Every atomic assertion extracted from the underlying record, ranked by evidence strength.
The best essay would be on the most important topic about which one could tell people something surprising.
Writing essays, at its best, is a way of discovering ideas.
Writing converts vague ideas into bad ones, which is a step forward because once the brokenness is visible, it can be fixed.
To be the evergreen kind of timeless, an essay has to be ineffective, in the sense that its discoveries aren't assimilated into our shared culture.
Natural selection is certainly a matter of permanent importance.
Hacking tests is not how one wins at the most important real-world tests.
Helping people overcome institutional lies will work as long as institutions remain broken.
Breadth of knowledge comes from reading and talking and seeing.
Any technique that gets good initial questions also gets good whole essays.
Every subtree of an essay is usually a shorter essay.
A well-written essay can be about any topic.
With art, the two senses of timelessness blend together.
If an essay's discoveries are assimilated, there will be nothing new in it for the second generation of readers.
Some mistakes people only learn to avoid by making them.
Science enters the picture like an elephant stepping into a rowboat when considering the best essay.
Getting breadth implies learning about topics very different from one another.
If the question of how to write the best possible essay reduces to making great discoveries, then the initial question was wrong.
The essay titled "The Best Essay" is not intended to be the best essay itself.
The goal of the essay is to figure out what the best essay would be like.
The author gets more new ideas after talking for an afternoon with Robert Morris than from talking to 20 new smart people.
Depth of knowledge comes from doing.
Everything said about initial questions also applies to questions encountered while writing an essay.
A good essay has to be surprising.
The best possible essay at any given time would usually be one describing the most important scientific or technological discovery it was possible to make.
The author initially imagined that the best essay would be fairly timeless.
An essay can be timeless in two senses: to be about a matter of permanent importance, and always to have the same effect on readers.
A good essay has to tell people something they don't already know.
It is a good sign if an initial question is one that people think has already been thoroughly explored.
It would not be impressive to write an essay introducing natural selection now.
At least half of essay writing involves rereading what has been written and asking if it is correct and complete.
The best essay now would be one describing a great discovery not yet known.
What makes an essay special is what it is about.
Trying to make a roughly correct answer exactly right can sometimes reveal a false assumption.
Discarding a false assumption can lead to a completely different answer.
The exercise shows that one should focus on making discoveries in some specific domain instead of writing essays.
The essay writing process continues recursively as responses spur further responses.
The author is interested in essays and what can be done with them.
The choice of branch to follow in an essay should offer the greatest combination of generality and novelty.
Charles Darwin first described the idea of natural selection in an essay written in 1844.
Some topics are better than others for essays.
It is more important to talk to people who make you have new ideas than to new people.
The author cut a 17-paragraph subtree and countless shorter ones in this essay.
An essay should ordinarily start with a question that spurs some response.
Darwin's 1844 essay on natural selection was surely the best one written that year, based on the criteria of importance and surprise.
The initial question constrains the essayist, setting an upper bound on its quality.
It probably won't work to choose some important-sounding topic at random and go at it.
Professional traders will not trade unless they have an "edge" or a convincing story about why they will win more than they lose.
The way to respond to the constraint of the initial question is to write many essays.
Almost any question can lead to a good essay.
Only some questions yield great essays.
Merely having questions about something other people take for granted can be enough of an "edge."
This essay itself is an example of an outrageous initial question.
To write a really good essay on some topic, one has to be interested in it.
A sufficiently puzzling question is worth exploring even if it doesn't seem very momentous.
Many important discoveries have been made by pulling on a thread that seemed insignificant at first.
A great initial question likely has implications in many different areas.
The reader is probably also feeling sated when the author stops asking questions.
The opposite of timelessness seems to be true for the best essay.
The initial written response to a question is usually mistaken or incomplete.
Writing about topics of timeless importance is an instance of breadth of applicability.