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New: Good Writing | Founder to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . © mmxxv pg


Arc Arc is a new dialect of Lisp we're working on. You can find an early release and ask questions at . The Arc community is very newbie-friendly, because all the users are newbies to some extent. To get an idea of where we eventually hope to take , see Being Popular and The Hundred-Year Language . Forum Tutorial Get Arc Arc's Out Take the Arc Challenge First Priority: Core Language Arc FAQ Help Us Design Philosophy Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented LFM and LFSP Ideas People Have Sent Us Old Arc Stuff


is a spec for a new dialect of Lisp, written in itself. This should sound familiar to people who know about Lisp's origins, because it's the way Lisp began . It consists of two text files meant to be read in parallel: a guide to the Bel language , and the source . For those who just want to see some code examples, there's a file of those . But of course the source is also a code example, since it's written in itself. Considering the rate at which I was discovering bugs before publishing , there are bound to be more remaining. So this first version is version C, after Cunningham's Law.


Lisp The Roots of Lisp What Made Lisp Different A Lisp Startup Arc: A New Lisp Lisp Code Lisp Links Lisp History Lisp Quotes Lisp FAQ


Spam A Plan for Spam Plan for Spam FAQ Better Bayesian Filtering So Far, So Good Filters that Fight Back Will Filters Kill Spam? Stopping Spam Spam is Different Filters vs. Blacklists The Destiny of Blacklists Getting Past Filters Spam Conference Filtering Research Spam Resources Spam Archives Spam Links


Responses "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." Founders' Accents What I Didn't Say Female Founders "I can be tricked by anyone who looks like ."


FAQs General FAQ Programming FAQ Startup FAQ Arc FAQ Lisp FAQ Viaweb FAQ Plan for Spam FAQ FFB FAQ


RAQs These are questions that I've only been asked once or twice, but which seem especially interesting. Why don't more painters have hacking jobs? Probably for the same reason that few hackers take up painting. They both seem from the outside like great abstruse mysteries. You can learn great abstruse mysteries as a teenager, because everything is a mystery at that point anyway. And you have the boundless self confidence that comes from ignorance. But unless you learn both as a teenager, which is rare, you'll be afraid of the other later. What should I read to learn more about history? The way to do it is piecemeal. You could just sit down and try reading 's History of the World cover to cover, but you'd probably lose interest. I think it's a better plan to read books about specific topics, even if you don't understand everything the first time through. Here are the most exciting ones I can think of: , Civilisation White, Medieval Technology and Social Change McEvedy, Penguin Atlases of Ancient and Medieval History Laslett, The World We , The Extension of Man Franklin, Autobiography Girouard, Life in the English Country House Pirenne, and , The Fall of Constantinople Cipolla, <PERSON>, and Empires Hadas, A History of Rome , The Art of War in the Middle Ages Vasari, Lives of the Artists Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors Caesar, Gallic Wars Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution Couldn't you add something equivalent to Lisp macros to languages like Perl or Python? Not without turning them into dialects of Lisp. Real macros need to operate on the parse tree of the program. To allow that in a language with syntax, you have to (a) make public the translation from source code to parse trees, and (b) give the programmer the opportunity to run programs on parse trees before they go on to the compiler. But it would be hard to do that without creating a notation for parse trees; and once you do, your language has become a skin on Lisp, in much the same way that in OS X , the Mac OS became a skin on Unix. How can I avoid turning into a pointy-haired boss? The pointy-haired boss is a manager who doesn't program. So the surest way to avoid becoming him is to stay a programmer. What tempts programmers to become managers are companies with old-fashioned corporate structure, where the only way to advance in salary and prestige is to go into management. So if you want to avoid becoming a PHB, avoid such companies, and work for (or start ) startups. I never had to manage anyone in our startup, even though I was the president. The other hackers were my peers, and would have given me the raspberry if I'd tried to "manage" them. We operated by consensus. And the rest of the company reported to our experienced COO, who was also more of a peer. Why be a manager when you could be a founder or early employee at a startup? I'm about to become a teacher. How can I be a good one? The best teachers I remember from school had three things in common: (1) They had high standards. Like testing their parents, students will test teachers to see if they can get away with low-quality work or bad behavior. They won't respect the teachers who don't call them on it. (2) They liked us. Like dogs, kids can tell very accurately whether or not someone wishes them well. I think a lot of our teachers either never liked kids much, or got burned out and started not to like them. It's hard to be a good teacher once that happens. I can't think of one teacher in all the schools I went to who managed to be good despite disliking students. (3) They were interested in the subject. Most of the public school teachers I had weren't really interested in what they taught. Enthusiasm is contagious, and so is boredom. Two startups want to hire me. Which should I choose? The one with the most determined and smartest founders (in that order) is the more likely to succeed. Pretend you're an investor-which you are, of your time-and ask yourself which of the two you'd buy stock in. How can I become really good at Lisp programming? Write an application big enough that you can make the lower levels into a language layer. Embedded languages (or as they now seem to be called, DSLs) are the essence of Lisp hacking. What philosophy books would you recommend? I can't think of any I'd recommend. What I learned from trying to study philosophy is that the place to look is in other fields. If you understand math or history or aeronautical engineering very well, the most abstract of the things you know are what philosophy is supposed to be teaching. Books on philosophy per se are either highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand (e.g. ). It can be interesting to study ancient philosophy, but more as a kind of accident report than to teach you anything useful. I want to start a startup, but I don't know how to program. How long will it take to learn? I would guess a smart person can learn to hack sufficiently well in . The best way to do it would be to find some startup to hire you in an initially menial capacity, and start learning to program on the side. Then gradually work your way up from answering phones through system administration to actual software design. There is always so much to do in a startup that people won't be too picky about your paper qualifications, if you can solve problems for them without screwing up.


is a programmer, writer, and investor. In , he and started , the first software as a service company. was acquired by Yahoo in , where it became Yahoo Store. In he started publishing essays on , which now gets around 25 million page views per year. In he and , , and started Y Combinator , the first of a new type of startup incubator. Since Y Combinator has funded over 3000 startups, including Airbnb, Dropbox, <PERSON>, and . In he published a new Lisp dialect written in itself called . is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, ), ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, ), and Hackers & Painters ( , ). He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in . Photo by , released under the Attribution Creative Commons license. Click for full-size version.


