GPT 4 used about 100k tokens, while GPT-4o got much better performance by using 200k tokens. LLM's that use the most tokens are typically the most efficient.
They're more efficient because they can represent more concepts with single tokens when compared to smaller models. The same is true of human language.
People with larger vocabularies (of words, or maths, or images, or whatever) can more efficiently express, and therefore process the relationships between, concepts. In fact more words, means there are literally more thoughts they are capable of having. Language constrains thought, but it also enables it. You can't think of a thing, if you can't conceptualize it and whether your vocabulary is words, maths, or images we all have a vocabulary of concepts.
Most relevantly here: The WAYS in which those tokens/words/thoughts are arranged matters. The difference between a model that's been "fine tuned" to a task, and one that hasn't is the efficiency with which it represents the relationships between the most relevant tokens. Again, human language (and human thought) is the same. Elegant language is language that is arranged to express complicated concepts using the fewest tokens possible. Every poet and every teacher know this instinctively. Good authors often learn it the hard way.
Modern readers often miss subtext and other more subtle forms of communication because they're bad readers. That's a different problem, and not the fault of the authors.
Its meant just to be an analogy, not rigorously accurate.
What I wound up with was too technical for one audience, and not technical enough for the other.
I feel like the poetry of the 21st century is a great victim of this. Poetry now sucks... Too little that convey with too many words.
Poetry has ALWAYS been mostly bullshit. It's only survivorship bias that makes it look any other way. The same is true of prose, music, art, and even science. There is more bad than good, but the good makes up for it and is what will be remembered.
Good poetry though exemplifies the real elegance I'm talking about.
Per the well-expressed article, I agree there's a problem that lies can be bundled as truth through elegance (and I have strong views that there are broader forms of this, as the author alludes to, effectively style over/instead of substance, for instance in our ability to discern capability through hiring processes or overweight our assessment of the merit of ideas based on who expresses them and how), but I challenge (1) the premise that many situations are effectively represented by a singular "truth", in which case the representation of truth may be relevant even if possible to game, (2) that style / aesthetic is pointless (it might be "useless" for a definition of utility, but I contest a philosophical perspective that sees humanity and culture best exemplified by reductionism and efficiency), and (3) that style and beauty cannot be truth itself (stare at a painting that moves you, listen to a favourite song or one of the great works, look upon a beautiful scene in nature, or experience any of the myriad forms of love, and consider how that resonates with truth as much as any proof; indeed this last point is one of the themes across pg's work that still resonates strongly for me despite feeling increasingly detached from many of his other positions over time, and is well reflected by his book title of Hackers and Painters).
But many writers use hyperbole, exaggeration, and other literary techniques that push ideas to the extreme of one side; is that not pushing back on the idea that there is no singular truth?
Style is definitely not pointless, but I also would disagree with you that a painting carries only style and elegance and holds no meaning. I am often moved by a song by what it is trying to convey to me or the story it is describing. Again, without style, I would never listen to the song.
I do believe, though, that writers often put elegance instead of meaning into their writing for the sole purpose of getting popular. And this hurts our literature.
eloquent words aren’t true.
Tao Te Ching – Verse 81
It strikes me as a broken heuristic. We use elegance as a proxy for intelligence and education and thus likelihood of something being true, but being a proxy means it can be cheated and gamed. You can invest effort in just getting good at language and then use that skill to fool people into thinking you know something.
We're post-New Age. Dont think theres a name for this time yet.
New age itself descends from the occult revival and things like Theosophy and the I AM movement. Some modern incarnations have gone back to these roots instead. You find that on the far right with people getting into esoteric fascism and traditionalism, stuff like Evola. You used to find some of this on the far left too but lately it seems to have hopped over.
All these things are basically big balls of pseudoprofound bullshit. Go try to read a theosophy text for an extreme example.
Yes, what is beautiful does please. But why should it do so? Because beauty is good and true. Indeed, in classical philosophy, while truth is being as known (the epistemic stance; as it relates to the intellect), and the good is being as desired (the ethical stance; as it relates to the will), beauty is being understood as pleasing (the aesthetic stance; as it relates to perception and to contemplation).
In short: True -> known by the intellect; Good -> desired by the will; Beautiful -> contemplated with delight.
The trouble is not beauty, but the author’s lack of discernment. Is a sentence really beautiful if it is untrue? What about if it is written using beautiful calligraphy? Well, under the artistic aspect of handwriting, yes, it is truly beautiful and true in that respect; but the meaning of the sentence is different from its expressed form (which also has content). The two can vary in truth and beauty independently.
