
Fashionable Problems - hackerews
http://paulgraham.com/fp.html
======
rgbrenner
I think pg understates the problem. It isn't just fashionable. Think about how
the solutions we use today evolved.

Someone had an idea originally and certain decisions were made about that
approach.. those that best adapted to the conditions of the time were
successful... rinse and repeat over several decades.

Those ideas that preserved the past were more likely to succeed because they
preserved the ecosystem that already existed. Ideas that diverged too much
from the existing successful tech had a huge obstacle in their way: they had
to recreate all of the existing solutions in their new model. So even if they
would lead to a better solution over time, they may never get past that
initial roadblock. And the longer we stay on the path, the bigger that
roadblock becomes.

If we are all thinking of ideas around the existing model and assuming all of
the existing assumptions, then we end up with similar solutions (fashionable
solutions). We've reduced the solution space, leading to a limited number of
solutions.

Perhaps groundbreaking/valuable tech can be found by questioning those
existing assumptions; identifying where tech is still built on assumptions
that are no longer true; or reexamining past solutions to see if they can be
solved in better ways today with what we've learned since then...

~~~
jandrewrogers
This is called "first principles thinking" and is one of the most reliable
methods for producing novel insights into a problem space. It is uncommon in
practice because it has a high cost both economically, because you are re-
deriving everything you think you know from scratch instead of "standing on
the shoulders of giants", and socially, because you are deviating from
orthodoxy promoted by high-status individuals.

This kind of relentless indifference to conformity is a rare quality in
people.

~~~
jacques_chester
There's also the cost that you are likely to just spin your wheels retreading
old ground. Examples to the contrary are notable, but notable _because they
are rare_.

~~~
jandrewrogers
I made this assumption for many years, and yes, that cost would be high. I
eventually discovered that, more often than not, everyone assumed that someone
must have already investigated a particular hypothesis but if you tried to
identify that "someone" it turned out that they didn't actually exist. After
doing this exhaustive search a few times in a few different domains and coming
up empty handed, it changed my perspective on the matter, to my great benefit.

Searching for evidence that someone has actually done the work is relatively
efficient. It never fails to astonish me the number of times that _everyone_
believes a particular bit of ground has been thoroughly tread yet, if I try to
find concrete evidence that someone has done the work, there is no evidence
that anyone actually has. There is a strong cognitive bias (I don't know if it
has a name) where everyone assumes that someone else has already tried every
obvious or reasonable approach and that belief is treated as factual.

~~~
_0ffh
>if I try to find concrete evidence that someone has done the work, there is
no evidence that anyone actually has

Unfortunately, the fact that negative results tend to get little if any
publicity works against you here. And it's probably worse outside, not inside
of academia. How often would a project team in some big company, or a couple
of guys in a garage try out some promising alternative approach to something,
fail to realize an advantage over the conventional approach, and then go out
of their way to publicize that failure? That would be extra work for no - or
even negative - gain.

It might just be meant to be humorous, but even "If at first you don't
succeed, destroy all evidence you even tried" sounds more likely than "If at
first you don't succeed, put some extra effort into telling everyone".

------
majos
This post sorely lacks evidence for its big first claim:

> I've seen a similar pattern in many different fields: even though lots of
> people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of
> possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar
> things.

Anyone want to step in with some examples? Without them, the thrust of the
essay seems to be: "If only other people understood what problems are worth
working on! Especially in the well-studied areas of essays, Lisp, and venture
funding! Too bad they do not. Well, goodbye."

~~~
account73466
I am wondering how far the essay would go if it were not from PG.

~~~
mbesto
This is basically my biggest critique of PG and various other YC leaders. Many
of the conclusions, while likely be probably being more "right" than "wrong"
in virtue, are derived from intuition and observations, not evidence based.
It's even more ironic, given how much emphasis the firm places on evidence
based thinking of its portfolio founders versus anecdotally thinking.

Great example:

 _" One quality that’s a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign
accent"_[0]

The danger is that I think pg has been "right" about so many things that every
time he pontificates about something it's treated as dogma. So when he's
"wrong", it'll be ignored. Impressionable people (which likely fits the
characteristic of many young tech entrepreneurs) will therefore be lead
astray.

[0] -
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/knowledgewharton/2013/12/19/292...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/knowledgewharton/2013/12/19/292013/#539787e916a6)

------
bawolff
Seems like a lot of weirdly defensive people in this thread.