Having Kids Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young felt about living virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children. But did I want them now? No. If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since I was a kid, were uncool. They were dull and responsible and had no fun. And while it's not surprising that kids would believe that, to be honest I hadn't seen much as an adult to change my mind. Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids, the kids seemed to be terrors, and the parents pathetic harried creatures, even when they prevailed. When people had babies, I congratulated them enthusiastically, because that seemed to be what one did. But I didn't feel it at all. "Better you than me," I was thinking. Now when people have babies I congratulate them enthusiastically and I mean it. Especially the first one. I feel like they just got the best gift in the world. What changed, of course, is that I had kids. Something I dreaded turned out to be wonderful. Partly, and I won't deny it, this is because of serious chemical changes that happened almost instantly when our first child was born. It was like someone flipped a switch. I suddenly felt protective not just toward our child, but toward all children. As I was driving my wife and new son home from the hospital, I approached a crosswalk full of pedestrians, and I found myself thinking "I have to be really careful of all these people. Every one of them is someone's child!" So to some extent you can't trust me when I say having kids is great. To some extent I'm like a religious cultist telling you that you'll be happy if you join the cult too but only because joining the cult will alter your mind in a way that will make you happy to be a cult member. But not entirely. There were some things about having kids that I clearly got wrong before I had them. For example, there was a huge amount of selection bias in my observations of parents and children. Some parents may have noticed that I wrote "Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids." Of course the times I noticed kids were when things were going wrong. I only noticed them when they made noise. And where was I when I noticed them? Ordinarily I never went to places with kids, so the only times I encountered them were in shared bottlenecks like airplanes. Which is not exactly a representative sample. Flying with a toddler is something very few parents enjoy. What I didn't notice, because they tend to be much quieter, were all the great moments parents had with kids. People don't talk about these much the magic is hard to put into words, and all other parents know about them anyway but one of the great things about having kids is that there are so many times when you feel there is nowhere else you'd rather be, and nothing else you'd rather be doing. You don't have to be doing anything special. You could just be going somewhere together, or putting them to bed, or pushing them on the swings at the park. But you wouldn't trade these moments for anything. One doesn't tend to associate kids with peace, but that's what you feel. You don't need to look any further than where you are right now. Before I had kids, I had moments of this kind of peace, but they were rarer. With kids it can happen several times a day. My other source of data about kids was my own childhood, and that was similarly misleading. I was pretty bad, and was always in trouble for something or other. So it seemed to me that parenthood was essentially law enforcement. I didn't realize there were good times too. I remember my mother telling me once when I was about 30 that she'd really enjoyed having me and my sister. My god, I thought, this woman is a saint. She not only endured all the pain we subjected her to, but actually enjoyed it? Now I realize she was simply telling the truth. She said that one reason she liked having us was that we'd been interesting to talk to. That took me by surprise when I had kids. You don't just love them. They become your friends too. They're really interesting. And while I admit small children are disastrously fond of repetition (anything worth doing once is worth doing fifty times) it's often genuinely fun to play with them. That surprised me too. Playing with a was fun when I was 2 and definitely not fun when I was . Why would it become fun again later? But it does. There are of course times that are pure drudgery. Or worse still, terror. Having kids is one of those intense types of experience that are hard to imagine unless you've had them. But it is not, as I implicitly believed before having kids, simply your DNA heading for the lifeboats. Some of my worries about having kids were right, though. They definitely make you less productive. I know having kids makes some people get their act together, but if your act was already together, you're going to have less time to do it in. In particular, you're going to have to work to a schedule. Kids have schedules. I'm not sure if it's because that's how kids are, or because it's the only way to integrate their lives with adults', but once you have kids, you tend to have to work on their schedule. You will have chunks of time to work. But you can't let work spill promiscuously through your whole life, like I used to before I had kids. You're going to have to work at the same time every day, whether inspiration is flowing or not, and there are going to be times when you have to stop, even if it is. I've been able to adapt to working this way. Work, like love, finds a way. If there are only certain times it can happen, it happens at those times. So while I don't get as much done as before I had kids, I get enough done. I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It hurts to see that sentence written down. I squirm to avoid it. But if there weren't something real there, why would I squirm? The fact is, once you have kids, you're probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum game. Only one idea at a time can be the top idea in your mind . Once you have kids, it will often be your kids, and that means it will less often be some project you're working on. I have some hacks for sailing close to this wind. For example, when I write essays, I think about what I'd want my kids to know. That drives me to get things right. And when I was writing , I told my kids that once I finished it I'd take them to . When you say that sort of thing to a little kid, they treat it as a promise. Which meant I had to finish or I'd be taking away their trip to . Maybe if I'm really lucky such tricks could put me net ahead. But the wind is there, no question. On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare? And while having kids may be warping my present judgement, it hasn't overwritten my memory. I remember perfectly well what life was like before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the ability to take off for some other country at a moment's notice. That was so great. Why did I never do that? See what I did there? The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it. I had plenty of happy times before I had kids. But if I count up happy moments, not just potential happiness but actual happy moments, there are more after kids than before. Now I practically have it on tap, almost any bedtime. People's experiences as parents vary a lot, and I know I've been lucky. But I think the worries I had before having kids must be pretty common, and judging by other parents' faces when they see their kids, so must the happiness that kids bring. Note [1] Adults are sophisticated enough to see for the fascinatingly complex characters they are, whereas to most are just defective . Thanks to , , and for reading drafts of this. Translation Slovak Translation


How to and Money When we sold our startup in I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of studying the paths from poor to rich , I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were. So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost. If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking "wow, I'm spending a lot of money." Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye. In most people's minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn't. Luxuries seem self-indulgent. And unless you got the money by inheriting it or winning a lottery, you've already been thoroughly trained that self-indulgence leads to trouble. Investing bypasses those alarms. You're not spending the money; you're just moving it from one asset to another. Which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say "it's an investment." The solution is to develop new alarms. This can be a tricky business, because while the alarms that prevent you from overspending are so basic that they may even be in our DNA, the ones that prevent you from making bad investments have to be learned, and are sometimes fairly counterintuitive. I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I'd feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince. I'd start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on a sofa watching TV for , let alone a whole day. And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done , the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after too, but nothing like as bad as I'd feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I'd feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don't go off on when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It's not fun. So it must be work. With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies. So nature and nurture combine to make us avoid self-indulgence. But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is, they're not even fun. Thanks to , , , , and for reading drafts of this.


The Shape of the Essay Field An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But there are three different reasons people might not know something, and they yield three very different kinds of essays. One reason people won't know something is if it's not important to know. That doesn't mean it will make a bad essay. For example, you might write a good essay about a particular model of car. Readers would learn something from it. It would add to their picture of the world. For a handful of readers it might even spur some kind of epiphany. But unless this is a very unusual car it's not critical for everyone to know about it. [ 1 ] If something isn't important to know, there's no answer to the question of why people don't know it. Not knowing random facts is the default. 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? 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. The reason I did this breakdown was to get at the following fact, which might have seemed controversial if I'd led with it, but should be obvious now. If you're writing for smart people about important things, you're writing for the young. Or more precisely, that's where you'll have the most effect. Whatever you say should also be at least somewhat novel to you, however old you are. It's not an essay otherwise, because an essay is something you write to figure something out. But whatever you figure out will presumably be more of a surprise to younger readers than it is to you. There's a continuum of surprise. At one extreme, something you read can change your whole way of thinking. The Selfish Gene did this to me. It was like suddenly seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous image: you can treat genes rather than organisms as the protagonists, and evolution becomes easier to understand when you do. At the other extreme, writing merely puts into words something readers were already thinking - or thought they were. The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers' thinking multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it's hard to do well at both. It's hard to have big new ideas about important topics. So in practice there's a tradeoff: you can change readers' thinking a lot about moderately important things, or change it a little about very important ones. But with younger readers the tradeoff shifts. There's more room to change their thinking, so there's a bigger payoff for writing about important things. The tradeoff isn't a conscious one, at least not for me. It's more like a kind of gravitational field that writers work in. But every essayist works in it, whether they realize it or not. This seems obvious once you state it, but it took me a long time to understand. I knew I wanted to write for smart people about important topics. I noticed empirically that I seemed to be writing for the young. But it took me to understand that the latter was an automatic consequence of the former. In fact I only really figured it out as I was writing this essay. Now that I know it, should I change anything? I don't think so. In fact seeing the shape of the field that writers work in has reminded me that I'm not optimizing for returns in it. I'm not trying to surprise readers of any particular age; I'm trying to surprise myself. The way I usually decide what to write about is by following curiosity. I notice something new and dig into it. It would probably be a mistake to change that. But seeing the shape of the essay field has set me thinking. What would surprise young readers? Which important things do people tend to learn late? Interesting question. I should think about that. Note [ 1 ] It's hard to write a really good essay about an unimportant topic, though, because a really good essayist will inevitably draw the topic into deeper waters. could write an essay about how to boil potatoes that ended up being full of timeless wisdom. In which case, of course, it wouldn't really be about how to boil potatoes; that would just have been the starting point. Thanks to and for reading drafts of this.


