(2009-09-25) Graham Persuade Vs Discover

Paul Graham on why he doesn't write courteously. I'd rather offend people needlessly than use needless words, and you have to choose one or the other... If you want to please people who are mistaken, you can't simply tell the truth. You're always going to have to add some sort of padding to protect their misconceptions from bumping against reality... Most writers do. Most writers write to persuade, if only out of habit or politeness. But I don't write to persuade; I write to figure out (Sense Making). I write to persuade a hypothetical perfectly unbiased reader... I write code the same way I write essays, making pass after pass looking for anything I can cut. But I have a legitimate reason for doing this. You don't know what the ideas are until you get them down to the fewest words... The danger of the second paragraph is not merely that it's longer. It's that you start to lie to yourself. The ideas start to get mixed together with the spin you've added to get them past the readers' misconceptions... I think the goal of an Essay should be to discover surprising things. That's my goal, at least. And most surprising means most different from what people currently believe. So writing to persuade and writing to discover are diametrically opposed.