But the essay doesnt really seem that revolutionary more common sense. If you
want to make an impact, dont work in an oversaturated field. The low hanging
fruit is probably already picked and other people will probably get there
before you do. But you also dont want to work in a field nobody cares about as
noone will care. Working on a problem with proven demand, but seems "boring"
and hasn't changed much recently is a good bet, as there is probably new
insights you can apply and new contexts that have appeared since last time
there was a frenzy for that field.

~~~
mannykannot
The advice to not work in an oversaturated field, if you want to make an
impact, looks to me a bit like the reverse of looking for one's keys under the
lamp post, because that is where the light is. We should give some credence to
the proposition that saturation is the wisdom of the crowd at work, figuring
out where a breakthrough is likely, and it is usually only with hindsight that
over-saturation is apparent.

~~~
bawolff
I somewhat suspect by the time something is "popular" it is, almost by
definition, oversaturated. Its sort of like weird investment strategies (e.g.
always buy stocks on mondays, or whatever I dont actually know anything about
stocks). Sure some of them may work originally, but unless i am extremely well
connected, by the time i hear about it, everyone else knows too and the market
has corrected for it.

Perhaps another metaphor is a gold rush. Even if there really is gold in those
hills, if everyone knows there is, its probably already too late to go out and
buy a shovel.

That said, i agree that there is plenty of survivorship and hindsight bias
when it comes to any advice on how to be succesful.

------
MaysonL
Just listened to a podcast with a VC who applied this pattern to nuclear
power. The big problem, which almost nobody was investing to solve, was
nuclear waste. He went out, attended a number of nuclear power events, and
found some people who thought they had a productive attack. They did, and
after he threw some money at them, ended up with a 40 or so X return.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-08-16/josh-
wolfe-d...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-08-16/josh-wolfe-
discusses-innovative-investments-podcast)

------
est31
> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative
> when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being
> fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable
> problems.

This makes no sense. The concepts of "conservative" and "fashionable" are
almost polar opposites. Becoming a musician or an actor is fashionable and the
dream of many. But it won't bring any money to most people who choose that
career. It's no conservative choice. Instead, it's conservative to go into
STEM, law or finance. But those fields are "boring". The pattern repeats
inside a field as well. It's conservative to be a cobol coder or a DOS expert,
and you'll certainly make money. But it's not fashionable. How come you aren't
building a cryptocurrency using self driving car that has a drone port on the
roof! It results in the woke fields being overrun with very smart and capable
people and capital, while tons of fields that use slightly outdated stuff are
ripe for harvest but nobody is around to do it.

~~~
simonh
I think here by conservative he means doing what everybody else is doing. Risk
averse. Following the mainstream. Going into COBOL May have been a
conservative choice 40 years ago, but not anymore. The conservative choice is
to go with the herd.

~~~
est31
> The conservative choice is to go with the herd.

That's not conservative. Being conservative means that you only follow a
change if it makes sense. If you adopt some new technology, you should do it
because it convinces you that it's better, not because it's new, wasn't
available before, everyone else is doing it, or any other such reason. If you
are conservative, you don't neccessarily end up doing what the majority is
doing, as most times, the majority is following some empty hype.

That's because his use of that word is wrong: everything said in that article
contradicts that statement.

~~~
ksdale
I think your definition of conservative is correct, but it assumes the thing
you’re trying to conserve is something like energy spent on new/different
approaches. I think pg’s definition of conservative in this case assumes the
thing being conserved is something like prestige or credibility.

As an aside, in my experience it’s a fairly common usage to describe any
behavior that avoids risk along some dimension, which could very well mean
going with the herd, if you’re trying to conserve social status.

------
blast
Is this the first PG essay that was composed on Twitter?

[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183686114844069888](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183686114844069888)

~~~
mmahemoff
Many articles now are cleanly formatted tweetstorms.

~~~
blast
Many PG articles? Which ones?

~~~
mmahemoff
Just a general observation. Wasn't specifically answering your question about
PG's writing.

~~~
xwowsersx
Lol what do you mean a "general observation"? You stated plainly that "Many
articles now are cleanly formatted tweetstorms". Which ones?