Good Writing There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions about important things. It might seem as if these two kinds of good would be unrelated, like the speed of a car and the color it's painted. And yet I don't think they are. I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right. So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true. Let's examine it. How can this possibly be true? I know it's true from writing. You can't simultaneously optimize two unrelated things; when you push one far enough, you always end up sacrificing the other. And yet no matter how hard I push, I never find myself having to choose between the sentence that sounds best and the one that expresses an idea best. If I did, it would be frivolous to care how sentences sound. But in practice it feels the opposite of frivolous. Fixing sentences that sound bad seems to help get the ideas right. [ 1 ] By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas right means developing them well - drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail. So getting the ideas right is not just a matter of saying true things, but saying the right true things. How could trying to make sentences sound good help you do that? The clue to the answer is something I noticed when I was doing the layout for my first book. Sometimes when you're laying out text you have bad luck. For example, you get a section that runs one line longer than the page. I don't know what ordinary typesetters do in this situation, but what I did was rewrite the section to make it a line shorter. You'd expect such an arbitrary constraint to make the writing worse. But I found, to my surprise, that it never did. I always ended up with something I liked better. I don't think this was because my writing was especially careless. I think if you pointed to a random paragraph in anything written by anyone and told them to make it slightly shorter (or longer), they'd probably be able to come up with something better. The best analogy for this phenomenon is when you shake a bin full of different objects. The shakes are arbitrary motions. Or more precisely, they're not calculated to make any two specific objects fit more closely together. And yet repeated shaking inevitably makes the objects discover brilliantly clever ways of packing themselves. Gravity won't let them become less tightly packed, so any change has to be a change for the better. [ 2 ] So it is with writing. If you have to rewrite an awkward passage, you'll never do it in a way that makes it less true. You couldn't bear it, any more than gravity could bear things floating upward. So any change in the ideas has to be a change for the better. It's obvious once you think about it. Writing that sounds good is more likely to be right for the same reason that a well-shaken bin is more likely to be tightly packed. But there's something else going on as well. Sounding good isn't just a random external force that leaves the ideas in an essay better off. It actually helps you to get them right. The reason is that it makes the essay easier to read. It's less work to read writing that flows well. How does that help the writer? Because the writer is the first reader. When I'm working on an essay, I spend far more time reading than writing. I'll reread some parts 50 or 100 times, replaying the thoughts in them and asking myself, like someone sanding a piece of wood, does anything catch? Does anything feel wrong? And the easier the essay is to read, the easier it is to notice if something catches. So yes, the two senses of good writing are connected in at least two ways. Trying to make writing sound good makes you fix mistakes unconsciously, and also helps you fix them consciously; it shakes the bin of ideas, and also makes mistakes easier to see. But now that we've dissolved one layer of preposterousness, I can't resist adding another. Does sounding good do more than just help you get the ideas right? Is writing that sounds good inherently more likely to be right? Crazy as it may seem, I think that's true too. Obviously there's a connection at the level of individual words. There are lots of words in English that sound like what they mean, often in wonderfully subtle ways. Glitter. Round. Scrape. Prim. Cavalcade. But the sound of good writing depends even more on the way you put words together, and there's a connection at that level too. When writing sounds good, it's mostly because it has good rhythm. But the rhythm of good writing is not the rhythm of music, or the meter of verse. It's not so regular. If it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and you just state them. But other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications. An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation, and a train of thought has a natural rhythm. So when an essay sounds good, it's not merely because it has a pleasing rhythm, but because it has its natural one. Which means you can use getting the rhythm right as a heuristic for getting the ideas right. And not just in principle: good writers do both simultaneously as a matter of course. Often I don't even distinguish between the two problems. I just think Ugh, this doesn't sound right; what do I mean to say here? [ 3 ] The sound of writing turns out to be more like the shape of a plane than the color of a car. If it looks good, as used to say, it will fly well. This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in some other way and then write about them afterward - for example, if you build something, or conduct an experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such cases the ideas often live more in the work than the writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas are good. The writing in textbooks and popular surveys can be bad for the same reason: the author isn't developing the ideas, merely describing other people's. It's only when you're writing to develop ideas that there's such a close connection between the two senses of doing it well. Ok, many people will be thinking, this seems plausible so far, but what about liars? Is it not notoriously possible for a smooth-tongued liar to write something beautiful that's completely false? It is, of course. But not without method acting. The way to write something beautiful and false is to begin by making yourself almost believe it. So just like someone writing something beautiful and true, you're presenting a perfectly-formed train of thought. The difference is the point where it attaches to the world. You're saying something that would be true if certain false premises were. If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs. So it's not quite right to say that better sounding writing is more likely to be true. Better sounding writing is more likely to be internally consistent. If the writer is honest, internal consistency and truth converge. But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too. Indeed, the two senses of good writing are more like two ends of the same thing. The connection between them is not a rigid one; the goodness of good writing is not a rod but a rope, with multiple overlapping connections running through it. But it's hard to move one end without moving the other. It's hard to be right without sounding right. Notes [ 1 ] The closest thing to an exception is when you have to go back and insert a new point into the middle of something you've written. This often messes up the flow, sometimes in ways you can never quite repair. But I think the ultimate source of this problem is that ideas are tree-shaped and essays are linear. You inevitably run into difficulties when you try to cram the former into the latter. Frankly it's surprising how much you can get away with. But even so you sometimes have to resort to an endnote. [ 2 ] Obviously if you shake the bin hard enough the objects in it can become less tightly packed. And similarly, if you imposed some huge external constraint on your writing, like using alternating one and two syllable words, the ideas would start to suffer. [ 3 ] Bizarrely enough, this happened in the writing of this very paragraph. An earlier version shared several phrases in common with the preceding paragraph, and the repetition bugged me each time I reread it. When I got annoyed enough to fix it, I discovered that the repetition reflected a problem in the underlying ideas, and I fixed both simultaneously. Thanks to and for reading drafts of this.


