I'm not complaining about the fact that this is, like my essays, in the form of an essay rather than an academic paper. I'm saying that it's a piece of advocacy rather than an attempt to figure out the truth.
That's an important distinction. In advocacy, you start already knowing the conclusion you want to reach, and you try as hard as you can to convince the audience of it, the way a lawyer or a politician would. Whereas an essay, as the name implies, starts with a question, and from there you try to follow the truth wherever it leads.
There is not a mathematically sharp distinction between the two approaches, of course. A lawyer or politician will use the truth when it suits his purpose. And an essayist trying to follow the truth will inevitably have biases that cause him not to follow the truth as far down some roads as others.
But though the two approaches form a continuum, and writers sometimes drift along it in the middle of a given piece, the distinction is a meaningful one.
The hardest thing for me going from studying physics and astronomy to law school was getting used to the idea of a form of learning that had little to do with figuring out truth.
That's an important distinction. In advocacy, you start already knowing the conclusion you want to reach, and you try as hard as you can to convince the audience of it, the way a lawyer or a politician would. Whereas an essay, as the name implies, starts with a question, and from there you try to follow the truth wherever it leads.
I wrote about this in "The Age of the Essay" (http://paulgraham.com/essay.html).
There is not a mathematically sharp distinction between the two approaches, of course. A lawyer or politician will use the truth when it suits his purpose. And an essayist trying to follow the truth will inevitably have biases that cause him not to follow the truth as far down some roads as others. But though the two approaches form a continuum, and writers sometimes drift along it in the middle of a given piece, the distinction is a meaningful one.