~~~
dang
Curious questions are great, but please don't cross examine. That's in the
site guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
lquist
_If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the best places
to look is fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays,
Lisp, venture funding – you may notice a pattern here._

Do people really think the fields of essays, LISP or venture funding are fully
explored?

~~~
gkoberger
I think so? They’re all expanding, of course... but none have really changed
that much over the past few decades. There’s a ton more VCs than there were a
decade ago, but has it really changed as a field? People tweak the formula a
bit, but we haven’t seen a shift in the same way YC shifted things. To a
lesser extent, pg was one of the first “tech essayists” (now it’s a genre,
[http://waitwho.is](http://waitwho.is)).

I don’t think pg is saying they’re being ignored, but rather that there’s a
sense of “yup we figured it out, let’s just iterate slowly on it”.

(I will say I can think of much better examples, but I don’t blame pg for
picking the three examples that sum up his entire career. He picked those
three things when nobody else cared.)

~~~
leppr
Cryptocurrency ICOs showed venture funding could be innovated on way more
fundamentally than "tweaking a formula". The simple ICO model may arguably
have been largely misused, but it kickstarted a lot of promising research and
experimentation[1].

[1]: e.g.
[https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html](https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html),
[https://www.zfnd.org/blog/dev-fund-guidance-and-
timeline](https://www.zfnd.org/blog/dev-fund-guidance-and-timeline)

------
fnord77
> If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently played out field,
> the value of whatever you discover will be multiplied by its enormous
> surface area.

If you found something in a big, fashionable field with a huge surface area
(cough ai/ml cough), wouldn't this multiplier apply to that fashionable field,
too?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Fashionable _problem_. Played out _field_.

So, essentially, yes - fashionable fields will be well explored; the essay is
about not getting sucked into fashionable _problems_ in whatever field you're
working in.

~~~
backpropaganda
So in the case of AI/ML, the fashionable new thing is unsupervised learning,
self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, GANS, etc. The played out
problems are image classification, speech recognition, etc.

------
MAXPOOL
Humanity as a whole as problem solving algorithm might be similar to particle
swarm in very complex neighbourhoods and topologies.

Particles (individual humans or small groups) move around in problem space as
particles with position and velocity. Each individual's movement is influenced
by its best known position locally but also the the best known global
positions in the search-space. When better positions are found by others,
individual change their course (take hints) and move towards them.

The problems would be the same. Too much randomness and it's just a random
search. Too much convergence leads to local optimums.

------
starpilot
This advice is just so... airy. Like most of his advice. "Build something
people love" Got it, now what? What do I build, exactly? Like the incredible
Onion talk on startup: "Step 1: come with up an idea. Step 2: Build it. We're
at step 2 - we're half way there"

------
savrajsingh
I think there are still a few major breakthroughs left in our understanding
and use of electricity.

------
nostromo
I love this mini-essay.

The counter to this is that it'll be harder to raise capital for un-
fashionable problems.

If you pitched "ML for sandwich makers" right now you could raise a million
bucks because so many VCs are making fashionable bets on ML.

~~~
StavrosK
So what? Raising is not success.

~~~
wwweston
It’s pretty successful as failures go.

~~~
StavrosK
I guess, if you define "success" as "managing to borrow money"...

------
bobbyi_settv
Fashionable problems are the ones for which you'll have the easiest time
recruiting employees, raising funding and generating press coverage, even
taking into account that their fashionability leads others to pursue them.

------
galaxyLogic
Well that's the whole paradox of Fashion isn't it? You want to follow fashion
but be almost at the top of it. If you are too much next year's style nobody
thinks you fashionable but just crazy. But if you follow last year's trend you
are also unfashionable.

The paradox is that nobody really knows what will be the next fashion and
similarly nobody knows what's the next worthwhile problem-area to work with.

There's a good reason why fashionable problem-areas are well-researched it is
because the results so far have been useful and promising.

------
echelon
My worry in solving an existing problem in a novel way is that the incumbents
can catch up faster than you can scale.

If I were to take on Netflix/Disney/Twitch with some new kind of video
entertainment product, they'd have deep pockets to fund a competing offering.

The lever of equity might work to attract better talent, but only if you
succeed. There's a lot of risk.