What to Do What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it myself in the process of investigating something else. But once I did, I thought I should at least try to answer it. So what should one do? One should help people, and take care of the world. Those two are obvious. But is there anything else? When I ask that, the answer that pops up is Make good new things . I can't prove that one should do this, any more than I can prove that one should help people or take care of the world. We're talking about first principles here. But I can explain why this principle makes sense. The most impressive thing humans can do is to think. It may be the most impressive thing that can be done. And the best kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has thought well, is to make good new things. I mean new things in a very general sense. Newton's physics was a good new thing. Indeed, the first version of this principle was to have good new ideas. But that didn't seem general enough: it didn't include making art or music, for example, except insofar as they embody new ideas. And while they may embody new ideas, that's not all they embody, unless you stretch the word "idea" so uselessly thin that it includes everything that goes through your nervous system. Even for ideas that one has consciously, though, I prefer the phrasing "make good new things." There are other ways to describe the best kind of thinking. To make discoveries, for example, or to understand something more deeply than others have. But how well do you understand something if you can't make a model of it, or write about it? Indeed, trying to express what you understand is not just a way to prove that you understand it, but a way to understand it better. Another reason I like this phrasing is that it biases us toward creation. It causes us to prefer the kind of ideas that are naturally seen as making things rather than, say, making critical observations about things other people have made. Those are ideas too, and sometimes valuable ones, but it's easy to trick oneself into believing they're more valuable than they are. Criticism seems sophisticated, and making new things often seems awkward, especially at first; and yet it's precisely those first steps that are most rare and valuable. Is newness essential? I think so. Obviously it's essential in science. If you copied a paper of someone else's and published it as your own, it would seem not merely unimpressive but dishonest. And it's similar in the arts. A copy of a good painting can be a pleasing thing, but it's not impressive in the way the original was. Which in turn implies it's not impressive to make the same thing over and over, however well; you're just copying yourself. Note though that we're talking about a different kind of should with this principle. Taking care of people and the world are shoulds in the sense that they're one's duty, but making good new things is a should in the sense that this is how to live to one's full potential. Historically most rules about how to live have been a mix of both kinds of should, though usually with more of the former than the latter. [ 1 ] For most of history the question "What should one do?" got much the same answer everywhere, whether you asked Cicero or . You should be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest. There was a long stretch where in some parts of the world the answer became "Serve God," but in practice it was still considered good to be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest. And indeed this recipe would have seemed right to most . But there's nothing in it about taking care of the world or making new things, and that's a bit worrying, because it seems like this question should be a timeless one. The answer shouldn't change much. I'm not too worried that the traditional answers don't mention taking care of the world. Obviously people only started to care about that once it became clear we could ruin it. But how can making good new things be important if the traditional answers don't mention it? The traditional answers were answers to a slightly different question. They were answers to the question of how to be, rather than what to do. The audience didn't have a lot of choice about what to do. The audience up till was the landowning class, which was also the political class. They weren't choosing between doing physics and writing novels. Their work was foreordained: manage their estates, participate in politics, fight when necessary. It was ok to do certain other kinds of work in one's spare time, but ideally one didn't have any. Cicero's De Officiis is one of the great classical answers to the question of how to live, and in it he explicitly says that he wouldn't even be writing it if he hadn't been excluded from public life by recent political upheavals. [ 2 ] There were of course people doing what we would now call "original work," and they were often admired for it, but they weren't seen as models. Archimedes knew that he was the first to prove that a sphere has 2/3 the volume of the smallest enclosing cylinder and was very pleased about it. But you don't find ancient writers urging their readers to emulate him. They regarded him more as a prodigy than a model. Now many more of us can follow 's example and devote most of our attention to one kind of work. He turned out to be a model after all, along with a collection of other people that his contemporaries would have found it strange to treat as a distinct group, because the vein of people making new things ran at right angles to the social hierarchy. What kinds of new things count? I'd rather leave that question to the makers of them. It would be a risky business to try to define any kind of threshold, because new kinds of work are often despised at first. was writing literal pulp fiction, and he's now recognized as one of the best writers of . Indeed this pattern is so common that you can use it as a recipe: if you're excited about some kind of work that's not considered prestigious and you can explain what everyone else is overlooking about it, then this is not merely a kind of work that's ok to do, but one to seek out. The other reason I wouldn't want to define any thresholds is that we don't need them. The kind of people who make good new things don't need rules to keep them honest. So there's my guess at a set of principles to live by: take care of people and the world, and make good new things. Different people will do these to varying degrees. There will presumably be lots who focus entirely on taking care of people. There will be a few who focus mostly on making new things. But even if you're one of those, you should at least make sure that the new things you make don't net harm people or the world. And if you go a step further and try to make things that help them, you may find you're ahead on the trade. You'll be more constrained in what you can make, but you'll make it with more energy. On the other hand, if you make something amazing, you'll often be helping people or the world even if you didn't mean to. was driven by curiosity and ambition, not by any practical effect his work might have, and yet the practical effect of his work has been enormous. And this seems the rule rather than the exception. So if you think you can make something amazing, you should probably just go ahead and do it. Notes [ 1 ] We could treat all three as the same kind of should by saying that it's one's duty to live well - for example by saying, as some have, that it's one's duty to make the most of one's God-given gifts. But this seems one of those casuistries people invented to evade the stern requirements of religion: it was permissible to spend time studying math instead of praying or performing acts of charity because otherwise you were rejecting a gift God had given you. A useful casuistry no doubt, but we don't need it. We could also combine the first two principles, since people are part of the world. Why should our species get special treatment? I won't try to justify this choice, but I'm skeptical that anyone who claims to think differently actually lives according to their principles. [ 2 ] Confucius was also excluded from public life after ending up on the losing end of a power struggle, and presumably he too would not be so famous now if it hadn't been for this long stretch of enforced leisure. Thanks to , , and for reading drafts of this.


Writes and Write-Nots October 2024 I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in there won't be many people who can write. One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have a mole they're worried about; people who are good at setting up computers know how many people aren't; writers know how many people need help writing. The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard. And yet writing pervades many jobs, and the more prestigious the job, the more writing it tends to require. These two powerful opposing forces, the pervasive expectation of writing and the irreducible difficulty of doing it, create enormous pressure. This is why eminent professors often turn out to have resorted to plagiarism. The most striking thing to me about these cases is the pettiness of the thefts. The stuff they steal is usually the most mundane boilerplate - the sort of thing that anyone who was even halfway decent at writing could turn out with no effort at all. Which means they're not even halfway decent at writing. Till recently there was no convenient escape valve for the pressure created by these opposing forces. You could pay someone to write for you, like , or plagiarize, like , but if you couldn't buy or steal words, you had to write them yourself. And as a result nearly everyone who was expected to write had to learn how. Not anymore. AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work. The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good writers and people who can't write. Is that so bad? Isn't it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren't many blacksmiths left, and it doesn't seem to be a problem. Yes, it's bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can't make this point better than did: If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking. So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too. This situation is not unprecedented. In preindustrial times most people's jobs made them strong. Now if you want to be strong, you work out. So there are still strong people, but only those who choose to be. It will be the same with writing. There will still be smart people, but only those who choose to be. Thanks to , , and for reading drafts of this.


When To Do What You Love There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer with a simple yes or no. Sometimes you should and sometimes you shouldn't, but the border between should and shouldn't is very complicated. The only way to give a general answer is to trace it. When people talk about this question, there's always an implicit "instead of." All other things being equal, why wouldn't you work on what interests you the most? So even raising the question implies that all other things aren't equal, and that you have to choose between working on what interests you the most and something else, like what pays the best. And indeed if your main goal is to make money, you can't usually afford to work on what interests you the most. People pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. But there's an obvious exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if you love football, and you're good enough at it, you can get paid a lot to play it. Of course the odds are against you in a case like football, because so many other people like playing it too. This is not to say you shouldn't try though. It depends how much ability you have and how hard you're willing to work. The odds are better when you have strange tastes: when you like something that pays well and that few other people like. For example, it's clear that truly loved running a software company. He didn't just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed, but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it. There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can't help noticing when something is mispriced, and can't help doing something about it. It's like a puzzle for them. [ 1 ] In fact there's an edge case here so spectacular that it turns all the preceding advice on its head. If you want to make a really huge amount of money - hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars - it turns out to be very useful to work on what interests you the most. The reason is not the extra motivation you get from doing this, but that the way to make a really large amount of money is to start a startup, and working on what interests you is an excellent way to discover startup ideas . Many if not most of the biggest startups began as projects the founders were doing for fun. Apple, Google, and Facebook all began that way. Why is this pattern so common? Because the best ideas tend to be such outliers that you'd overlook them if you were consciously looking for ways to make money. Whereas if you're young and good at technology, your unconscious instincts about what would be interesting to work on are very well aligned with what needs to be built. So there's something like a midwit peak for making money. If you don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're most interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you can't usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again. What if you're not sure what you want? What if you're attracted to the idea of making money and more attracted to some kinds of work than others, but neither attraction predominates? How do you break ties? The key here is to understand that such ties are only apparent. When you have trouble choosing between following your interests and making money, it's never because you have complete knowledge of yourself and of the types of work you're choosing between, and the options are perfectly balanced. When you can't decide which path to take, it's almost always due to ignorance. In fact you're usually suffering from three kinds of ignorance simultaneously: you don't know what makes you happy, what the various kinds of work are really like, or how well you could do them. [ 2 ] In a way this ignorance is excusable. It's often hard to predict these things, and no one even tells you that you need to. If you're ambitious you're told you should go to college, and this is good advice so far as it goes, but that's where it usually ends. No one tells you how to figure out what to work on, or how hard this can be. What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty. And probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you're interested in. That will get you more information about how interested you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they offer for ambition. Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring out what to work on is a problem that could take to solve, the sooner you start, the better. One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people? Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring. [ 3 ] The other thing you do in the face of uncertainty is to make choices that are uncertainty-proof. The less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this "staying upwind." If you're unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math. There's one case, though, where it's easy to say whether you should work on what interests you the most: if you want to do great work . This is not a sufficient condition for doing great work, but it is a necessary one. There's a lot of selection bias in advice about whether to "follow your passion," and this is the reason. Most such advice comes from people who are famously successful, and if you ask someone who's famously successful how to do what they did, most will tell you that you have to work on what you're most interested in. And this is in fact true. That doesn't mean it's the right advice for everyone. Not everyone can do great work, or wants to. But if you do want to, the complicated question of whether or not to work on what interests you the most becomes simple. The answer is yes. The root of great work is a sort of ambitious curiosity, and you can't manufacture that. Notes [ 1 ] These examples show why it's a mistake to assume that economic inequality must be evidence of some kind of brokenness or unfairness. It's obvious that different people have different interests, and that some interests yield far more money than others, so how can it not be obvious that some people will end up much richer than others? In a world where some people like to write enterprise software and others like to make studio pottery, economic inequality is the natural outcome. [ 2 ] Difficulty choosing between interests is a different matter. That's not always due to ignorance. It's often intrinsically difficult. I still have trouble doing it. [ 3 ] You can't always take people at their word on this. Since it's more prestigious to work on things you're interested in than to be driven by money, people who are driven mainly by money will often claim to be more interested in their work than they actually are. One way to test such claims is by doing the following thought experiment: if their work didn't pay well, would they take jobs doing something else in order to do it in their spare time? Lots of mathematicians and scientists and engineers would. Historically lots have . But I don't think as many investment bankers would. This thought experiment is also useful for distinguishing between university departments. Thanks to , , , , Harj Taggar, and for reading drafts of this.


