Regarding the nobel prize quote above, while it provides some food for thought, I’m not sure what point exactly it is intended to make.
About the nobel price quote: it shows that the most powerful language is unexpected, breaks the obviousness of things, something that ancient greeks knew very well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
About the nobel prize quote, it isn’t that powerful to me because I don’t really know what it wants to say, and it didn’t lead me to any notable insight either. But maybe that’s just me.
It's about the process, not the talent. When you've carefully thought through and refined an idea to understand whether it makes sense yourself, that usually provides a lot of guidance on how you can express the idea eloquently to others. You know the questions they'll have and the answers they'll find satisfying, because you already went through the same process. When you're just tossing out your first half-baked impression, it's a lot harder to communicate it well, although some people do have the orthogonal talent of making it up on the fly.
The gap is typically that if something is written poorly we can infer the underlying thinking that went into it wasn't well enough conceived to put out high quality text. You can understand this implicitly when you think about how you would write about a topic that you barely know about vs a topic that you are so comfortable with that the writing doesn't even seem like an effort. Ironically people often don't write about the stuff they know best because they presume it's obvious - and it is, to them. And then they write about the stuff they're trying to figure out - which is poorly understood and poorly expressed.
My answer would be: "eloquence" may be a too-strong requirement, but if you can't express your ideas at least clearly, how can you be sure that they are the right ideas? Because without a detailed description that another human being can understand, this is really hard to judge. Maybe there is a lot of overlooked flaws in your flow.
I have a suspicion that there is a subset of geniuses who just intuitively "grok" some important ideas without being able to describe them to other people. Some of the autistic savants come to mind. But I am not sure if they can be induced to actually cooperate efficiently with the rest of humanity. Whatever happens in their minds, seems to be locked there.
What PG is saying is that if something is ugly, you can conclude that it's most likely wrong as well.
Attention to detail is a signal of quality, but these things are just heuristics, not reliable truths.
The article says it is ruling out both of these possibilities, as other posts elsewhere in this discussion have already pointed out.
I don't see how. Your post was disputing the claim that good design, craftsmanship, beauty, etc. are signs of correctness. And that's not the claim PG makes in the article. Your post never disputed the claim PG did make, which is that bad design and craftsmanship, ugliness, etc., are signs of lack of correctness.
The essay itself lacks anything novel, despite the rather breathless framing: “So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true.” These ideas are a couple of hundred years old at least. Kant: “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good”. This is classic Age of Enlightenment stuff, repackaged in classic Silicon Valley VC style.
but the best communication survives too because it touches universal truths by connecting them with specific real phenomena. the worst (most harmful) communication survives because it frantically goodharts our quality evaluation process, even when it contradicts truth or reality. e.g. Orwell on the good side, L Ron Hubbard on the bad side. Unfortunately these categories are often not well sorted until after the principals are all dead (probably because everyone has to die before you can tell whether the values are universal or just generationally interesting), and there's a style-bar that has to be cleared before you even get to join the canon for consideration; interestingly this this would tend to increase the illusion that style is associated with substance, especially in older writing.
But towards the end he backs away from that claim, and makes the claim I described:
"[W]hile 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."
In the light of that, and of much of the rest of the essay, I think the sentence from the start that you quote was misstated. It should have been stated as "Writing that's right is likely to sound good."
> "[W]hile 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."
What do you mean, backs away? Those aren't different claims. If writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, it is necessarily the case that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
But many people making a mistake won't show that everything anyone says is an example of that mistake. Your observation isn't relevant here, because a claim of that form hasn't been made. We don't have "not", we have "less", which behaves differently.
For the claim "f(a) > f(b) -> g(a) > g(b)", it is trivial to show that "f(a) < f(b) -> g(a) < g(b)". These two claims are identical to each other. The proof is one step long.
In the present context, we have f(x) representing "quality of the writing in x" and g(x) representing "likelihood that the ideas in x are correct".
Yes, they are. The first claim (the one he backs away from) is A implies B, where A = "this writing is beautiful" and B is "this writing is true". The second claim is Not A implies Not B. Those are not logically equivalent. The second claim is logically equivalent to B implies A, i.e., "this writing is true" implies "this writing is beautiful". But B implies A is not equivalent to A implies B.
> If writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, it is necessarily the case that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
No, it isn't. It could also be the case that both types of writing, sounding bad and not sounding bad, are less likely to be right (because, say, sophistry is very prevalent).