Scaling rapidly also means giving up control as you seek capital. It'd be hard
to organically grow and go unnoticed.

~~~
Timberwolf
My experience working for the 800lb gorilla incumbent was that we didn't take
competition seriously at all. Even stuff competitors did that would be trivial
for us to replicate got put in the "not a priority" bucket. The few cases
where we were forced to match a feature you were looking at a lead time
measured in years, tending to infinity if it threatened the influence of a
powerful department. And this is the reactive stuff. Forget actual innovation,
other than a few toy projects that never escaped the lab!

However, this was justified: even the most promising-looking competitors
tripped over their own bad assumptions long before becoming a threat. We saw
plenty of novel ideas but they'd always be sunk by a failure to understand the
basics of how our market worked - things like trying to put a complicated app
with a thousand options at a point in the journey everyone is trying to
simplify and time-optimise, etc.

If someone who knew the market well had gone at it seriously and solved hard
problems rather than apply the usual hand-waving "tech! blockchain! magic!",
by the time we'd noticed it would have been too late to respond. You'd hope
more recent incumbents like Netflix or Twitch might be a bit more responsive,
but corporate inertia can build up surprisingly quickly.

------
diego
Well, I have a hard time thinking of a field that I believe is fully explored.
History has shown time and again that it's really easy to be fooled in that
respect.

------
mark_l_watson
Agree. It is also a good reason for having multidisciplinary interests so we
might have different ideas for looking for very different solutions to
problems.

------
shrubble
In this thread a guy talks about using the Q language and then someone else
jumps in and says 'it's not scalable etc.'

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854793)

What if all this cloud/k8s / serverless stuff is really all piffle? What if
running stuff on dedicated hardware ends up a better solution in some fashion?

~~~
icebraining
It may be fashionable and overused, but I don't think we can talk about the
cloud as if it was still something new and unknown. By now I think one can
already do an informed decision on which to use for a particular problem.

~~~
jakobegger
> an informed decision on which to use for a particular problem

I doubt that really is the case. I think most decisions are made based either
on anecdotes, or whatever someone happens to have experience with.

It's rare that you can accurately predict the kind of workloads you'll have to
deal with ahead of time, and it's even rarer that the people making the
decision have experience with multiple completely different stacks.

And I don't really think it matters that much. Some people solve the problem
with distributed document stores and key value stores, other people use a big
transactional database and just keep putting extra RAM sticks in their
server... I don't think there's always an obviously "better" choice.

------
smitty1e
Let's write "The Online Packaging System To Ruminate About Them All"
(TOPSTRATA).

Are we not eternally one packaging system short of Nirvana?

------
kick
Is this a repost? I feel like Paul has already written this essay.

Edit: Oh, it was originally a tweet:
[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183687634763309056?s=20](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183687634763309056?s=20)

------
mmaunder
I'd suggest focusing on people and the problems they have rather than
industry, your space, the news and your colleagues. That way you'll serve real
needs rather than getting a ton of street cred as you dissapear down an
academic rabbit hole.

------
mmahemoff
"Fashionable solutions" are a related phenomenon to fashionable problems.
Solving a problem the same way as everyone else (and often expecting a better
result).

Both are widespread.

~~~
franze
"Fashionable Solutions" are major problems. An actor with lack of experience
solves a challenge (a challenge coming from of a million+ times solved
problem) not with a proven solution, but with a fashionable one (one that
currently has some mindshare and good PR). the research most of the time is
looking at alternatives that try to solve the similar thing in the same
fashionable way. therefore no real research was done.

an example: a fashionable solution for a static webpage is a fashionable
static site builder, a unfashionable solution is an HTML page.

------
lazyjones
People are different, but I cannot imagine how someone could seriously work on
(as in: devote their whole working time to, by their own choice, as an
entrepreneur, researcher or hobbyist rather than an employee or student)
problems they don't genuinely love. Sure, some do it for the money, but then
they probably just love money and found a promising opportunity to earn it.

------
jonplackett
It's not just people's desires and people following what is 'fashionable'. I
read a while back that in Physics it was impossible to get funding for
anything outside of what was fashionable, String Theory was their example.

------
akr1
Funny, we've just launched EssayMash.com yesterday trying to accomplish what
PG writes about: further exploration into essays. We host monthly essay
competitions on an important topic with $300+ in cash prizes.

------
galfarragem
What I understand from PG words is that people, even the creative ones, by
lack of courage or macro vision are not a 'Elon Musk' and go with the herd
building yet another crypto or yet another SAAS.

------
ronilan
Silicon Valley’s biggest problem is that is tends to see problems as
opportunities and opportunities as problems. There is no opportunity in that
problem.

------
rdiddly
Nice to see the recent burst of writing activity from PG. Also nice to see
people here putting it through the paces. Would expect nothing less.