The <NRP> I met the before we even started Y Combinator. In fact they were one of the reasons we started it. YC grew out of a talk I gave to the Harvard Computer Society (the undergrad computer club) about how to start a startup. Everyone else in the audience was probably local, but and came up on the train from the University of Virginia, where they were seniors. Since they'd come so far I agreed to meet them for coffee. They told me about the startup idea we'd later fund them to drop: a way to order fast food on your cellphone. This was before smartphones. They'd have had to make deals with cell carriers and fast food chains just to get it launched. So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, . But I was impressed with their brains and their energy. In fact I was so impressed with them and some of the other people I met at that talk that I decided to start something to fund them. I told and that we were starting Y Combinator, and encouraged them to apply. That first batch we didn't have any way to identify applicants, so we made up nicknames for them. The were the "Cell food muffins." "Muffin" is a term of endearment uses for things like small dogs and . So that gives you some idea what kind of impression and made in . They had the look of slightly ruffled surprise that baby birds have. Their idea was bad though. And since we thought then that we were funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them. But we felt bad about it. was sad that we'd rejected the muffins. And it seemed wrong to me to turn down the people we'd been inspired to start YC to fund. I don't think the startup sense of the word "pivot" had been invented yet, but we wanted to fund and , so if their idea was bad, they'd have to work on something else. And I knew what else. In there was a site called Delicious where you could save links. It had a page called that listed the most-saved links, and people were using this page as a de facto Reddit. I knew because a lot of the traffic to my site was coming from it. There needed to be something like but designed for sharing links instead of being a byproduct of saving them. So I called and and said that we liked them, just not their idea, so we'd fund them if they'd work on something else. They were on the train home to at that point. They got off at the next station and got on the next train north, and by were committed to working on what's now called . They would have liked to call it Snoo, as in "What snoo?" But was too expensive, so they settled for calling the mascot and picked a name for the site that wasn't registered. Early on was just a provisional name, or so they told me at least, but it's probably too late to change it now. As with all the really great startups, there's an uncannily close match between the company and the founders. in particular. Reddit has a certain personality - curious, skeptical, ready to be amused - and that personality is 's. will roll his eyes at this, but he's an intellectual; he's interested in ideas for their own sake. That was how he came to be in that audience in in the first place. He knew me because he was interested in a programming language I've written about called Lisp, and Lisp is one of those languages few people learn except out of intellectual curiosity. 's kind of vacuum-cleaner curiosity is exactly what you want when you're starting a site that's a list of links to literally anything interesting. was not a big fan of authority, so he also liked the idea of a site without editors. In the top forum for programmers was a site called Slashdot. It was a lot like , except the stories on the frontpage were chosen by human moderators. And though they did a good job, that one small difference turned out to be a big difference. Being driven by user submissions meant was fresher than Slashdot. News there was newer, and users will always go where the newest news is. I pushed the Reddits to launch fast. A version one didn't need to be more than a couple hundred lines of code. How could that take or two to build? And they did launch comparatively fast, into the first YC batch. The first users were , , me, and some of their YC batchmates and college friends. It turns out you don't need that many users to collect a decent list of interesting links, especially if you have multiple accounts per user. Reddit got two more people from their YC batch: and , and they too were unusually smart. was just finishing his PhD in physics at Harvard. was younger, a college freshman, and even more anti-authority than . It's not exaggerating to describe him as a martyr for what authority later did to him. Slowly but inexorably Reddit's traffic grew. At first the numbers were so small they were hard to distinguish from background noise. But within it was clear that there was a core of real users returning regularly to the site. And although all kinds of things have happened to the company in since, the site never looked back. Reddit the site (and now app) is such a fundamentally useful thing that it's almost unkillable. Which is why, despite a long stretch after left when the management strategy ranged from benign neglect to spectacular blunders, traffic just kept growing. You can't do that with most companies. Most companies you take your eye off the ball for and you're in deep trouble. But was special, and when came back in , I knew the world was in for a surprise. People thought they had Reddit's number: one of the players in , but not one of the big ones. But those who knew what had been going on behind the scenes knew there was more to the story than this. If Reddit could grow to the size it had with management that was harmless at best, what could it do if came back? We now know the answer to that question. Or at least a lower bound on the answer. is not out of ideas yet.


