>The best possible essay at any given time would usually be one describing the most important scientific or technological discovery
That sounds like a trekie concluding that the best literature is "Star Trek" licensed novels...
Sorry, but PG didn't invent or define the essay.
It is a form that is centuries old (and in prior incarnations, millenia old) and have its own long cultural history, classics, and canon, few of the latter being about "important scientific or technological discoveries".
Maybe if instead of "best" he changed it to "most impactful scientifically" he'd have a point.
I graded a lot of humanities papers in a previous career. One of the weirder genres of bad paper would come from very smart computer science/math/physics majors who didn’t have time to do any of the assigned reading and just kind of tried to answer the prompt from first principles without citing any primary sources or other scholarship.
This feels like that paper, except the author isn’t a stressed-out college sophomore but a 59 year old “thought leader” with a large audience who gets Sam Altman to read his drafts. No attempt to engage with the history of the genre at all, or with the many other writers who have considered the form, and no examples cited except a famous scientific article by Darwin.
I never saw this essay before. Thank you to share. A choice quote:
> I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond.
> The whole genre reminds me of the the wooly business books one comes across at airports ("Management secrets of Gengis Khan", the "Lexus and the Olive Tree") that milk a bad analogy for two hundred pages to arrive at the conclusion that people just like the author are pretty great.
Definitely a fun read, but the author has an axe to grind with the references to "who gets bitches" and the unnecessary footnotes. Take what you will from it.
There's no literal quote about "who gets bitches" or the word bitch at all in the post though. What you refer to is a paragraph about the distinction between programming and painting (meant as a joke counter-argument to PG's essay about how hacking is essentially like painting), which opens like: "Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do".
The author (who is on HN, btw, too) does go into a more substantial difference of the nature of the two endeavours too, but the whole post is in a jocking tone. And yes, it has "an axe to grind", but it's not about who gets the girl. It's about taking down essays they consider pompous and self-congratulatory.
That sounds like a trekie concluding that the best literature is "Star Trek" licensed novels...
Sorry, but PG didn't invent or define the essay.
It is a form that is centuries old (and in prior incarnations, millenia old) and have its own long cultural history, classics, and canon, few of the latter being about "important scientific or technological discoveries".
Maybe if instead of "best" he changed it to "most impactful scientifically" he'd have a point.