------
blondin
yeah but i am afraid pg is not relatable anymore (to most of us anyway).

devoting more than 20 percent of your time to problems that are unfashionable
but dear to you is ill-advised because: a. they don't pay the bill b. they
take time and in the grand scheme of things spending time with others on
things you all understand is better than being happy alone.

but of course there are exceptions...

~~~
m11a
b) not true for everyone. the way different people want to live their lives
is, well, different.

his essays don't necessarily have to be relatable, they just have to be
useful. he isn't a life coach (though I suppose that is arguable). his
expertise is in tech and startups, that's where he's proven himself, and
that's the area where his advice carries weight.

------
blueboo
Paul is confusing ignorance for insight here. It's the same phenomenon whereby
a weekend visit to Paris has your uncle explaining the European soul but your
year in Kyoto leaves you barely able to generalize at all from your (actual)
knowledge of nuance, complexity and diversity of another culture.

Everyone is trying to break the mold at various scopes.

Meanwhile, you're welcome to reproduce your late-90s success at any moment,
Paul. We'll wait.

~~~
jdsully
Does YC not count?

------
mc3
Sounds grand. There are a lot of us who just want to pay the rent. If that
means a React job, so be it.

------
notkid
The heuristic of trying to work on what you genuinely love is not helpful or
practical for most people. It sounds good, but it is just a platitude. Genuine
love and fake love feel and look pretty similar. Most people naturally start
loving the life they live in, if it is generally positive. Then, they make up
a self-affirming, coherent narrative that justifies their emotions, decisions,
and interests. If you do an AI startup, life goes well for you, and you
embrace that decision and life, how can you differentiate whether it was
really a genuine interest or not?

~~~
mark_l_watson
Cal Newport makes the good point that people learn to like/love things after
they get very good at it, whatever “it” is.

I love Joseph Campbell but his advice to his students to “follow their bliss”
may not always be optimal.

I read the AI book “Mind Inside Matter” in the late 1970s, and even though I
have done a ton of non-AI architecture and software development, I have also
been able to work on AI problems like knowledge representation, expert system,
NLP, neural networks, and deep learning starting in 1982. I definitely
followed my bliss, but I have never been world class in my profession, but I
have enjoyed myself.

------
ismail
I think it goes much deeper than people choosing to work on fashionable
problems. Here are my thoughts

1\. The more defined and mature the problem space is, the more the assumptions
that underpin that field are taken as a given.

2\. These assumptions may become so deeply ingrained that people become
effectively blind to the entire range of possibilities.

3\. These assumptions frame how the problem/solution space is looked at.
Therefore the solution space is constrained by the set of assumptions (about
what the problem is , how to solve it, what to do)

4\. These assumptions are recursive, in that they are contained within other
assumptions. It is turtles all the way down. At some level, someone working in
the space may not even understand what the core assumptions are. We have to
have these assumptions though. See the next point.

5\. The interesting thing about this is: The constraining of the
problem/solution space is actually a _positive_. It enables co-ordination and
incremental improvements and refinement. It allows people new to the domain to
quickly get productive.

I like to think about it this way:

Picture yourself in a massive area that is pitch black. You are grasping
around and can not see much. Someone figures out how to get a tiny fire
started. With this tiny fire you get to see a little bit. Using this you can
build a bigger fire illuminating more of the area (but still leaving the
entire space unexplored). This eventual results in the ability to build a
permanent light illuminating a specific corner of this space.

This specific space with light illuminating it becomes highly productive,
people can do all sort of things. Like read etc. Yet, there are still areas
left unexplored. The light cannot simply be taken across. It takes work, and
it takes turning your back towards the current "lit" up space, and taking a
step back into the dark. A scary thought for some.

5\. Importantly: These assumptions have been inherited from the past. So they
existed and were relevant at a specific point in time. They may or may not be
relevant as of today. We would have to peel several layers to get to the core.

6\. While 4 is a positive, it is also a negative. The idea/areas greatest
strength (maturity, constant improvements, efficiencies) is also its greatest
weakness (constraining the search space)

To take a step into the dark, is to turn your back to the lit up parts. You
have to question the underlying assumptions and see if they are still
relevant. If you discover an assumption about the world that is no longer
accurate, then you found a new space to illuminate.

To put it in another way, to explore the dark is to shift your perspective on
the problem/solution. It is to see with "new eyes". Initially it may be dark,
but slowly with diligent work, and passion you could light up a completely new
and novel area.

------
bdotdub
Area man write blog post saying things are great and just so happens to
overlap exactly with what he does

------
gist
> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative
> when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being
> fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable
> problems.

How can a statement like that be made? Is there some kind of authoritative
directory of 'the smartest, most imaginative people' being 'surprisingly
conservative when deciding what to work on'.

Implied I guess Paul means 'who I've met or who I know of'. So then say that.

It's a big world out there. Who knows what anyone is working on or what they
are thinking or have tried and why they haven't pursued it.

This is a bit like saying 'people love their dogs and will do anything for
them if they are sick'. Just a general statement of opinion by one person (and
generally accepted as being correct) but based on not anything even close to
being scientific and/or backed up by any actual data. That part is fine. But
if that is the case state it as such and not some absolute. Why does this
matter? Because when someone like Paul writes something it will be taken by
others to be some kind of important thought or fact.

