[timeagain]

> The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about.

The premise is wrong (or at least not obviously right) IMO, so I have a hard time taking any of the rest of it seriously. Could the best essay not be the most emotionally moving? The best when heard aloud? The most convincing call to action? The most accurate? The highest grossing? Driving the most engagement? What about the topic (any topic) that you could tell the /most interesting surprise/ about?

If Paul Graham didn’t run this company he certainly would not make it to the front page for his lazy philosophy.

[clooper]

Hemingway once said just write the truest sentence you can think of and I think he was right. Good writing and good essays are truthful in a way that wouldn't be expected from commercial and marketing copy. But to write truthfully one must know what is true and this is surprisingly hard.

[Nevermark]

> No essay is true, or complete, including this on

- Gödel, a bastard and a cynic, having a bad essay day after attempting to out drink Hemingway, yet somehow expressing a surprising deep truth

[clooper]

You might also be interested in Tarski's work about the undefinability of truth.

[Nevermark]

Well, yes exactly.

On the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about. And all those things you said. And … and (yes, that “and”) … so much more!

We are talking about the join of all essay joins. The essay supremum. By definition

I think we can agree there is a limit to the length of this essay. Proof by absurdum: if the essay is too long to read, that would imply unread word choices make a difference. So there is finite length N.

Now we just search for it. Unleash the monkeys! Or today, unleash the competitive adversarial AI cohort!

We can find it, just not copyright it. Which I think, is the best outcome for humanity. Assuming this essay is aligned with our interests, but we have set that unboxing in motion now so it’s not worth worrying about

I think it’s best to maintain some humor when talking about mythical bests, one way or another

[geor9e]

Anyone can nitpick anyone by listing whatabouts they didn't intend. Whatabout this OTHER sense of the word "best". It's in the dictionary. You didn't address it, therfore you're a lazy man of straw. The only defense to that type of attack is to write everything in a way that never chooses any one path, spends all it's time mounting a defense to every whatabout, vaguely floating over eggshells, immune to attack. Who wants to read something like that? Or, you can trust the reader to try to understand the context. The context is a man who calls himself an essayist, has about a hundred essays spanning a decade, all in a very distinct style, where most folks reading them are fans of the prior ones. The context is the Paul Graham Essay sense of the word essay. It's not discussing emotional, spoken, money grossing essays. And to help the reader not get hung up on those whatabouts, he even explicitly spelled what sense of best he is talking about.

[docfort]

I’m still surprised that this essay didn’t explore the nature of the audience. I’m not disagreeing with your take about the dangers of straw men, but PG does seem very much in the vein of essays are for communicating interesting stuff, or fun stuff, or provocative stuff. To someone! And it seems like too long of an essay to discover by the end this serious omission. A timeless essay is one that retains meaning to a person, or maybe many people, over the course of time. PG spent a while trying to explore the message in this essay and no time on trying to understand the audience.

[timeagain]

I’ll concede my point, I think you’re right. Everyone’s a critic.