The Best Essay March 2024 Despite its title this isn't meant to be the best essay. My goal here is to figure out what the best essay would be like. It would be well-written, but you can write well about any topic. What made it special would be what it was about. Obviously some topics would be better than others. It probably wouldn't be about this 's lipstick colors. But it wouldn't be vaporous talk about elevated themes either. A good essay has to be surprising. It has to tell people something they don't already know. The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about. That may sound obvious, but it has some unexpected consequences. One is that science enters the picture like an elephant stepping into a rowboat. For example, first described the idea of natural selection in an essay written in . Talk about an important topic you could tell people something surprising about. If that's the test of a great essay, this was surely the best one written in . And indeed, the best possible essay at any given time would usually be one describing the most important scientific or technological discovery it was possible to make. [ 1 ] Another unexpected consequence: I imagined when I started writing this that the best essay would be fairly timeless - that the best essay you could write in would be much the same as the best one you could write now. But in fact the opposite seems to be true. It might be true that the best painting would be timeless in this sense. But it wouldn't be impressive to write an essay introducing natural selection now. The best essay now would be one describing a great discovery we didn't yet know about. If the question of how to write the best possible essay reduces to the question of how to make great discoveries, then I started with the wrong question. Perhaps what this exercise shows is that we shouldn't waste our time writing essays but instead focus on making discoveries in some specific domain. But I'm interested in essays and what can be done with them, so I want to see if there's some other question I could have asked. There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the one I started with. Instead of asking what would the best essay be? I should have asked how do you write essays well? Though these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer to the first question, as we've seen, isn't really about essay writing. The second question forces it to be. Writing essays, at its best, is a way of discovering ideas. How do you do that well? How do you discover by writing? An essay should ordinarily start with what I'm going to call a question, though I mean this in a very general sense: it doesn't have to be a question grammatically, just something that acts like one in the sense that it spurs some response. How do you get this initial question? It probably won't work to choose some important-sounding topic at random and go at it. Professional traders won't even trade unless they have what they call an edge - a convincing story about why in some class of trades they'll win more than they lose. Similarly, you shouldn't attack a topic unless you have a way in - some new insight about it or way of approaching it. You don't need to have a complete thesis; you just need some kind of gap you can explore. In fact, merely having questions about something other people take for granted can be edge enough. If you come across a question that's sufficiently puzzling, it could be worth exploring even if it doesn't seem very momentous. Many an important discovery has been made by pulling on a thread that seemed insignificant at first. How can they all be finches? [ 2 ] Once you've got a question, then what? You start thinking out loud about it. Not literally out loud, but you commit to a specific string of words in response, as you would if you were talking. This initial response is usually mistaken or incomplete. Writing converts your ideas from vague to bad. But that's a step forward, because once you can see the brokenness, you can fix it. Perhaps beginning writers are alarmed at the thought of starting with something mistaken or incomplete, but you shouldn't be, because this is why essay writing works. Forcing yourself to commit to some specific string of words gives you a starting point, and if it's wrong, you'll see that when you reread it. At least half of essay writing is rereading what you've written and asking is this correct and complete? You have to be very strict when rereading, not just because you want to keep yourself honest, but because a gap between your response and the truth is often a sign of new ideas to be discovered. The prize for being strict with what you've written is not just refinement. When you take a roughly correct answer and try to make it exactly right, sometimes you find that you can't, and that the reason is that you were depending on a false assumption. And when you discard it, the answer turns out to be completely different. [ 3 ] Ideally the response to a question is two things: the first step in a process that converges on the truth, and a source of additional questions (in my very general sense of the word). So the process continues recursively, as response spurs response. [ 4 ] Usually there are several possible responses to a question, which means you're traversing a tree. But essays are linear, not tree-shaped, which means you have to choose one branch to follow at each point. How do you choose? Usually you should follow whichever offers the greatest combination of generality and novelty. I don't consciously rank branches this way; I just follow whichever seems most exciting; but generality and novelty are what make a branch exciting. [ 5 ] If you're willing to do a lot of rewriting, you don't have to guess right. You can follow a branch and see how it turns out, and if it isn't good enough, cut it and backtrack. I do this all the time. In this essay I've already cut a 17-paragraph subtree, in addition to countless shorter ones. Maybe I'll reattach it at the end, or boil it down to a footnote, or spin it off as its own essay; we'll see. [ 6 ] In general you want to be quick to cut. One of the most dangerous temptations in writing (and in software and painting) is to keep something that isn't right, just because it contains a few good bits or cost you a lot of effort. The most surprising new question being thrown off at this point is does it really matter what the initial question is? If the space of ideas is highly connected, it shouldn't, because you should be able to get from any question to the most valuable ones in a few hops. And we see evidence that it's highly connected in the way, for example, that people who are obsessed with some topic can turn any conversation toward it. But that only works if you know where you want to go, and you don't in an essay. That's the whole point. You don't want to be the obsessive conversationalist, or all your essays will be about the same thing. [ 7 ] The other reason the initial question matters is that you usually feel somewhat obliged to stick to it. I don't think about this when I decide which branch to follow. I just follow novelty and generality. Sticking to the question is enforced later, when I notice I've wandered too far and have to backtrack. But I think this is the optimal solution. You don't want the hunt for novelty and generality to be constrained in the moment. Go with it and see what you get. [ 8 ] Since the initial question does constrain you, in the best case it sets an upper bound on the quality of essay you'll write. If you do as well as you possibly can on the chain of thoughts that follow from the initial question, the initial question itself is the only place where there's room for variation. It would be a mistake to let this make you too conservative though, because you can't predict where a question will lead. Not if you're doing things right, because doing things right means making discoveries, and by definition you can't predict those. So the way to respond to this situation is not to be cautious about which initial question you choose, but to write a lot of essays. Essays are for taking risks. Almost any question can get you a good essay. Indeed, it took some effort to think of a sufficiently unpromising topic in the third paragraph, because any essayist's first impulse on hearing that the best essay couldn't be about x would be to try to write it. But if most questions yield good essays, only some yield great ones. Can we predict which questions will yield great essays? Considering how long I've been writing essays, it's alarming how novel that question feels. One thing I like in an initial question is outrageousness. I love questions that seem naughty in some way - for example, by seeming counterintuitive or overambitious or heterodox. Ideally all three. This essay is an example. Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another. And thinking about how to do something so ambitious is close enough to doing it that it holds your attention. I like to start an essay with a gleam in my eye. This could be just a taste of mine, but there's one aspect of it that probably isn't: to write a really good essay on some topic, you have to be interested in it. A good writer can write well about anything, but to stretch for the novel insights that are the raison d'etre of the essay, you have to care. If caring about it is one of the criteria for a good initial question, then the optimal question varies from person to person. It also means you're more likely to write great essays if you care about a lot of different things. The more curious you are, the greater the probable overlap between the set of things you're curious about and the set of topics that yield great essays. What other qualities would a great initial question have? It's probably good if it has implications in a lot of different areas. And I find it's a good sign if it's one that people think has already been thoroughly explored. But the truth is that I've barely thought about how to choose initial questions, because I rarely do it. I rarely choose what to write about; I just start thinking about something, and sometimes it turns into an essay. Am I going to stop writing essays about whatever I happen to be thinking about and instead start working my way through some systematically generated list of topics? That doesn't sound like much fun. And yet I want to write good essays, and if the initial question matters, I should care about it. Perhaps the answer is to go one step earlier: to write about whatever pops into your head, but try to ensure that what pops into your head is good. Indeed, now that I think about it, this has to be the answer, because a mere list of topics wouldn't be any use if you didn't have edge with any of them. To start writing an essay, you need a topic plus some initial insight about it, and you can't generate those systematically. If only. [ 9 ] You can probably cause yourself to have more of them, though. The quality of the ideas that come out of your head depends on what goes in, and you can improve that in two dimensions, breadth and depth. You can't learn everything, so getting breadth implies learning about topics that are very different from one another. When I tell people about my book-buying trips to Hay and they ask what I buy books about, I usually feel a bit sheepish answering, because the topics seem like a laundry list of unrelated subjects. But perhaps that's actually optimal in this business. You can also get ideas by talking to people, by doing and building things, and by going places and seeing things. I don't think it's important to talk to new people so much as the sort of people who make you have new ideas. I get more new ideas after talking for with than from talking to 20 new smart people. I know because that's what a block of office at Y Combinator consists of. While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes from doing. The way to really learn about some domain is to have to solve problems in it. Though this could take the form of writing, I suspect that to be a good essayist you also have to do, or have done, some other kind of work. That may not be true for most other fields, but essay writing is different. You could spend half your time working on something else and be net ahead, so long as it was hard. I'm not proposing that as a recipe so much as an encouragement to those already doing it. If you've spent all your life so far working on other things, you're already halfway there. Though of course to be good at writing you have to like it, and if you like writing you'd probably have spent at least some time doing it. Everything I've said about initial questions applies also to the questions you encounter in writing the essay. They're the same thing; every subtree of an essay is usually a shorter essay, just as every subtree of a Calder mobile is a smaller mobile. So any technique that gets you good initial questions also gets you good whole essays. At some point the cycle of question and response reaches what feels like a natural end. Which is a little suspicious; shouldn't every answer suggest more questions? I think what happens is that you start to feel sated. Once you've covered enough interesting ground, you start to lose your appetite for new questions. Which is just as well, because the reader is probably feeling sated too. And it's not lazy to stop asking questions, because you could instead be asking the initial question of a new essay. That's the ultimate source of drag on the connectedness of ideas: the discoveries you make along the way. If you discover enough starting from question A, you'll never make it to question Though if you keep writing essays you'll gradually fix this problem by burning off such discoveries. So bizarrely enough, writing lots of essays makes it as if the space of ideas were more highly connected. When a subtree comes to an end, you can do one of two things. You can either stop, or pull the Cubist trick of laying separate subtrees end to end by returning to a question you skipped earlier. Usually it requires some sleight of hand to make the essay flow continuously at this point, but not this time. This time I actually need an example of the phenomenon. For example, we discovered earlier that the best possible essay wouldn't usually be timeless in the way the best painting would. This seems surprising enough to be worth investigating further. There are two senses in which an essay can be timeless: to be about a matter of permanent importance, and always to have the same effect on readers. With art these two senses blend together. Art that looked beautiful to the ancient still looks beautiful to us. But with essays the two senses diverge, because essays teach, and you can't teach people something they already know. Natural selection is certainly a matter of permanent importance, but an essay explaining it couldn't have the same effect on us that it would have had on 's contemporaries, precisely because his ideas were so successful that everyone already knows about them. [ 10 ] I imagined when I started writing this that the best possible essay would be timeless in the stricter, evergreen sense: that it would contain some deep, timeless wisdom that would appeal equally to and . That doesn't seem to be true. But if the best possible essay wouldn't usually be timeless in this stricter sense, what would it take to write essays that were? The answer to that turns out to be very strange: to be the evergreen kind of timeless, an essay has to be ineffective, in the sense that its discoveries aren't assimilated into our shared culture. Otherwise there will be nothing new in it for the second generation of readers. If you want to surprise readers not just now but in the future as well, you have to write essays that won't stick - essays that, no matter how good they are, won't become part of what people in the future learn before they read them. [ 11 ] I can imagine several ways to do that. One would be to write about things people never learn. For example, it's a long-established pattern for ambitious people to chase after various types of prizes, and only later, perhaps too late, to realize that some of them weren't worth as much as they thought. If you write about that, you can be confident of a conveyor belt of future readers to be surprised by it. Ditto if you write about the tendency of the inexperienced to overdo things - of young engineers to produce overcomplicated solutions, for example. There are some kinds of mistakes people never learn to avoid except by making them. Any of those should be a timeless topic. Sometimes when we're slow to grasp things it's not just because we're obtuse or in denial but because we've been deliberately lied to. There are a lot of things adults lie to kids about, and when you reach adulthood, they don't take you aside and hand you a list of them. They don't remember which lies they told you, and most were implicit anyway. So contradicting such lies will be a source of surprises for as long as adults keep telling them. Sometimes it's systems that lie to you. For example, the educational systems in most countries train you to win by hacking the test . But that's not how you win at the most important real-world tests, and after of training, this is hard for new arrivals in the real world to grasp. Helping them overcome such institutional lies will work as long as the institutions remain broken. [ 12 ] Another recipe for timelessness is to write about things readers already know, but in much more detail than can be transmitted culturally. "Everyone knows," for example, that it can be rewarding to have kids . But till you have them you don't know precisely what forms that takes, and even then much of what you know you may never have put into words. I've written about all these kinds of topics. But I didn't do it in a deliberate attempt to write essays that were timeless in the stricter sense. And indeed, the fact that this depends on one's ideas not sticking suggests that it's not worth making a deliberate attempt to. You should write about topics of timeless importance, yes, but if you do such a good job that your conclusions stick and future generations find your essay obvious instead of novel, so much the better. You've crossed into territory. Writing about topics of timeless importance is an instance of something even more general, though: breadth of applicability. And there are more kinds of breadth than chronological - applying to lots of different fields, for example. So breadth is the ultimate aim. I already aim for it. Breadth and novelty are the two things I'm always chasing. But I'm glad I understand where timelessness fits. I understand better where a lot of things fit now. This essay has been a kind of tour of essay writing. I started out hoping to get advice about topics; if you assume good writing, the only thing left to differentiate the best essay is its topic. And I did get advice about topics: discover natural selection. Yeah, that would be nice. But when you step back and ask what's the best you can do short of making some great discovery like that, the answer turns out to be about procedure. Ultimately the quality of an essay is a function of the ideas discovered in it, and the way you get them is by casting a wide net for questions and then being very exacting with the answers. The most striking feature of this map of essay writing are the alternating stripes of inspiration and effort required. The questions depend on inspiration, but the answers can be got by sheer persistence. You don't have to get an answer right the first time, but there's no excuse for not getting it right eventually, because you can keep rewriting till you do. And this is not just a theoretical possibility. It's a pretty accurate description of the way I work. I'm rewriting as we speak. But although I wish I could say that writing great essays depends mostly on effort, in the limit case it's inspiration that makes the difference. In the limit case, the questions are the harder thing to get. That pool has no bottom. How to get more questions? That is the most important question of all. Notes [ 1 ] There might be some resistance to this conclusion on the grounds that some of these discoveries could only be understood by a small number of readers. But you get into all sorts of difficulties if you want to disqualify essays on this account. How do you decide where the cutoff should be? If a virus kills off everyone except a handful of people sequestered at , could an essay that had been disqualified now be eligible? Etc. 's essay was derived from an earlier version written in . Extracts from it were published in . [ 2 ] When you find yourself very curious about an apparently minor question, that's an exciting sign. Evolution has designed you to pay attention to things that matter. So when you're very curious about something random, that could mean you've unconsciously noticed it's less random than it seems. [ 3 ] Corollary: If you're not intellectually honest, your writing won't just be biased, but also boring, because you'll miss all the ideas you'd have discovered if you pushed for the truth. [ 4 ] Sometimes this process begins before you start writing. Sometimes you've already figured out the first few things you want to say. Schoolchildren are often taught they should decide everything they want to say, and write this down as an outline before they start writing the essay itself. Maybe that's a good way to get them started - or not, I don't know - but it's antithetical to the spirit of essay writing. The more detailed your outline, the less your ideas can benefit from the sort of discovery that essays are for. [ 5 ] The problem with this type of "greedy" algorithm is that you can end up on a local maximum. If the most valuable question is preceded by a boring one, you'll overlook it. But I can't imagine a better strategy. There's no lookahead except by writing. So use a greedy algorithm and a lot of time. [ 6 ] I ended up reattaching the first 5 of the 17 paragraphs, and discarding the rest. [ 7 ] confessed to making use of this phenomenon when taking exams at . He had in his head a standard essay about some general literary topic, and he would find a way to turn the exam question toward it and then just reproduce it again. Strictly speaking it's the graph of ideas that would be highly connected, not the space, but that usage would confuse people who don't know graph theory, whereas people who do know it will get what I mean if I say "space". [ 8 ] Too far doesn't depend just on the distance from the original topic. It's more like that distance divided by the value of whatever I've discovered in the subtree. [ 9 ] Or can you? I should try writing about this. Even if the chance of succeeding is small, the expected value is huge. [ 10 ] There was a vogue in for saying that the purpose of art was also to teach. Some artists tried to justify their work by explaining that their goal was not to produce something good, but to challenge our preconceptions about art. And to be fair, art can teach somewhat. The ancient ' naturalistic sculptures represented a new idea, and must have been extra exciting to contemporaries on that account. But they still look good to us. [ 11 ] caused huge controversy in with his ideas about "trial marriage." But they make boring reading now, because they prevailed. "Trial marriage" is what we call "dating." [ 12 ] If you'd asked me , I'd have predicted that schools would continue to teach hacking the test for . But now it seems plausible that students will soon be taught individually by AIs, and that exams will be replaced by ongoing, invisible micro-assessments. Thanks to , , , , , and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.


