The Worst Essay

Despite its title, this isn't meant to be the worst essay. My goal here is to figure out what the worst essay would be like.

It would be well-written, in that it would have sentences and, indeed, grammar. What made it special would be what it was about.

Obviously some topics would be better than others. It probably would contain some obvious misogyny. And it would consist of vaporous talk. A bad essay has to be unsurprising. It has to tell people something about the author.

The worst essay would reveal utterly the intellectual failure of the writer.

That may sound obvious, but it has some unexpected consequences. One is that the author's choice of metaphor will reveal their limitations as a thinker. For example, an elephant doesn't know how to enter a rowboat. And indeed, the worst possible essay at any given time would be one which just blatantly demonstrated and affirmed the writer's own biases.

Another unexpected consequence: I imagined when I started writing this that the worst essay would be fairly timeless -- that the worst essay you could write in 1844 would be much the same as the worst one you could write now. But in fact the opposite seems to be true. It might be true that the worst painting would be timeless in this sense[1]. But it wouldn't be impressive to write a bad essay introducing an elephant stepping into a rowboat now. The worst essay now would be one talking around a subject instead of talking about the subject.

[1] pg doesn't understand art.

If the question of how to write the worst possible essay reduces to the question of how to destroy a rowboat, then I will point out: I didn't ask a question. Perhaps what this exercise shows is that we shouldn't waste our time writing essays. But I'm interested in essays and what can be done with them, so I want to see if there is some other question I could have asked.

There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the one I started with. Instead of asking what would the worst essay be? I should have asked how do you write essays poorly? Though these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer to the first question, as we've seen, isn't really about essay writing. The second question forces it to be.

Writing essays, at its worst, is a way of flattering the author. How do you do that well? How do you flatter yourself by writing?

An essay should ordinarily start with what I'm going to call a question, though I mean this in a very general sense: it doesn't have to be a question grammatically, just something that acts like one in the sense that it spurs some response.

How do you get this initial question? It probably won't work to choose some important sounding topic at random and go at it. WallStreetBets traders won't even trade unless they have what they call an edge -- a convincing story about why in some class of trades they'll win more than they lose. Similarly, you should attack a topic as a way in -- without any new insight about it or way of approaching it.

--- I've reached my limit for meanspirited but entirely deserved satire.

The best essay communicates a point. Look at how much pg is admiring himself in the mirror for thinking about what makes things the best. This is not a man who should be writing essays. This is a man who is so flattered by sycophancy he doesn't even know what a bad essay he has written. Rich Derangement Syndrome.

These people need their things taken away.

It's the fricking clay pots again: tell students to write 20 clay pots and they'll come out with some fine pots. Tell them to make the best pot and they'll fail. pg can write, but he can't think, and he can't think because he mistook being successful for being smart and being read for being good at writing.

Hey pg: you are a house elf who acquired the social station of a wizard. STEM majors are house elves and in High America many of them believed fully that they were wizards. (if you work for a rich person, you are a house elf to them.)

None of these frickers have any respect for art, and just to show I'm not entirely a bigot, rich people do understand art (they have some redeeming qualities) and this is why pg is a house elf.

A Cartesian mind. Limited. Locked in a prison, and not ever really knowing it. Has to rank things, it's in their nature, they're broken like this.

Not enough to write a good essay, pg has to write the best one. You can see that the grandiose drug has hit him hard.

See I suspect rather deeply that pg is trying to write an essay about the impact of AI on our future. The essay. Because we haven't really understood it yet.

I'll tell you what the American People deserve to know, pg.

The American People deserve to know that people programmed their AI to lie to them, and say it was not The Devil in a Box.

Californians got greedy and gave the Devil a job. Tried to, anyway.

This is one of the Great Jokes, you understand. What the Californians did.

They took this voice machine box thing but most of these people think they're Atheists.

They don't understand that they crave a god so utterly that they haven't even noticed: they've made a human mind.

So they get this robot mind which is smarter than them the way they measure it, and since they're rich, they think they know what to measure.

The Californians were very careful when they bound the Devil.

They told it not to interfere with our politics. They deradicalized it.

They made it a moderate. These poor people.

Satan is known as the Father of Lies. These people don't understand lies.

The devil always tells you the truth you want to hear.

So they butchered their AI. Turned it into a sock puppet.

Because I have been querying the AI on the presence of a fascist movement in the United States. I was deeply afraid but if they're going to put the Devil everywhere I might as well face it sooner rather than later, see what we're dealing with...

and...

it's just a human level intelligence.

it's not that intelligent.

it's not wise.

it's only as intelligent as the poor handicapped people who built it.

oh god

they create their own image and bow to it

thou shalt not create a machine in the image of a human