What is necessarily the case is that, if writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, writing that is right is less likely to sound bad. Which, as above, is not logically equivalent to "writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right".
No, it cannot be the case that every type of writing is less likely to be right. Less likely than what?
Think of it this way: some percentage of writing that sounds bad is wrong, and some percentage of writing that does not sound bad is wrong. I am simply pointing out that it is perfectly possible for both percentages to be the same, so that whether or not the writing sounds bad gives no useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
I think you are taking "less likely" too literally. PG makes it clear that he is not talking about exact mathematical functions. His intent is much better captured by treating the statements as logical implications, as I and others have been doing.
> I am simply pointing out that it is perfectly possible for both percentages to be the same
Come on. If you believe those percentages are the same, what's left of PG's claim?
> , so that whether or not the writing sounds bad gives no useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
He notes, and you stipulate, that if the writing sounds bad, that gives useful information about whether it's right or wrong.
> His intent is much better captured by treating the statements as logical implications, as I and others have been doing.
I have been treating them as logical implications. The difference is that I actually know what the implications are.
How do you think the argument "assuming badly worded papers are no more likely to be wrong than any other papers, it isn't necessarily the case that if badly worded papers are more likely to be wrong than other papers, conclusion X would follow" works? You want to use logic instead of algebra? Every conclusion follows from a contradiction.
> What is necessarily the case is that, if writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, writing that is right is less likely to sound bad.
That's true. You're 100% right about this.
But if you're able to prove it, you should be well aware that exactly the same proof will quickly show that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
> Which, as above, is not logically equivalent to "writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right".
And that, obviously, is false. They are the same statement; either is sufficient to prove the other. I don't know what happened in your comment.
It's a logical tautology, at least if we make the implications definite (i.e., "sounds bad" necessarily implies "not right", and therefore "right" necessarily implies "does not sound bad"). In other words, "A implies B" is logically equivalent to "Not B implies Not A". There's no need to give any further proof.
> you should be well aware that exactly the same proof will quickly show that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.
No, it won't. You really need to learn some basic logic.
> They are the same statement
No, they're not. Again, please learn some basic logic. "A implies B" is not logically equivalent to "B implies A". You are claiming that it is. Any basic textbook on logic will tell you that you are wrong.
I can do it for you:
+----------+--------+
| eloquent | clumsy |
+-------+----------+--------+
| true | A | B |
+-------+----------+--------+
| false | C | D |
+-------+----------+--------+
For convenience, I'll use the lowercase letters to refer to probabilities rather than counts: a = A / (A + B + C + D), b = B / (A + B + C + D), etc.
We are given the postulate "papers that sound bad [in our terminology, "clumsy"] are less likely to be true". There are two possible interpretations of this:
1. Clumsy papers are less likely to be true than the average of all papers.
2. Clumsy papers are less likely to be true than eloquent papers.
Fortunately for us, each of these implies the other, so I'll use interpretation (1), again for convenience.
We can now define our postulate precisely:
b / (b + d) < (a + b) / (a + b + c + d)
We can use basic algebra to rearrange the postulate:
b / (b + d) < (a + b) [because a + b + c + d = 1]
b < (a + b)(b + d) [because (b + d) is positive]
b < (ab + ad + b^2 + bd) [algebra]
b < b(a + b + d) + ad [algebra]
b < b(1 - c) + ad [because a + b + c + d = 1]
b < b - bc + ad [algebra]
0 < 0 - bc + ad [algebra]
bc < ad [algebra]
a / (a + c) > (a + b) / (a + b + c + d)
a / (a + c) > (a + b)
a > (a + b)(a + c)
a > a^2 + ac + ab + bc
a > a(a + c + b) + bc
a > a(1 - d) + bc
a > a - ad + bc
0 > 0 - ad + bc
ad > bc
Why did you insist - repeatedly - that a very basic and obvious fact was false? What were you thinking?
Yes, if you use some disfavored group's vernacular, there's a decent chance you also use their cultural values.
Nonsense. I've known many writers who are wonderfully eloquent at transmitting their essential message well with text, but fumble their way through live discourse as if they were high-schoolers in their first classroom presentation.
Some people just communicate better by certain means, and with writing, there's a breathing space that some can't manage with speech, in which you can better organize your otherwise interesting ideas.
"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."
In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
Hopefully that's not too much italianposting for the international audience :)