How to Get New Ideas January 2023 ( Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. This is what I would have said.) The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you'll notice it's full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds.


The Need to Read November 2022 In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer. That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just because it would be hard to build a replacement for reading, but because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write. [ 1 ] Would that matter? If we replaced reading, would anyone need to be good at writing? The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them. A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery. Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you'll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing . There are of course kinds of thinking that can be done without writing. If you don't need to go too deeply into a problem, you can solve it without writing. If you're thinking about how two pieces of machinery should fit together, writing about it probably won't help much. And when a problem can be described formally, you can sometimes solve it in your head. But if you need to solve a complicated, ill-defined problem, it will almost always help to write about it. Which in turn means that someone who's not good at writing will almost always be at a disadvantage in solving such problems. You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things. [ 2 ] People who just want information may find other ways to get it. But people who want to have ideas can't afford to. Notes [ 1 ] Audiobooks can give you examples of good writing, but having them read to you doesn't teach you as much about writing as reading them yourself. [ 2 ] By "good at reading" I don't mean good at the mechanics of reading. You don't have to be good at extracting words from the page so much as extracting meaning from the words. Translation Chinese Translation Italian Translation French Translation


What You (Want to)* Want Since I was about 9 I've been puzzled by the apparent contradiction between being made of matter that behaves in a predictable way, and the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I wanted. At the time I had a self-interested motive for exploring the question. At that age (like most succeeding ages) I was always in trouble with the authorities, and it seemed to me that there might possibly be some way to get out of trouble by arguing that I wasn't responsible for my actions. I gradually lost hope of that, but the puzzle remained: How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do? [ 1 ] The best way to explain the answer may be to start with a slightly wrong version, and then fix it. The wrong version is: You can do what you want, but you can't want what you want. Yes, you can control what you do, but you'll do what you want, and you can't control that. The reason this is mistaken is that people do sometimes change what they want. People who don't want to want something - drug addicts, for example - can sometimes make themselves stop wanting it. And people who want to want something - who want to like classical music, or broccoli - sometimes succeed. So we modify our initial statement: You can do what you want, but you can't want to want what you want. That's still not quite true. It's possible to change what you want to want. I can imagine someone saying "I decided to stop wanting to like classical music." But we're getting closer to the truth. It's rare for people to change what they want to want, and the more "want to"s we add, the rarer it gets. We can get arbitrarily close to a true statement by adding more "want to"s in much the same way we can get arbitrarily close to 1 by adding more 9s to a string of 9s following a decimal point. In practice three or four "want to"s must surely be enough. It's hard even to envision what it would mean to change what you want to want to want to want, let alone actually do it. So one way to express the correct answer is to use a regular expression. You can do what you want, but there's some statement of the form "you can't (want to)* want what you want" that's true. Ultimately you get back to a want that you don't control. [ 2 ] Notes [ 1 ] I didn't know when I was that matter might behave randomly, but I don't think it affects the problem much. Randomness destroys the ghost in the machine as effectively as determinism. [ 2 ] If you don't like using an expression, you can make the same point using higher-order desires: There is some n such that you don't control your nth-order desires. Thanks to , , , and for reading drafts of this. Translation


Alien Truth If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd share certain truths in common with us. The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're true by definition. Ditto for the truths of physics; the mass of a carbon atom would be the same on their planet. But I think we'd share other truths with aliens besides the truths of math and physics, and that it would be worthwhile to think about what these might be. For example, I think we'd share the principle that a controlled experiment testing some hypothesis entitles us to have proportionally increased belief in it. It seems fairly likely, too, that it would be true for aliens that one can get better at something by practicing. We'd probably share Occam's razor. There doesn't seem anything specifically human about any of these ideas. We can only guess, of course. We can't say for sure what forms intelligent life might take. Nor is it my goal here to explore that question, interesting though it is. The point of the idea of alien truth is not that it gives us a way to speculate about what forms intelligent life might take, but that it gives us a threshold, or more precisely a target, for truth. If you're trying to find the most general truths short of those of math or physics, then presumably they'll be those we'd share in common with other forms of intelligent life. Alien truth will work best as a heuristic if we err on the side of generosity. If an idea might plausibly be relevant to aliens, that's enough. Justice, for example. I wouldn't want to bet that all intelligent beings would understand the concept of justice, but I wouldn't want to bet against it either. The idea of alien truth is related to Erdos's idea of God's book. He used to describe a particularly good proof as being in God's book, the implication being (a) that a sufficiently good proof was more discovered than invented, and (b) that its goodness would be universally recognized. If there's such a thing as alien truth, then there's more in God's book than math. What should we call the search for alien truth? The obvious choice is "philosophy." Whatever else philosophy includes, it should probably include this. I'm fairly sure would have thought so. One could even make the case that the search for alien truth is, if not an accurate description of philosophy, a good definition for it. I.e. that it's what people who call themselves philosophers should be doing, whether or not they currently are. But I'm not wedded to that; doing it is what matters, not what we call it. We may one day have something like alien life among us in the form of AIs. And that may in turn allow us to be precise about what truths an intelligent being would have to share with us. We might find, for example, that it's impossible to create something we'd consider intelligent that doesn't use Occam's razor. We might one day even be able to prove that. But though this sort of research would be very interesting, it's not necessary for our purposes, or even the same field; the goal of philosophy, if we're going to call it that, would be to see what ideas we come up with using alien truth as a target, not to say precisely where the threshold of it is. Those two questions might converge, but they'll converge from quite different directions, and till they do, it would be too constraining to restrict ourselves to thinking only about things we're certain would be alien truths. Especially since this will probably be one of those areas where the best guesses turn out to be surprisingly close to optimal. (Let's see if that one does.) Whatever we call it, the attempt to discover alien truths would be a worthwhile undertaking. And curiously enough, that is itself probably an alien truth. Thanks to , , , , and for reading drafts of this.


Putting Ideas into Words Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write them. Once you publish something, the convention is that whatever you wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your ideas, and now you've expressed them. But you know this isn't true. You know that putting your ideas into words changed them. And not just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead. It's not just having to commit your ideas to specific words that makes writing so exacting. The real test is reading what you've written. You have to pretend to be a neutral reader who knows nothing of what's in your head, only what you wrote. When he reads what you wrote, does it seem correct? Does it seem complete? If you make an effort, you can read your writing as if you were a complete stranger, and when you do the news is usually bad. It takes me many cycles before I can get an essay past the stranger. But the stranger is rational, so you always can, if you ask him what he needs. If he's not satisfied because you failed to mention x or didn't qualify some sentence sufficiently, then you mention x or add more qualifications. Happy now? It may cost you some nice sentences, but you have to resign yourself to that. You just have to make them as good as you can and still satisfy the stranger. This much, I assume, won't be that controversial. I think it will accord with the experience of anyone who has tried to write about anything nontrivial. There may exist people whose thoughts are so perfectly formed that they just flow straight into words. But I've never known anyone who could do this, and if I met someone who said they could, it would seem evidence of their limitations rather than their ability. Indeed, this is a trope in movies: the guy who claims to have a plan for doing some difficult thing, and who when questioned further, taps his head and says "It's all up here." Everyone watching the movie knows what that means. At best the plan is vague and incomplete. Very likely there's some undiscovered flaw that invalidates it completely. At best it's a plan for a plan. In precisely defined domains it's possible to form complete ideas in your head. People can play chess in their heads, for example. And mathematicians can do some amount of math in their heads, though they don't seem to feel sure of a proof over a certain length till they write it down. But this only seems possible with ideas you can express in a formal language. [ 1 ] Arguably what such people are doing is putting ideas into words in their heads. I can to some extent write essays in my head. I'll sometimes think of a paragraph while walking or lying in bed that survives nearly unchanged in the final version. But really I'm writing when I do this. I'm doing the mental part of writing; my fingers just aren't moving as I do it. [ 2 ] You can know a great deal about something without writing about it. Can you ever know so much that you wouldn't learn more from trying to explain what you know? I don't think so. I've written about at least two subjects I know well - Lisp hacking and startups - and in both cases I learned a lot from writing about them. In both cases there were things I didn't consciously realize till I had to explain them. And I don't think my experience was anomalous. A great deal of knowledge is unconscious, and experts have if anything a higher proportion of unconscious knowledge than beginners. I'm not saying that writing is the best way to explore all ideas. If you have ideas about architecture, presumably the best way to explore them is to build actual buildings. What I'm saying is that however much you learn from exploring ideas in other ways, you'll still learn new things from writing about them. Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course. You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my experience, writing is the stricter test. You have to commit to a single, optimal sequence of words. Less can go unsaid when you don't have tone of voice to carry meaning. And you can focus in a way that would seem excessive in conversation. I'll often spend on an essay and reread drafts 50 times. If you did that in conversation it would seem evidence of some kind of mental disorder. If you're lazy, of course, writing and talking are equally useless. But if you want to push yourself to get things right, writing is the steeper hill. [ 3 ] The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. It feels to them as if they do, especially if they're not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you discover they're not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it. Putting ideas into words is certainly no guarantee that they'll be right. Far from it. But though it's not a sufficient condition, it is a necessary one. Notes [ 1 ] Machinery and circuits are formal languages. [ 2 ] I thought of this sentence as I was walking down the street in . [ 3 ] There are two senses of talking to someone: a strict sense in which the conversation is verbal, and a more general sense in which it can take any form, including writing. In the limit case (e.g. Seneca's letters), conversation in the latter sense becomes essay writing. It can be very useful to talk (in either sense) with other people as you're writing something. But a verbal conversation will never be more exacting than when you're talking about something you're writing. Thanks to , , and for reading drafts of this. Translation