~~~
mvp
Most of his essays have that wise old man who has seen the world kind of vibe
to them. If anybody else writes the same things without the success he has had
it will be ridiculous to read.

I don't think anybody who reads his essays is looking for any scientific
report based on facts. They are looking for some sort of confirmation that
they are not crazy when they have similar thoughts.

~~~
gist
It's in some ways the writing equivalent of the NPR calm and measured voice
the intended impact to make it more believable and important and entirely
rational sounding and correct.

------
sillysaurusx
As a long-time pg supporter, it pains me to say this: I think at this point pg
could write anything and it would show up immediately with critical acclaim.

It was more charming when he had to work hard to make his points known.

But hey, fame, right? Just famous people things.

There's so much more to say in this case, though! _How_ do you avoid the
traps? Waving a wand like "Just love something" leaves far too much to the
imagination. Pointing at a prior essay at loving your work is helpful, but
different.

Often, you have to actively offend people in order to find good problems to
work on. The idea that people have devoted their lives to the wrong thing is
inherently offensive to them. That's a point not covered here.

For example, I imagine that a lot of people who've studied 3D rendering for
their entire lives are about to feel very outdated the moment neural network
renderers displace them. And that's also a good counterexample to the point
that "Often, the best place to search for new ideas is a place thought fully
explored." It might often be true, but it's not always true.

And then there are the in-betweens. Bitcoin was in a field both thought fully
explored (crypto + finance) and also unexplored, in a certain sense.

~~~
tyre
Had the same thought.

Some of his essays, no one else could have written them and brought a fresh,
nuanced perspective.

These couple paragraphs wouldn’t get any attention if not for the name of the
writer. Maybe that’s fine—great writers have their share of banality—but does
reveal how susceptible we are generally to brand name over substance.

~~~
gist
I am actually surprised that PG doesn't feel uncomfortable about the 'acclaim'
that he is getting for writing many of the things he has said that are not
related to anything he has expertise in. Reminds me of celebrities who opine
about politics with their thoughts (sometimes not always with PG).

Paul is authoritative on many topics. General thoughts about life and people
are great to hear what he thinks. Why not? But he is no more special than
100000 other people who have no audience. Does he know this?

I've often thought he should do some A/B posting with his thoughts. Write
something and then randomly decide whether to put it on his blog or some other
place and see what the interest level is.

~~~
dang
They're essays. The word means 'attempt' and the genre has always been about
non-expertise. Montaigne was the ultimate non-expert.

~~~
FreakLegion
> The word means 'attempt'

It can, but doesn't in this context. 'Essay' was a sort-of polyseme (like
'passion', which can still mean 'suffering') that has long since severed ties
with its origin. Outside certain narrow academic discussions, the etymology
and current use of 'essay' have effectively nothing to do with one another.

In any case though pg does pretend to some amount of expertise. "How to Do
Philosophy" is an example.

~~~
dang
Of course it does; it has kept a close association with this meaning
throughout literary history. An essay is an attempt, a sketch, thinking out
loud. It's the literary genre equivalent of informal conversation. In an
essay, you discover what you think by writing it, just as in exploratory
programming you discover what your program is by programming it. To say that
essays aren't for non-authoritative musing is like saying novels aren't for
depicting human experience.

~~~
tyre
I strongly disagree with this.

The greatest essayists are not putting a "sketch" into the world. I cannot
imagine reading an Isaiah Berlin essay and saying, "this is just informal
conversation."

Consider Didion, Foster Wallace, Sontag, Mailer, Orwell, Hitchens, Paine,
Zadie Smith, the founding fathers of the United States via the Federalist
Papers.

There is no lack in seriousness, no lack in rigor, and no lack direct purpose
backed by thoughtful consideration and ample evidence.

There are _also_ informal or unserious or musing essays, but please do not
lump together the entire genre of essays with a description of Medium posts.

~~~
dang
I think we got some signals crossed. I wasn't talking about being
unserious—just that you don't have to be an expert to write a fine essay.

I haven't read all the authors you list, but the ones I have support the
point. They were not specialists writing about topics they were authorities
on. They were good writers and thinkers exploring the topics they were writing
about.

