The Shape of the Essay Field

PG is an excellent writer, but this essay seems remarkably misleading. The unstated premise seems to be that well-educated adults already know everything they want/need to know about everything, which is silly. I'm older than PG, and pretty well educated, but I am constantly learning new things. I don't think it's because they are not important or I am obtuse. I think it is because I am (still) intellectually curious.

Sometimes I learn new things because they are new. And sometimes I learn new things (that are well known to people in other fields) because while I know a lot about some things, I know very little about others -- so little that I don't even know those things overlap with my interests.

Those of us who enjoy learning appreciate that we will never know everything we would like to, and in fact we will never know the boundaries of knowledge for topics we care a lot about. It's not that it is unimportant to us, it's just that we hadn't learned about it yet. That's why we read essays.

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.

> 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.

>>> 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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Pushing the needle of literacy and good writing requires eager young readers.

I think the point that PG is trying to make is that young people are easier to influence.

I don't know if acquiring new knowledge guarantees that it's going to be transformative in the way that it can be for the young, especially for those who are young today.

The intention behind acquiring knowledge can make a difference too. I imagine that a young person more likely aiming to independently acquire knowledge due to some practical want, than an older person who may be more content with the theory behind it.

But this is me speculating on a sensitive dichotomy. Although I think we should let the young guys have this one.