Writing tells me what I think - Tuesday, 7 September 2004
The programmer Paul Graham made his fortune selling Viaweb to Yahoo back in the dot-com boom, so now he writes programming languages, textbooks and essays. Not just any old essays either; Graham's essays have three unusual characteristics:
- He writes like my idea of a writer: clear, precise, vivid on topics that most people would expect to be bored by. Think Asimov on Chemistry.
- He writes about thinking - about taboos, about the similarities between programming and painting, about why nerds are unpopular.
- He influences. His essay A Plan For Spam is one of the most influential essays of the past decade: he handed technologists an actionable, fleshed-out, you-can-believe-it strategy to suppress a plague that was strangling email. Within a few months independent programmers had turned that plan into software I can see processing my email as I write this sentence.
Now Graham has written an essay about essay-writing, called The Age of the Essay. In it, he crystallises something I was planning to set out myself: why I read and write essays. Irritatingly, he says it far better than I would have done if I'd started from scratch:
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history ... to Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.
In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.
But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.
I hate writing, a fact that surprises anyone who knows that I am a part-time writer and used to be a full-time one. Many writers love writing. As a young newspaper journalist I had a colleague, Andrew Mole, who had moved into journalism from the police force. Andrew had notebooks full of the stuff he'd written from his experiences as a cop around Wallaroo in rural South Australia. Andrew was a compulsive writer. I have never so much as kept a diary.
I write for only one reason: so that I know what I think.
Paul Graham: The Age of the Essay
Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters (Amazon)
Permanent linkBelieving vs Knowing - Sunday, 5 September 2004
I took the opportunity last Saturday night to talk with an epidemiologist who'd spent time doctoring in Mozambique in the 1980s. I asked him what the experience had taught him.
"Everything,' he replied. "Everything I know now, I learnt there".
Mozambique was a tough country in the 1980s: on top of poverty, malnutrition and endemic diseases it featured a civil war. Doctoring there required him to break medicine down to its essential elements. But it's in that sort of environment that you discover why the essentials of any field are what they are. You find out things for sure. Rather than having learnt and believing, you know.
My epidemoiologist friend told me a story about a friend looking through a telescope at the moons of Jupiter. "I used to believe that the planets went around the Sun and the moons went around the planets," the friend told him after a few minutes. "Now I know they do."
This difference between believing and knowing is vast. You learn a lot reading books, in courses, talking to people. It takes a different, more intense experience to create something you know, something that you'll stand up and defend. But these are the experiences worth seeking out.
Why did the CIA miss 9/11? - Monday, 26 April 2004
Why did US intelligence organisations not anticipate the September 11 2001 attacks on New York and Washington? Right now, at least three sets of explanations vie for attention:
- The CIA and FBI could have put the pieces together, but lack of focus by their political masters prevented it. The former US counter-terrorism head, Richard Clarke, puts this thesis in his book (see summary at The Road to Surfdom) and various interviews.
"I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'" - The CIA and FBI couldn't have put the pieces together: these things look predictable in hindsight, but beforehand choosing the right pieces of intelligence is like pulling needles out of a hayfield. So says the brilliant journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker piece Connecting the Dots: The paradoxes of intelligence reform:
"Their intentions didn't form a pattern. They formed a Rorschach blot. What is clear in hindsight is rarely clear before the fact." - The CIA and FBI could have put the pieces together, but poor analysis prevented it. People were over-confident and didn't plan for different scenarios. Critical thinking expert Paul Monk puts this thesis at Austhink , referring to the second thesis as an "alibi".
The third thesis is perhaps the most interesting, in part because it may hold the greatest hope of long-term change.
The third thesis is also the least developed, Paul Monk needs to develop it further. Worse, based on much of the recent reporting on US decision-making before and after the attacks, it looks simply wrong.
Nevertheless, Monk's essay is as interesting as his other work.
