I don't expect essays to be scientific papers. The term comes from the French verb essayer 'to attempt, to try'. It's a genre widely known for being exactly that: a (mostly) brief rundown of ideas, without an exhaustive empirical demonstration being necessary nor expected.
On top of that, it's a ~1500-word blog post on his own website. Get real.
Who cares? If your argument is that essays aren't concerned with facts, then that's a great argument for ignoring the entire genre of essays. Ideas without basis in reality aren't worth anything.
Luckily, some essayists are concerned with facts, so we don't have to throw out the whole genre. But we should absolutely ignore the essays that don't concern themselves with facts.
> If your argument is that essays aren't concerned with facts, then that's a great argument for ignoring the entire genre of essays. [...] Luckily, some essayists are concerned with facts, so we don't have to throw out the whole genre. But we should absolutely ignore the essays that don't concern themselves with facts.
>If your argument is <something undesirable or unreasonable>, then <slippery slope>. Luckily, <me and the majority or authority figures disagree with you>, so <positive outcome>.
That's a straw man fallacy if I've ever seen one. It's a textbook example. Congratulations.
My reply to another user regarding that:
>Paul Graham, on the other hand, is just publishing a simple essay on his very own website; of course I don't expect an exhaustive empirical demonstration on his part, though any kind of factual data can be welcome.
Look, it's not a binary decision (facts/no facts), but a qualitative distinction: it's how I expect facts--whatever those are, but that's another discussion--to be dealt with in a short essay on a personal blog, instead of expecting or wanting essays to be deliberately unconcerned with them.
> That's a straw man fallacy if I've ever seen one. It's a textbook example. Congratulations.
Everyone can read the conversation and see what was said.
> Look, it's not a binary decision (facts/no facts), but a qualitative distinction: it's how I expect facts--whatever those are, but that's another discussion--to be dealt with in a short essay on a personal blog, instead of expecting or wanting essays to be deliberately unconcerned with them.
Okay, if that's what you're saying, I didn't understand that previously, and I'll take some blame for thinking I understood instead of asking clarifying questions.
But, I'll say, the qualitative discussion of "how facts are dealt with" is pretty irrelevant if there aren't any facts to deal with. It's very much not clear that much of PG says in this essay is based in facts at all. Even if you want to argue that quality of evidence is a spectrum, the can still be a 0 value on that spectrum.
Is there not a spectrum of levels of accuracy/voracity in essays? Is it not valid to have a preference for authors alignments to parts of that spectrum?
Description of the world seems necessarily a compression of facts. I read this critique as stating more or less, "I find that PG tends to bias the data selected for the compression to support the conclusions he is inclined to promote".
I agree that essays have a wider allowable not-grounded-in-demonstrable-reality-ness compared to scientific papers but if an author seems to one to cherry pick, it seems reasonable for the one to declare that as a criticism of the author.
This is an important thing to know, especially since those compression statements are usually the premises the theses of the essays depend.
I don't think scientific papers are the only place that should be expected to, when purporting something as fact, be well... factual.
Funny enough, all throughout my many years in academia I had to provide sources for anything I stated as a fact in an essay (including opinion pieces).
I should of just let my professors know that I wasn't providing them a scientific paper -- I was just attempting/trying to provide a brief rundown of ideas and they were wrong to expect empirical evidence of anything I claimed as fact.
> I hope your "many years in academia" weren't spent in anything even remotely related to linguistics. And that your editors there corrected your grammar, as well.
I don't expect essays to be scientific papers. The term comes from the French verb essayer 'to attempt, to try'. It's a genre widely known for being exactly that: a (mostly) brief rundown of ideas, without an exhaustive empirical demonstration being necessary nor expected.
On top of that, it's a ~1500-word blog post on his own website. Get real.