Perhaps this is why we take a certain kind of greater offense at lies told to use sweetly. A course vulgarian is already low and hideous in his speech, and his lies will more closely correspond to the coarseness of his manners in proportionality. But a lie spoken with refinement almost suggests duplicity, between the promise of truth in the beauty of the medium - an honor that is proper to truth - and the ugliness and untruth of the message. The truth should be honored with beautiful expression, but here, it is almost as if we’ve been lied to twice: in the content per se and in the form of the content as a promise of the truth of the content by implication. It is a perversion, which already reveals that there is a normative relation between truth, goodness, and beauty that has been violated. We presume it for this reason.
Now, if someone is undiscerning, he will fail to discern the various elements in play and fail to judge them accordingly as distinct elements. If a man lacks taste, he might even consider beautiful what is actually mediocre or gaudy or ugly. If he lacks what we might call perseverance or a kind of stamina - in short: if he is weak - then he might be unwilling to let go or refuse something pleasing or seemingly pleasurable that is attached to something that may not be so good (for instance, the glutton who cannot refuse the pleasure of good food, even though the excess is killing him).
It’s good that the author at least recognizes his own weakness, but the conclusion at the end simply does not follow. Ugliness is not “authentic” or virtuous or honest. Indeed, by casting it as a virtue, one falls into the same or even worse trap: the presumption of goodness or truth on the part of what is ugly. One will presume that a slovenly interview candidate must be good, because he is slovenly, which is ridiculously stupid. So now you face a new possibility: the slovenly mediocrity. A double blow. And if beauty can work in the favor of a candidate, then why can’t ugliness work against him? It goes both ways.
If we had more beauty - in dress, in manners, in speech, in our surroundings - I think perhaps the “seductive” power the author cannot seem to resist would be less, well, seductive. He would not be so starved for beauty. It would not be such a rarity that he would feel compelled to latch onto the occasional occurrence. What we need is more beauty not less. In the 1950s, no one thought a man in a suit was remarkable. Today, wearing a suit is much less common. In some industries like tech in the last couple of decades, suits may even be viewed with disdain and hostility. The “dress code” forbids them.
W.r.t. poetry and prose, in either case, a fully beautiful piece of poetry or prose does shine forth with truth. In the former case, the beauty of the form takes on a greater significance, but the meaning is still its lifeblood. The form is there to relay the meaning through skillful appeal to pathos and use of imagery, metaphor, simile, analogy, rhythm, and wordplay. The peculiarities of the language used to write it becomes a source of delight. There is more room for flirtation and play and implication. In the latter case, immediate clarity and directness of a more literal shade dominate. The particular purpose of each determines the basis for the beauty of each.
Socrates as created by Plato acts as a sort of aesthetic beauty which adds strength to Plato's words by the seduction of Socrates. Just as Alcibiades is attracted to Socrates because of his character, so too are we the readers supposed to be. Plato attempts to elevate our conception of Beauty from the beauty of a particular (like the good looks of Alcibiades) to Beauty itself (as in the form).
In this way, Beauty is a tool which can make more attractive certain ideas by its association. The history of advertising is testament to such utility. In this way I do not think that beauty is linked to goodness or truth as a requirement, but bares only the right relation to them when it is used in their service. That is, the value of beauty is determined by goodness and truth, such that if something is beautiful but lacking in goodness and truth, though it remains beautiful, the value of beauty above all else is shown absurd. All values seem to work like this, where any value held as the highest value will in time negate its own value by the relative excess of itself to other values.
All that is to say, that the wise person utilizes beauty as a means of reifying the value of the true and the good. From this perspective, it is true knowledge that redeems the tactic of beauty (such as rhetoric) from sophistry. For the good word to not fall upon deaf ears, one must compete with the sophist and provide the same level of beauty but with right ideas. Of course, claims to true knowledge must be justified, and we should not appeal to beauty for their verification.
I think more that beauty is a sign of intellect, and intellect is a prerequisite for true knowledge. To create beauty requires knowledge of patterns and skill enough to weave those patterns together into something greater than the sum of those patterns. True knowledge cannot be known for certain we might say, but if one has it, it will be knowledge of true patterns of Nature, and so such a person would be in possession not only of true knowledge, but also of beauty since the patterns of beauty would be derivative of the patterns of Nature.
Thus, in writing of what is true and good, it is very likely to be beautiful, since the knowledge necessary to apprehend beauty is the same knowledge that is capable of producing it, and beauty flows most naturally where it is most welcome. But beauty fails in its virtue if the underlying content does not reflect reality.
I think we're mostly saying the same things but I find it a bit weaselly to say that something loses beauty when it loses truth or goodness, when what it loses is simply the truth/goodness. That our value of beauty changes in proportion to its relation to goodness/truth, does not mean that the beauty itself has changed. It is not beauty alone which will save the world, but goodness and truth delivered in the guise of beauty.