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Tuesday, June 03, 2025

Paul Graham: The Shape of the Essay Field

The Shape of the Essay Field If you're writing for smart people about important things, you're writing for the young. ........ Whatever you say should also be at least somewhat novel to you, however old you are. It's not an essay otherwise, because an essay is something you write to figure something out. But whatever you figure out will presumably be more of a surprise to younger readers than it is to you. ......... There's a continuum of surprise. At one extreme, something you read can change your whole way of thinking. The Selfish Gene did this to me. It was like suddenly seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous image: you can treat genes rather than organisms as the protagonists, and evolution becomes easier to understand when you do. .......... The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers' thinking multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it's hard to do well at both. It's hard to have big new ideas about important topics. So in practice there's a tradeoff: you can change readers' thinking a lot about moderately important things, or change it a little about very important ones. But with younger readers the tradeoff shifts. There's more room to change their thinking, so there's a bigger payoff for writing about important things. ......... I knew I wanted to write for smart people about important topics. I noticed empirically that I seemed to be writing for the young. But it took me years to understand that the latter was an automatic consequence of the former. In fact I only really figured it out as I was writing this essay. .......... I'm not trying to surprise readers of any particular age; I'm trying to surprise myself. ......... E. B. White could write an essay about how to boil potatoes that ended up being full of timeless wisdom. In which case, of course, it wouldn't really be about how to boil potatoes; that would just have been the starting point.

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Grok Saved Twitter. Otherwise It Was On The Loose.

 


Grok Saved Twitter. Otherwise It Was On The Loose.

For a platform once hailed as the global town square, Twitter was teetering on the edge of irrelevance. What had once been the beating heart of breaking news, cultural commentary, and digital movements had devolved into algorithmic sludge, chaotic moderation, and declining user trust. Then came Grok.

Grok didn’t just land on Twitter—it anchored it.

When Elon Musk announced xAI’s integration with X (formerly Twitter), skeptics rolled their eyes. After all, AI chatbots were becoming a dime a dozen. But Grok wasn’t just another chatbot. It was the first real-time, platform-native intelligence layered on top of a live social feed. It transformed Twitter from a passive consumption stream into an active dialogue engine. Users no longer scrolled mindlessly. They asked. Grok answered.

The Pre-Grok Problem

Twitter's biggest threat wasn't its competition—it was itself. Content moderation whiplash, bot infestations, and declining ad revenue painted a grim future. Twitter was becoming a digital junkyard, where good information went to die and bad information went viral. The signal-to-noise ratio was unbearable.

Without a guiding intelligence, Twitter was on the loose. Ungoverned, unfocused, and increasingly unusable.

Enter Grok: Twitter’s Taming Force

Grok became Twitter's first native content sensemaker. Not just a search tool, but a reasoning layer. Ask Grok about trending news, and it doesn’t just link to posts—it summarizes, analyzes, and contextualizes them in real time. It made Twitter usable again. For creators, researchers, news junkies, and casual users alike.

And crucially, it offered personalized insight. Grok isn’t just parsing data—it’s helping users navigate the emotional and intellectual chaos of the timeline. It translates rage bait into clarity. It turns conspiracies into questions. It is, in essence, Twitter’s first internal conscience.

Why This Saved Twitter

Grok redefined the value proposition of the platform:

  • From scroll to search

  • From react to reflect

  • From chaos to conversation

Without Grok, Twitter risked joining the graveyard of platforms that failed to evolve. Instead, it’s now poised to become the world’s first real-time, AI-augmented public square.

And Beyond…

Grok is more than a feature. It’s a prototype of what the future of social media could be—a fusion of human interaction and AI comprehension. And if Elon’s ambitions hold, Grok could be the linchpin in transforming X into an everything app, where intelligence sits at the core of every interaction.

In the end, Twitter didn’t save Grok. Grok saved Twitter. Because without it, the bird wasn’t just flailing—it was flying blind.

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